12th October 2011, 08:02 PM
In the old days (before commercial archaeology, anyway) people used to go and dig sites or examined finds etc to test a hypothesis - that was a far more 'scientific' approach than the modern reality in this country ('I'm being paid to do a watching brief on this pipeline even though I'd rather be finding out whether there's a regular pattern to the Roman villas along this valley'). There seems to be very little enthusiam for actually testing hypotheses - an example: I've seen several musings in the literature as to whether the irory for Anglian/Saxon purse rings had been obtained from a contemporary African source or whether they were using fossil mammoth ivory from Siberia or thereabouts, but I'm unaware of anyone ever having taken the jump and spend a few quid getting a C14 date [I'd be interested to hear if anyone has actually done this] - simple, case solved, the ivory's 80k years old, move on to some other puzzle....got some here if anyone's got the funding....