Crackpot index

[ZSilvia]

5 points if the bloke showing you round the site claims to BE a Templar with access to secret records of the site, held on Malta (happened to me once!!)

a HEARTY lol!

[Jack]

100 points for saying or quoting something along the lines of '...looking beyond the evidence.'
50 points for saying 'the cosmological model is now generally accepted...'
30 points for using ethnographical evidence to 'understand' how prehistoric people 'thought' or 'read the landscape'
+30 points if the above ethnographical evidence is African
+50 points if the above ethnographical evidence is Polynesian/Australian
+50 points if the above ethnographical evidence relates to a society with a different form of subsistence/ mobility to your prehistoric society.
1000 points for referencing Marija Gimbutas

[Dinosaur]

50 points for each journal page based on interpreting two weathered scraps of pottery and a cow bone as a 'structured deposit'

[angi]

10 points for claiming that the spirit of a dead maid is telling you where the kitchen used to be (plus 5 if you close your eyes and brush your forehead with your hand)

[P Prentice]

1000 points for every time you have claimed a few bits of Neolithic pot in a few pits as evidence of Neolithic settlement

[CARTOON REALITY]

10 points for sneering.
A smack on the bottom for telling fibs.

[kevin wooldridge]

It's probably just me, but what is this thread actually about?

[BAJR]

Nice and easy Kevin... there is a fine Crackpot index in Physics... what we need is one for Archaeology - one that any ideas can be subjected to (including ours) and scored.

people can then decide on empirical evidence, the level at which the theory becomes crackpot.

Simples

[Dinosaur]

1000 points for every time you have claimed a few bits of Neolithic pot in a few pits as evidence of Neolithic settlement

Aha, someone else who's splashed out on Anderson-Whymark and Thomas (eds.) 2012! North Yorkshire should have one of the big squirly symbols on figure 15.1, don't want Norfolk/Cambridgeshire hogging all the limelight, if nothing else parts of Northern England are awash with Neo pits, even if there's not much in most of them

[Dinosaur]

...actually I've just realised my personal project backlog puts me third in the neolithic pits county-by-county table, can I have 10,000 points please?