Does anyone know what happened to the thread entitled: 'Pro-Celt Pryor at it again', started by Germanist?
We had a really interesting discussion going there about Indo-Europeans, Celts, DNA - you name it. It seems to have disappeared!
Forgive me if I'm not going about this query in the right way, but I'm new to the Forum. I think I put a posting there around the 24th of July but haven't had chance to look in for a week or so.
Thanks for the input, Chris and Steffan. I must say I can't think of anything that would have been dodgy enough to merit its deletion but as I say, I am new to the Forum.
Ah well, perhaps I'll just start another thread carrying on from where we left off!
It is a pity that it has vanished. Although I hadn't posted to it, I was very interested in some of the comments and had meant to adress a couple of items that cropped up along the way.
This was one of the posts from the forum, in reference to recent genetic findings, from the surveys conducted by goldstein and capelli for instance.
Archeologists can rightly or wrongly make their own conclusions, but historians have to draw on archeological, linguistic and literary evidence in order to correlate their understanding of the past. the contemporary genetic findings have also thrown another line of analysis into the mix, which is all for the better.
Archeologists could point out for example that a byzantine cup found does not necessarily mean the owner was a byzantine. but if the contemporary literature states that the byzantines moved into a certain area, and if the linguistic evidence supports that the people spoke and still speak the byzantine language in the same area, and the genetic evidence points to a strong degree of byzantine dna in the same area, then this creates the historical dogma that would happily conclude in this example that there was a byzantine ethnic and cultural incursion into the said area.
Pryor is fine in pointing out that roman life continued in Britain after the legions left, and that there was continuity, but we already know this. to conclude however an overwhelming cultural shift based on the fact that a fragment of pottery may or may not have been used by a saxon or whatever whilst at the same time dismissing the contemporary literary evidence and totally ignoring the recent genetic evidence is just churlish.
Acculturisation is impossible to prove but is also impossible to disprove, yet what mainly bugs me is the idea that someone writing about events 1500 years after they happened has a better understanding of what happened than contemporary observers. He dismisses Bede, yet supports Gildas, then later dismisses Gildas as unreliable.
Also, the notion that the inhabitants of Britain were somehow cut off from the rest of Europe is hard to substantiate, considering that Britain was still part of the continent until around 8000(?) years ago, and there must have been contact.
Pryor does work however in highlighting the Brythonic inheritence of what is now England, as opposed to a merely Anglicist viewpoint. We know now from the genetic surveys and encouraged by Pryor, that the Britons did not by and large flee, but a good number stayed and became acculturalised with the saxon settlers.
One wonders if the moderators understand much, if anything, about archaeology - they probably have a quick look at this forum occasionally, as a rest from Big Brother.
For those new to forums - it is generally a bad idea to immediately restart a thread which has been removed. Fighting the moderators of any forum is a mug's game.
There are occasions when a thread disappears due to some software blip, or gets deleted by mistake. (If you suspect that is the case, you could appeal privately to the moderators to reinstate it.) In the great majority of cases though the thread will have been removed deliberately for reasons within the code to which the moderators work.
No-one could regret the demise of the thread in question more than me, since I contributed to it at length. But I'm bound to say that it provoked a hostile reaction from the start. A post inferring that the initial poster was a nazi was removed. The thread was then disrupted by increasingly hostile comments on the deletions (also removed). There comes a point when moderators will conclude that a thread cannot be saved.
You are correct, Ms. Mills. Well spotted. The afore-mentioned thread has indeed been expelled from its TTF homeland to be planted in BRD territory. The question is: will the native threads resist, assimilate or flee to the History Forum?
Very upsetting disappearance of an interesting discussion - what have the moderators got to do with it? I thought we had free speech in this country, and what's more - I was learning a great deal from that subject!
