Stonehenge and other things
They're at it again with Stonehenge. You may recall that about three months ago the British Government announced that it would not proceed with an ambitious scheme to bury an adjoining major trunk road in a tunnel on the grounds of expense. The road, known locally as the A303, is already overburdened with traffic between London and a booming southwestern England. Now Tesco, the British grocery giant, has announced plans to build a huge warehouse distribution center at nearby Andover. When last I traveled between Los Angeles and Phoenix by road, I spent much of time overtaking Wal-Mart trucks traveling between distribution centers and stores. If the Tesco warehouse goes ahead, a torrent of large trucks will flow on to the A303 day-and-night, adding even more to the catastrophic overcrowding on this already overstressed highway. Stonehenge, an icon of Britain's long past, will suffer even more from noise and pollution. And quite apart from the serious economic issues--and make no mistake, they really are very important indeed--one continues to be amazed at the shortsightedness of government. Surely you must look at the future of Stonehenge from a long-term perspective, and not just as a matter of short-term budgeting. Can you imagine how much a scheme like this, or its still unplanned alternative, will cost in, say, ten years?
Archaeology is unimportant to many governments in the larger scheme of things, which is hardly surprising given a public raised on Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Lara Cruft, and now 10,000 B.C. The latter is a masterpiece of vapid disaster, thought up by the filmmaker Roland Emmerich, who brought us Independence Day. Saber-toothed tigers in 10,000 B.C.? Give us a break! But when it comes to Hollywood and entertainment, everything goes. This is, in the final analysis, popular entertainment in the genre of tacky 1950s epics which starred Victor Mature, or that perennial favorite, Kirk Douglas in The Vikings. Let's just hope that people are smart enough to realize that archaeology paints a very different picture of ancient times and of our forebears. I'm not holding my breath in a world where many people equate archaeology not with ancient people, but with dinosaurs.
I've just learned that I'm going on The Daily Show on March 17 to talk about The Great Warming. In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would ever appear on a national talk show, let alone Jon Stewart. Wow!
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