Marc Berger Wrote:"It's easy to prove neo pits aren't there." Are you saying that this will lead to proof that the neos would not place a pit or pits "there".
nope. I did not/will not say that
Marc Berger Wrote:What are we talking about: 10yr2/1 soil when found between a fork in a river looking east with a hill over looking it from the north. Was this some kind of a taboo place found in no ones land between the territory of three Tribes one of which had elongated skulls. I would tend to worry that the neos did not place pits in "most" places. Wouldn't it be more straight forward working on the places where neo pits have been found and trying to spot the similarities between them and then testing this theory of similarity by finding other like places and post-dicting place of neo pit.
Nope, not in isolation.
Where the pits are is important, but where they aren't is also.
You can't even have a stab at understanding them until you can understand their actual distribution and how this distribution relates to the past landscape. The places where I have seen neo pits 'interpreted' there are vast areas unexcavated around them...........Even so the distributions of recorded pits still were imbued with some kind of meaning.
also to really understand their original distribution you have to take into considerations all the factors affecting their discovery: experience of archaeologists, time pressures on the excavation, research agendas of the excavations, truncation on each site, geology/visibility, methodologies of each excavation etc etc.
Marc Berger Wrote:And then it also turns out not all neo pits are the same thing....I am of the theory that most neo pits were Melolontha melolontha traps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXmserp6ZGs. Obviously where you find one of these cockchafer pits I predict that there would have been a beech tree nearby in the Neolithic http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12146792
I had heard....but think on this............are all neo pits the same?...........do the have the same dimensions/ profiles? Do they have the same fills? Do they contain the same artefacts, ecofacts?
And one of Dino's favourites......how many pits on a project that contain no dating evidence were neolithic? How many unexcavated blobs?
Though is nothing to do with the IfA...............or the debate on chartered status