Problematic Discoveries

[Springhead]

Shawomet,

You will be relieved to hear that the possible artifact you mention and show is not one Jack analyzed as "provable Pleistocene," though a good number of the rocks posted on the Rock Art Museum site were. Jack did state that he was not sure about the piece but that I should hang on to it.

Here we go on the mental illness bit. Do you classify all your peers this way unless you happen to agree with them? You have opined "mistaken" and "wrong" relative to the purported artifacts on this thread, terms of disagreement expressed a little more reasonably.

The age of these pieces is unknown, but is it too much of a stretch to think that environmental conditions may be a contributory factor in the condition of the rocks? I have read many references about the difficulty of seeing clear signs of knapping and other work techniques due to the age of given pieces. I would ask that you consider that possibility as well as acknowledging that this thread's assemblage may differ from many artifacts of the Holocene as they are core and blade techniques. All examples of this assemblage incorporate art into the intentional work.

P.S. The "Mayan" artifacts you refer to are from a megalithic culture from southern Colombia at the source of the Magdelena River at a place called San Agustin.

Thanks for your comments.

[Springhead]

Hi Circumspice,

This is the only forum I am a member of or have posted on. I never expected concurrence with my conjectures, but I did hope that a few folks would consider the possibility that the assemblage was real. I suppose you suggest there is concurrence on this forum, perhaps akin to the E.P./Simon21 duel?

Renee and Chris White, as a correction to your lacking research, initially had the idea of a sanctuary site and in preparing the ground to construct a stone circle found an existing one. I do not know them, but they certainly do not deserve your denigration. I fail to see how their activity involves greed.

Que triste your B.S. meter is pegged! My suggestion (to accommodate the state of belief and disbelief) would be to recalibrate or find a bigger meter. Your foregone conclusions, pushed story lines, and insulting style certainly require one to shop for the largest B.S. meter currently available to even get a handle on the load.

I do agree that if it's too good to be true....................

Thanks for commenting.

[circumspice]

Hi Circumspice,

This is the only forum I am a member of or have posted on. I never expected concurrence with my conjectures, but I did hope that a few folks would consider the possibility that the assemblage was real. I suppose you suggest there is concurrence on this forum, perhaps akin to the E.P./Simon21 duel?

Renee and Chris White, as a correction to your lacking research, initially had the idea of a sanctuary site and in preparing the ground to construct a stone circle found an existing one. I do not know them, but they certainly do not deserve your denigration. I fail to see how their activity involves greed.

Que triste your B.S. meter is pegged! My suggestion (to accommodate the state of belief and disbelief) would be to recalibrate or find a bigger meter. Your foregone conclusions, pushed story lines, and insulting style certainly require one to shop for the largest B.S. meter currently available to even get a handle on the load.

I do agree that if it's too good to be true....................

Thanks for commenting.

I didn't say that you were a member of another board. I said that you had previously posted on "fringe websites". Which you have because you are a registered member of the Portable Rock Art Museum which is a notable fringe website. You have linked that website to showcase your rocks here. Do you deny it? I read there that you must register on that website in order to be able to post pics of your dubious rocks.

My research is not lacking concerning the Whites & the so called Spout Run archaeological site. That is the reason why I said that if it's too good to be true it isn't.

*cue Twilight Zone theme music... Have Rod Serling narrate...

The Whites go looking for a suitable site to construct a stone circle and... Lo & Behold!!! They coincidentally FIND an existing stone circle, conveniently located on THEIR LAND... A really ancient one to boot... And... The miracles don't cease... They keep finding incredible things... (ALL ON THEIR PROPERTY...) How about that??? "A growing list of features"... Yeah, features found NOWHERE else in North America. Uh huh... Five square feet of at least 2 miles of miraculous features was excavated & some very controversial conclusions were made... All without the benefit of peer review. How professional is that?

You, the Whites & Jack Hranicky stretch credulity to the breaking point. I'm insulted that you expect anyone on this board or any other to give you & your measly geofacts the benefit of the doubt without presenting even a shred of evidence. Your cockamamie "conjectures" are grounds for having the state of your mental health cast in doubt. If you had researched Homo erectus better you would have known not to include them in your "conjectures". Admit it, you wanted to go for deep antiquity & you chose the wrong hominid to introduce as your 'artists'... Then you decided that maybe you ought to add another of the Homo genus into the mix to make it seem more plausible. You were given every opportunity to show some proof, any proof at all & all we get is your assertions. You ask a lot of a group of strangers.

And yes, my bullshit meter is still pegged.

[circumspice]

"God's Hand"

A very, very old article but relevant to this particular thread.

https://www.newsweek.com/archeology-wav ... and-153959

I will not blindly accept the ideas, hypotheses or theories put forth concerning Springhead's "finds" or the seemingly miraculous "finds" on the White's Spout Run site. As I stated on a previous post, they have only one thing in common (besides incredible claims) & that one thing is Jack Hranicky.

Fraud is all too easily perpetrated, especially when there is zero oversight. Do we have the makings of yet another fraud? I don't know for sure but I suspect it could be because there has been no input from disinterested parties. Can you say Piltdown Man boys & girls?

[Springhead]

Hi Circumspice,

Fraud may be viewed as a serious charge, and you have spent much verbal capital denigrating conspiracy theories with the caveat, apparently, that these comments do not apply to you. Before one starts yelling "fire," one might look again to see if the smoke is in fact super heated hot air modified vocally.

That an amateur like myself making conjectures about found objects similar to other finds in the geographic area is perpetrating fraud along with others finding the same and each party independently contacting an archaeologist who has made himself available to help explain this unknown human endeavor which he is investigating is absurd and sensationalistic. None of the mentioned parties knew one another until the inquiries were made to Jack Hranicky. There are seven sites now, I believe, so I guess your conspiracy to commit fraud involves more perps.

Unknown human activity on the planet could far outweigh the known stuff. Should we just wrap it up where we are? You complain about the lack of professional conduct and the like when finders are run of the mill folks who are not career academics. I personally am elated that I lack credentials, for in the quest to gain those credentials, I feel that the free thinking held dear would suffer defeat at the hands of orthodoxy.

I wonder who will win the most recent chest bumping contest over there in the Old World. I have always been told that working together we can do anything. This forum is a tool and not an arena.

Thanks for your comments and sorry about the late response.......hurricane here.

[circumspice]

More notable chicanery concerning archaeological sites:

https://www.livescience.com/61989-famed ... fakes.html

[Springhead]

Hello Circumspice,

Thanks for the link to the interesting article. Mellaart was a tragic figure despite his talents. Was his ego the problem, perhaps mental illness, or just succumbing to professional pressure to perform? Archaeology certainly took a hit with spoiled information about the site in question. I assume this is more implication of the massive fraud perpetrated by certain laymen and a professional to overturn the apple cart. Who has time for this stuff? Why would folks cheat themselves with such activities in such a limited format? I would think a good scam would be driven forward with more drama and louder arguments on some social media platform. Where is the return?

[circumspice]

Hello Circumspice,

Thanks for the link to the interesting article. Mellaart was a tragic figure despite his talents. Was his ego the problem, perhaps mental illness, or just succumbing to professional pressure to perform? Archaeology certainly took a hit with spoiled information about the site in question. I assume this is more implication of the massive fraud perpetrated by certain laymen and a professional to overturn the apple cart. Who has time for this stuff? Why would folks cheat themselves with such activities in such a limited format? I would think a good scam would be driven forward with more drama and louder arguments on some social media platform. Where is the return?

Every forger/hoaxer is an individual who is driven by his/her own personal motivations. Probably the most common motivation is public recognition. Other motivations are nationalism, revenge or a desire to humiliate a rival, monetary gain & sometimes mental illness. Sometimes the forger/hoaxer's motivation is to see if they can avoid detection due to the belief of personal intellectual superiority. Who knows what truly motivates a person to perpetrate a hoax or fraud for seemingly no material reason? What about someone like Ferdinand Demara Jr.? Why did he spend much of his life as an imposter?

http://www.badarchaeology.com/frauds-an ... es-dawson/

I'll say it once more... I will not blindly accept the ideas, hypotheses or theories put forth concerning Springhead's "finds" or the seemingly miraculous "finds" on the White's Spout Run site. As I stated on a previous post, they have only one thing in common (besides incredible claims) & that one thing is Jack Hranicky.

Who cares if the apple cart is overturned? Paradigms change over time. They either evolve as new info becomes available or they are refuted & replaced with a new paradigm. Try to grasp this... Most people with an interest in paleoanthropology would be THRILLED by a genuine, well documented find such as you have tried to fob off on this board. Nobody cares about a few surviving die-hard Clovis Firsters... They have been proven to be utterly wrong in almost every aspect of their intransigence. What you seem to have no understanding of is the scientific process... You see, standing on a rooftop & making spurious proclamations & declarations does not qualify as a substitute for a professional excavation that follows established scientific methodology & procedures. You seem to think that you are being singled out because you are being asked to provide some kind definitive proof for your incredible claims.

[gasp!!!]

Would you like some crackers with your whine?

You seem to want your personal ideas/theories/fantasies taken at face value & accepted without question. Your own statement is quite diagnostic: (spoken like a true crank)

I personally am elated that I lack credentials, for in the quest to gain those credentials, I feel that the free thinking held dear would suffer defeat at the hands of orthodoxy.

Ummm... Right... (get the aluminum foil)

[shawomet]

Shawomet,

You will be relieved to hear that the possible artifact you mention and show is not one Jack analyzed as "provable Pleistocene," though a good number of the rocks posted on the Rock Art Museum site were. Jack did state that he was not sure about the piece but that I should hang on to it.

Here we go on the mental illness bit. Do you classify all your peers this way unless you happen to agree with them? You have opined "mistaken" and "wrong" relative to the purported artifacts on this thread, terms of disagreement expressed a little more reasonably.

The age of these pieces is unknown, but is it too much of a stretch to think that environmental conditions may be a contributory factor in the condition of the rocks? I have read many references about the difficulty of seeing clear signs of knapping and other work techniques due to the age of given pieces. I would ask that you consider that possibility as well as acknowledging that this thread's assemblage may differ from many artifacts of the Holocene as they are core and blade techniques. All examples of this assemblage incorporate art into the intentional work.

P.S. The "Mayan" artifacts you refer to are from a megalithic culture from southern Colombia at the source of the Magdelena River at a place called San Agustin.

Thanks for your comments.

No, I think Hranicky going from seasoned hand where projectile point typology is concerned to the opinion that your rocks show alteration by human hands might suggest a decline in mental functioning that would be inexplicable to me. If there is a name for such a decline, it's true, I'm no authority on mental illness of any sort, but I would have to assume something notable must have occurred for Hranicky to suddenly no llonger be able to distinguish artifact from geofact. What would cause such a change in ability and recognition that was based on long experience? I assumed some mental deterioration might be responsible. Or perhaps a significant loss of eyesight? Perhaps he is close to blind?

As far as the possibility that deterioration/environmental conditions transformed artifacts to geofacts, I have found what I call "erased points", where water has removed virtually all the flaking, but you can usually detect some remnant flaking with the correct lighting conditions, and, at any rate, I can only offer an opinion based on decades of examining artifacts. You are free to dismiss those opinions.

[Simon21]

Shawomet,

You will be relieved to hear that the possible artifact you mention and show is not one Jack analyzed as "provable Pleistocene," though a good number of the rocks posted on the Rock Art Museum site were. Jack did state that he was not sure about the piece but that I should hang on to it.

Here we go on the mental illness bit. Do you classify all your peers this way unless you happen to agree with them? You have opined "mistaken" and "wrong" relative to the purported artifacts on this thread, terms of disagreement expressed a little more reasonably.

The age of these pieces is unknown, but is it too much of a stretch to think that environmental conditions may be a contributory factor in the condition of the rocks? I have read many references about the difficulty of seeing clear signs of knapping and other work techniques due to the age of given pieces. I would ask that you consider that possibility as well as acknowledging that this thread's assemblage may differ from many artifacts of the Holocene as they are core and blade techniques. All examples of this assemblage incorporate art into the intentional work.

P.S. The "Mayan" artifacts you refer to are from a megalithic culture from southern Colombia at the source of the Magdelena River at a place called San Agustin.

Thanks for your comments.

No, I think Hranicky going from seasoned hand where projectile point typology is concerned to the opinion that your rocks show alteration by human hands might suggest a decline in mental functioning that would be inexplicable to me. If there is a name for such a decline, it's true, I'm no authority on mental illness of any sort, but I would have to assume something notable must have occurred for Hranicky to suddenly no llonger be able to distinguish artifact from geofact. What would cause such a change in ability and recognition that was based on long experience? I assumed some mental deterioration might be responsible. Or perhaps a significant loss of eyesight? Perhaps he is close to blind?

As far as the possibility that deterioration/environmental conditions transformed artifacts to geofacts, I have found what I call "erased points", where water has removed virtually all the flaking, but you can usually detect some remnant flaking with the correct lighting conditions, and, at any rate, I can only offer an opinion based on decades of examining artifacts. You are free to dismiss those opinions.

English isn't great either.