Talk:Negligent damage to Chysauster Ancient Village

message: Is this honestly claimed to be NPOV? - Montréalais
It certainly doesn't look like it to me, from the title throughought the article.  -- Zoe
Actually, you're right. It should be something like "Outrageous Governmental vandalism of significant Iron Age site". This is the moderate title. Negligence is just a euphemism for what actually happened: they tried to bury it and hoped nobody would notice. As a result there is one fewer fogou in existence (only ten more to be destroyed and they can pretend that they never existed at all). There was severe damage to the fogou, we can only hope that the allegedly responsible authority was negligent and not deliberately seeking to destroy a significant historical site (which some have suggested they were in order to save money), and the article does not fully detail the extent to the chicanery which EH got up to try and weasel out of their culpability in this regrettable affair. It should further be noted that Jocelyn Stevens (under whose regime some of the dilapidations began to occur) was the man behind the plot to put a Visitor Centre at Stonehenge, and was outed for suggesting that funds be diverted from the preservation of ancient monuments into the increase of his and a few senior civil servants' salaries. EH is a quango and should be recognised as the highly powerful, dangerous and archaeologically insensitive body which it truly is; this is not exactly the best kept secret to the archaeological community in Britain. Whilst charged with the preservation of a number of key sites, it concentrates on the key lucrative tourist attractions at the expense of other more historically important locations. user:sjc
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Why does this need its own article? Why can't the info here be incorporated into Chysauster Ancient Village (and is there any reason why that isn't at simply Chysauster?) --Camembert
:Good point Camembert; however the reason I went for it in a separate article is that damage to significant archaeological sites needs proper and discrete documentation (I think most archaeologists would bear me out on this). There is no reason why Wikipedia should not become the central repository for information such as this: I have on the back-burner a list of approximately 100 sites in the UK which need similar treatment; the damage which occurred to Chysauster, IMV should be a subsidiary to the main article, and treated separately: the list of problems is of historical interest in its own right and extensive. It is revealing about the activities (or inactivities) of quangos, and exposes the facts of the matter which would otherwise be buried along with the fogou. We can further go on from here to create an Archaeological Damage List. We can categorise this by damage type. (e.g. Governmental inactivity, landowner abuse, Viking runic graffiti, etc). Moreover, trying to tie contemporary events to an article which deals with a historic and archaeological site is distracting to the reader and unnecessary in a medium such as Wikipedia which lends itself to proper segregation. user:sjc
:PS: Chysauster itself is a locational name which is vastly > than the ancient village site which occupies no more than 60 sqare metres. user:sjc
"but not before considerable damage had been done to the fogou and its subsequent collapse." I know nothing about this topic, but this clause makes no sense to me.  Does it mean considerable damage to the subsequent collapse?  Huh?  Should it read "not before the fogou had sustained significant damage and later collapsed?"  But that makes no sense either, what with the "before" and "later."  Someone who understands this should edit it for clarity.moink 22:47, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)