Last night’s Television programme Stonehenge Timewatch nicely illustrated two pitfalls of knowledge management – We tell more than we can know and if we have an answer in mind we can usually find it.
If you have never seen it here is a great panoramic interactive view of it which you will not get if you visit it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/stonehenge/panorama.shtml
Everyday experience suggests that we often seem to know more than we can tell. Riding a bicycle, playing tennis or driving a car, for instance, all involve mastering complex sets of motor skills, yet we are at a loss when it comes to explaining exactly how we perform such physical feats. We cannot write down or explain to someone how to perform these acts. But paradoxically we also often seem to tell more than we can know. We interpret what we have observed – we fill in the gaps. On last night’s programme professors Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright were keen to prove their theory correct, that the smaller blue stones of Stonehenge, the ones that had been transported some 250 km from South Wales, were believed to have healing properties.
[See http://www.bbc.co.uk/timewatch/stonehenge.shtml ]
Earlier this year Timewatch archaeologists carried out the first dig for almost half a century inside the stone circle of the world’s most famous Neolithic monument. Their aim was to unearth evidence for a startling new theory – that Stonehenge was built to heal the sick. It was a good demonstration of The Ladder of Inference in practice (see my earlier posting). Archaeologists had a belief and were looking for data to support it. They found significantly more chips of bluestone than the local sarsen stones which they interpreted as evidence that people had chipped off talismen to cure their insufferable pains and ills. They also found an ancient grain suggesting agriculture on or near the site, necessary apparently to allow people time to spend time putting the stones upright. To the archaeologists the finds fitted with their model of what they wanted the answer to be. For someone like me with no belief one way or another about the origins and purpose of Stonehenge I was left feeling there were a number of possible answers.
Now they might be right, but the evidence portrayed in the programme certainly didn’t convince me that people travelled across Europe in search of a cure for an abscess or broken bones.
29 September, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Interesting observations, the ‘how and why’ arguments have been run by archaeologists for decades. In the absence of written accounts questions of ‘motive’ cannot be resolved.