Archaeologist Johan Normark fights back against cranks

[Welsh Andy]

Just because you are comfortable in your rigorous cage of convention do not try to imprison everyone else in it. Live and let live, or is that too rad?

That has to be the first time anyone has ever called me conventional!

An archaeologist has an understanding of the body of knowledge and theory that as been built up over the last century. A crank grabs a shovel and goes "tally ho!" and heads off to look for random shit that supports their preexisting supposition with next to no knowledge of archaeology beyond "it's old shit that we dig out of the ground".

Town and village councils today in Austria, parts of Germany, Hungary, Ireland and yes even in the U.K. employ dowsing as a method of finding groundwater to sink wells. It's cheap, cost effective and quite successful. Perhaps you can write and tell them it's a lot of shit. Perhaps, as an archaeologist, you could do a bit of research before trashing it. I am not saying everything is true, I am quite sceptical about a lot of methods but you are all so quick to lump everything in together into a black and white world, it's astonishing.

It's cheap yes but I wouldn't say cost effective on account of it not working. I have actually done some reading on dowsing and all the studies have been inconclusive at best or, when done under proper conditions, have found it to not work at any greater degree than chance. It would be cheaper to throw darts at a map.

And if my local council was spending money on dowsing you can be rest assured I would be kicking up an almighty stink about it.