<HTML>Hi Garrett:
You wrote:
"My main point was to illustrate how this issue is well recognized by historians."
Hmmm ... Historians to me conjures up images of people who have manged to get through university without stepping on any of their professor's toes and have manged to "think like an historian", that is memorized all the current dogma, well basically been successfully cloned from that intrepit explorer and archaeologist and historian, their teacher.
It has been often stated that our universities are a place where freedom of the mind is encouraged and helped to grow but are there any on this board who hold to the belief that this be really true. Imagine for a moment Don Barone writing his thesis on how the Great Pyramid was all part of a mathematical design, Imagine that he puts forward a fairly convincing argument to the mathematicians and some of them concede that this idea could be true. But alas our poor Don is in an Egyptology class of of course and "they' all know that the Egyptians did not know this type of math, so poor Don fails never to be heard from again. However were the mathematicians to have maked it he might have at least got a passing grade and been encouraged to expand or refute his own theories. Unfortunately this occurs every day of the year with "freethinkers" failing because they question the staus quo.
As long as peer review remains, to my way of thinking, review by an army of "clones" I must remain somewhat sceptical of a lot of what I read as history and fact.
A perfect example is this month's Archaeolgy magazine. In an article on Egypt there are three broken pieces of stellae or carvings which "they" profess to be from the time just after the demise of the Hyskos. Now there is really little to be viewed in this carvings however Archaeology takes it upon itself to fill in the carvings and suggest that the archers are shooting at the enemy even though there is absolutely nothing that could lead one to this conclusion from the picture. Here we have a great example of the subtle "mind molding" that conservative magazines such as Archaeolgy attempt. I am not saying that they could not have been shooting at the enemy but they could have been shooting at birds, at targets, at wild game. I do not appreciate when a magazine like Archaeolgy takes it upon itself to fill in the blanks for me. There are three examples of this in the current edition and all of them were based on the slimmest of arguments, yet it is touted as the Truth. Dangerous, very dangerous indeed.
Best Regards
Don Barone</HTML>
