Re: Latest on Newport Tower dig


"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1j8pm2l55skm2988eeoab7kk7udjb7b13h@xxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 10:23:33 +0100, "Peter Alaca" <p.alaca@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Eric Stevens <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx > wrote:
"Peter Alaca" wrote:
Eric Stevens wrote:
"nadia" wrote:
Doug Weller wrote:

http://www.turnto10.com/news/10392157/detail.html
An archaeological dig at a mysterious Newport Tower turns up --
not much.
So, still no archaeological evidence that it is any earlier than
the 17th century.

I found another newspaper article at the Newport Daily News from
November 24th. It is more informative than the short article that
you just posted. Very interesting.

www.newportdailynews.com/articles/2006/11/24/news/news4.txt

"Touro Park dig comes up empty

By Sean Flynn/Daily News staff
November 24th
NEWPORT - If Nordic Vikings, Scottish Knight Templars or even
stranded Chinese sailors built the Newport tower in Touro Park,
they came and left without leaving a trace - not a coin, nail or a
piece of pottery.
[...]

With the advantage of hindsight, it now seems a great pity that the
team did not research the old maps before they started digging. They
might then have realised they had homed in on the garden paths of
the 19th century.

Suzanne Carlson in her article 'Tilting at Windmills: The Newport
Tower' NEARA Journal Vol XXX, 3&4, wrote:

"... it is interesting that on many air photos of the park, one
sees a color variation of the grass approximately twenty
meters southeast from the tower which forms a sharp
rectangular outline, perhaps a house foundation."

Attempts have been made in the past (I think both Mallory and
Godfrey) to obtain permission to explore this area but the
permission has always been withheld. I would like to think that
this time, this area was explored with Ground Penetrating Radar and
electrical resistance measurements but it would not surprise me to
find that it was not included in the current exploration.

This is nonsense Eric. If the tower is older then the
17th century, there must be older remains to be found
in an excavation, but they didn't. Therefore a garden
area away from the tower is irrelevant.

Of course it's not nonsense and your conclusion that the area is a
garden is premature.

Okay, make that a park.
http://tinyurl.com/y9kfed
http://www.scartists.com/jul/ww5064.jpg

If a team is going to carry out an archaeological examination of a
site one would expect that they would look where there were
indications of something to find.

Well, they did. There was a very conspicous
tower to investigate.

I am quite specifically not arguing for the tower as being of Norse
construction and I for one would like the argument settled for good.
However leaving alone a longstanding conspicuous 'explore me' cannot
lead to finality.

The archaeologist were hired to investigate the
Newport tower, not something else.

You keep saying this. Is it too much for you to explain why you think
digging up the nearby park is an investigation of the tower and
digging up the nearby mysterious rectangular area is not an
investigation of the tower?

Biggest problem I have with this so called 'Newport Tower dig' is the
sarcatistic tone used by most of the archaeologists. THAT and the total
ignorance of digging within and under the tower itself and doing an European
way of excavation in the mysterious rectangular area doesn't give any high
credibility to the so called dig. Apart from which the photo I refered to of
what they did find in one of these obscure small quadrates never been
explained....

O I do know that it's more close by Newport that should and better be
carefully excavated one day. And I guess it will be. But not by present days
brickwall-presumption archaeologists, guess some from Europe with experience
in ground-radar reading will do the job on private land.

Inger E



Eric Stevens


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