A+ to Ramilisonina for answering the interviewers questions with some poise while remaining engaging. As an archaeologist, Ramilisonina presents his findings clearly and cohesively, but does stray a bit into inference from the get-go. As a student of archaeology, I've been forewarned time and time again of just how much of this discipline is interpretation. While I can follow Ramilisonina's train of thought in linking stone megaliths in Madagascar to "Bluestonehenge, and would love for that story to be true (it's more fun to weave a story), I believe a bit more caution could be used in interpreting this site. For instance, what else was found at "Bluestonehenge" to lead to this interpretation? Was it simply the stones themselves? Personally, I want to know more about the primary findings at this site, though I hope this response was much more pleasant (and polite) than the blog response below:
C- to Luciano, whose blog response was basically what I said above, only an order of magnitude less polite. Let's start here: "Clearly it is incredibly difficult to transpose or import a belief system from Madagascar into a UK-based neolithic community, but this appears to be what Mike Parker Pearson has done, in conjunction with Ramilisonina." Though in the past year of my studies I have been shown the ugly face of academia, also known as academic papers, I personally believe that much of the emotion found in this particular text is unnecessary. To further my point, here's another reminder of a little gem: "...has invented the Stonehenge "domain of the dead" as an explanation for what he as found (or imagined)..." WHAT. Though part of me agrees with Luciano from an archaeological point of view, his means of expressing it take away from his point. 'Nuff said.
I realize I probably should have been focussing more so on the archaeological evidence shown by these two texts, but THIS is how academic arguments SHOULD be...
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