Just when I though I was 'becoming comfortable' with archaeological theory, I was asked by Stuart Rathbone to read an early draft of the paper you see below. Stuart is a field archaeologist of many years standing. He is co-author (with Victoria Ginn) of the rather wonderful book: Corrstown: A Coastal Community. Excavations of a Bronze Age village in Northern Ireland (reviewed here). He is also the central figure behind the Campaign For Sensible Archaeology, a clarion call for no-nonsense reporting and discussion in archaeology. In this paper, Stuart has stepped into a very different archaeological world: he advocates the use of the Burroughs-Gysin cut up technique as a method of gaining new and different insights into the archaeology of Neolithic Britain and Ireland. I will not pretend that this is an easy read - but it is rewarding. My initial fear was that it was a daft idea - definitely not 'sensible' - but his results are extraordinary. Whatever any reader thinks of the method, I feel that the results - these unlikely mergings and mashings of colliding sentences - brings forth something extraordinary: genuinely new insights into archaeology.
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