Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Although most of us can see Avebury is “better” thanks to Keiller, despite his mistakes, that doesn't necessarily mean “more” would bring a lot more benefits than he already bestowed. It's important to be sure that it would because the one certainty is that further excavation tomorrow would involve a conscious decision to destroy part of the archaeological record whereas doing it in the future would destroy less of it.

Buried archaeology is not like artefacts, the act of renovation destroys some of it's essence, which is the potential to recover immeasurable amounts of knowledge from it and it's surroundings, and that's a lesson Archaeology has learned the hard way but very thoroughly over time and is committed to now (though detectorists aren't) – to the extent that 99% of excavation takes place only in advance of development and loss of the asset and the remaining 1% , for research, usually involves only sampling a few percent and leaving as much as possible for the future. To the extent that, other than maybe 1 or 2 stones, EH would certainly not agree to a grand project and most archaeologists wouldn't agree to take part in it.

In the light of that, TMA calls for not one but lots of unthreatened stones to be dug up look a bit out of line with modern archaeological thinking and maybe gives the archaeological establishment the chance to look down on amateurs, which is a shame.