Communicating archaeology by press release needs care
It’s not often that archaeologists are able to persuade a prominent newspaper to change its copy. So on the face of it David Jacques should be congratulated for successfully lobbying the Sunday Telegraph to tweak an item about his excavation at Blick Mead in Wiltshire.
On November 2 the paper published a story that claimed the “people who built Stonehenge” lived in “Britain's first city” – known to archaeologists as a riverside Mesolithic site, used by hunter-gatherers millennia before Stonehenge was thought of. Jacques complained, and the online article was subtly amended; “city” was put in quotation marks, and the people who left their debris at Blick Mead were demoted to the “ancestors of Stonehenge builders”. Linking Stonehenge with an ancient city, however, may seem a striking claim, in quotes or not. What lies behind this? And what can we learn from it?
As is almost always the case with science stories in the media, this one’s origins lay in a press release. But journalists and their papers should take responsibility for what they publish, so let’s start with the writer, the Telegraph's science editor, Sarah Knapton. She has form for going with sensational angles, defending her reporting of a false claim that
“e- cigarettes are no safer than smoking tobacco”, for example. Or writing a recent piece headed, “Climate change: fake news or global threat? This is the science”, which was criticised by scientists for mixing sense and nonsense, and effectively denying the reality of the climate crisis. A more knowledgeable or careful journalist would not have written that Stonehenge was built by huntergatherers who lived in a city, even if it said so in a pr statement.
Nonetheless, that release, again not written by an archaeologist, must take much of the blame. It was promoting a film in a series broadcast by National Geographic, called Lost Cities with Albert Lin. Lin is a personable, award-winning story-teller and “explorer”, who likes technology as a means to engage a wide public. Lost Cities uses lidar to locate unmapped remains around the world, with Lin apparently dropping in as discoveries are made. It’s not subtle. “I’m looking for the lost city of Stonehenge”, says Lin, setting out on a new venture. And he finds it! “These crazy rocks!” he exclaims as he walks into the circle. “Perhaps Blick Mead was one of Europe’s first cities!”
Lin and the British company that made the film are no more archaeologists than Sarah Knapton. They know Stonehenge has almost unmatched global appeal, and they want to have the site in their series about ancient cities – but someone has to help them. In this case that someone was not a Sunday Telegraph writer, but an archaeologist, David Jacques, and his press office at the University of Buckingham. Jacques may not have actually said, as the Telegraph did (and the other media that copied the story around the world), “Britain’s first ‘city’ arose near an ancient spring on Salisbury Plain, and its inhabitants probably built Stonehenge.” But he laid out the pieces.
Imagine you are a writer or a producer with little time. You need something new to link Stonehenge to a lost city, but you know nothing about archaeology. You go online. It doesn’t take long before one excavation, apparently the only one currently taking place in the World Heritage Site, stands out: Blick Mead.
Jacques was clearly right to protest that hunter-gatherers were not urban dwellers, and that they did not build Stonehenge. What we know of Blick Mead suggests it was a location repeatedly visited by people over many generations. In that, and in conditions that allow poor preservation of bone and no wood, it is typical of a growing number of such sites across the uk (see feature May/Jun 2015/142). What makes it unique is its proximity to Stonehenge, and the depth of history it can bring for a wide public attracted by the stones.
But that is not how it has been presented. To quote Jacques and his press office, this is an excavation that will “rewrite British history”. Blick Mead was “a really important place for the spread of ideas, new technologies and probably genes”, “where the communities who built the first monuments at Stonehenge once lived”. On one occasion a “standing stone” was described (on close inspection, this turned out to be a flint nodule), and Blick Mead has repeatedly been dubbed “the cradle of Stonehenge”.
Little peer-reviewed research has been published on the site, which makes it hard for specialist archaeologists to assess such claims. The important academic debate that might normally have occurred about Blick Mead’s remains and what they mean has not yet happened. It’s good to correct misleading media reports. But it is archaeologists, not journalists, who ultimately create the stories.