Re: Science vs Scholarship and the Newport Tower

On Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:42:49 GMT, "David B." <tronospamchos@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 08 Dec 2007 17:37:17 GMT, "David B." <tronospamchos@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The significant aspect of what I wrote was not so much the presence of
17th century material, but that such presence was combined with a
complete absence of earlier material- which I'm sure the Chronognostic
folks would have trumpeted to the world if they'd found a single scrap.
Eric was writing about "archaeological findings" (as opposed to "finds")
by Godfrey- who again placed more significance on absence than presence.

I would be interested to know your source for this. Here is the final
paragraph of chapter IIX of Godfrey's thesis (page 137):

"In spite of the great numbers of fragments of various kinds found,
it cannot be said that the collection shed more than the faintest
light on the problem of the Tower. Fascinating as it is to browse
around the many boxes containing tantalizing fragments of our
ancestors culture, the pieces do not tell when, why, and by whom
the Tower was built. One could speculate endlessly about the
portion of the neck of a Spanish oil Jar: where did it come from,
how did it get here, but its position indicated that it arrived
long after the Tower's builder departed. China doll fragments
suggest a world of pathetic young misses in crinolines, weeping
over their broken treasures, but do not suggest who moved the
stones, mixed the mortar, and designed this strange structure. For
that solution, we must look further."

I am not aware that Godfrey was able to progress past this point.

You're not understanding the passage- what Godfrey is saying there is
simply that the evidence he found gave no indication as to who built the
tower.

You are misparaphrasing him.

He actually wrote "the pieces do not tell WHEN, why, and by whom the
Tower was built."

However, the datable items he found were all 17th century or
later, so elsewhere he tentatively assigned a 17th century date to the
building- in the absence of earlier finds.

Which is a conditional date - an upper limit to a date range if you
like (which I am sure you don't :-).

And the documentary record IS clearly related to the NT, unless the 1677
stone mill within that plot of land is not the 1777 old stone mill.

We can't presently answer that implied question.

We can answer it with an extremely high degree of probability, given
that the sole building within the upper 8-acre part of the same plot of
land was referred to as the "old stone wind mill" in Edward Pelham's
will (1741).

You have to make a number of assumptions to accept that. They may be
reasonable assumptions but they remain assumptions.

David B.


PS- going off at a bit of a tangent. Is the stone used in the mill
local? A lot of flattish blocks of stone would probably be brought into
Newport as ship ballast.

Everything I have read speaks of the stone as being the local rubble.



Eric Stevens
.

Relevant Pages

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