Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

I'm working on this same premise with modern CnR motifs. The one at Blawearie for example, is so obviously the work of metal tools, with peck marks fresh as daisies, even when it's weathered in after a few years, it should still be clear to a half-experienced eye that this isn't the real deal.

I think yYou're right, a plaque wouldn't really fit for the Brouwer carving.

I think the best way to avoid confusion is by having it clearly flagged up with those who record these things (hence posting it here as a part of that). A couple of times in the past decade, I've had to accompany the CA and a fella who'd found some CnR like motifs in North Tyneside, and even after the CA told them these were accounted for as modern, they didn't believe it until taken and shown how it'd been done.

Hi June,

I think that the big difference between prehistoric monuments and the imitations erected/inscribed today is that of recording.

Prehistory is unrecorded at the time. Modern stuff is always recorded in some way or other. Whatever imitations are created today will be recorded by someone somewhere, be it in a diary, on a pc or laptop, or on t'internet, be it on sites like this, or on the moron-magnet otherwise known as Facebook. Somewhere everything is recorded, observed, witnessed, and, of course, there's Big Brother, who seems to be an ever-present in these days of government prying. George Orwell failed - he got the year wrong!

"We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love ... and then we return Home"

As for your aboriginal verse, for me it's pure poetry, and speaks the truth of what life really means.

All the best,
TE.

To be fair, TE, I think Mr Orwell's greatest testament is that we aren't being worked to death in a gulag somewhere.....

No offence taken, none at all. I've been pondering, and have concluded there ought to be some kind of overt sign in a modern repro, some element of the thing, be it a carving, a standing stone or earthwork, that makes direct reference to it's otherness when compared to it's ancient counterpart.

Millenium stones all seem to have the date on them, modern stones are usually easily discernable by the lack of weathering, and earthworks would all have totally different stratigraphy from old ones, but despite this, the only common method of identifying new carvings seems to be by the methods discussed here, i.e. by recording. Ideally, a photo of the rock surface before carving and after carving. That would be difficult for anyone to get mixed up with.