Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Ripple Effect

    The Ripples Timothy Ives is creating are spreading, distorting further his own distorted point of view about Ceremonial Stone Landscapes. 

     This morning I find another article in yet another online magazine: 

Stoned In America

 Bruce Gilley  January 12, 2022

Dr. Timothy Ives has written an elegant and scholarly work exposing the academic fraud and political larceny of the "ceremonial stone landscape" movement.”

 "While there are many confluences of academic misconduct and racial anxiety in the contemporary West, few are so fun to read about as the phenomenon of “ceremonial stone landscape” activism in contemporary New England, especially in the gentle hands of Dr. Timothy Ives, principal archaeologist of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission.

He has written an elegant and scholarly work exposing the academic fraud and political larceny of a movement that seeks to have stone piles left behind by early American farmers redesignated as pre-European spiritual temples built by Indians. It is a warning..."

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/stoned-in-america/

I keep trying to comment:

Ives seems to be unfamiliar with the Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dates that are emerging in the scientific literature for some of these sites, some of which go back thousands of years. The age of the sample from the Site of Hopkinton, Rhode Island is in the range of 1570-1490 C.E (or 490 ± 40 years ago). The ages of the samples from Pratt Hill near Upton, Massachusetts, at a site that was recently desecrated by being scraped off the boulder foundation it was originally built on, are 1475-1375 C.E. (595 ± 50 years) for the top sample and 1315-1835 B.C.E (3,595 ± 260 years) for the bottom sample. These samples were obtained from dust or loess that had blown into the structure and collected in the scooped out hollow of the boulder foundation. https://www.usgs.gov/data/optically-stimulated-luminescence-osl-data-and-ages-selected-native-american-sacred-ceremonial

5 comments :

pwax said...

I think the battle is going our way.

pwax said...

Academic fraud is an interesting accusation. As far as I know there are not many academics in the CSL community.

Tim MacSweeney said...

Rather than "elegant and scholarly," I found the Ives writing style in "Stones of Contention" very similar to that of Stephen Miller's "How I Changed My Left-Wing High School." http://www.psaf.org/archive/2004/August/ChangedLeftWingHS.html

Curtiss Hoffman said...

Part of the basis for Ives' argument is his contention that the piles resulted from the "sheep fever" of 1820-1840, in which New England farmers had so many sheep that they removed the surface vegetation from pastures, resulting in downslope erosion and the exposure of lots of rocks, which they then had to remove and placed on piles.

The Gages have pointed me to a remarkable document, an actual census of sheep in the region, state by state, county by county, and in 6 cases (CT, MA, NH, NY, RI, and VT) town by town. I've done a statistical comparison of the number of sheep per town against the number of identified stone structures, on the assumption that if Ives is right these should correlate. They don't! In fact, in about 40% of towns there is actually a negative correlation. Fully 67% of the towns in these states where sheep were inventoried have no stone structures, while about 10% of the towns where stone structures are inventoried had no sheep. Case dismissed!

pwax said...

Aww Curt. There you go being anti-scientific. Enough of the "wokescolding".