Your Daily Giant 2/27/2013
Today's Daily Giant is a continuation of yesterday's. We held a boardroom meeting with all the shareholders and determined it was the right thing to do to avoid a 1200 word post. When we left off, Dr. Preston Holder had unearthed 7 foot skeletons at the Sea Island site in Georgia. This case is a prime example of how troubling data gets sanitized through the information filter The end result is that Anthropologists and Archaeologists become unaware of this phenomena. On top of that, a paranoid environment has been actively created, one that makes it, if any professional were to consider exploring this topic, the equivalent of career suicide. Although Dr. Holder as well as Dr. Seltzer and Dr.Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian examined and commented on the evidence, I could find no mention of the giant stature of the skeletons after the initial report. This in spite of photographs being taken at the site. I did find the following information regarding this episode however. Kevin Kiernan, professor of English Emeritus at the University of Kentucky in his paper, Preston Holder on the Georgia Coast 1936-1938, informs us.
"Very little information is in print about Preston Holder’s extensive, seminal, Works Progress Administration (WPA) era excavations of prehistoric and early contact Indian sites on the Georgia Coast, from Savannah to St. Simons Island, between April 1936 and February 1938. For reasons that remain obscure, his WPA supervisors in Washington (Smithsonian Instituition) and Georgia did not permit Holder to publish his work-in-progress, discouraged the use of his results for his Columbia doctorate, and effectively hid his formal unpublished reports and relevant papers from scrutiny. In some cases, the supervisors expunged the reports and papers. Under his name, only one meager, two-page note, which was never intended for print publication, briefly describes five of the sites that he excavated in 1936 and 1937 on St. Simons Island."
These are the words of a cautious and respected professor and trust me after reading his material I can assure you, he has done his homework. Look at the words he chose, "reasons that remain obscure", "did not permit", "discouraged", "effectively hid", "expunged" and "never intended". Professor Kiernan is a member of the Board of Directors for the Society for Georgia Archaeology 2008-2012 as well as a member of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA); Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC); Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA); Society for Georgia Archaeology (SGA, Board of Directors); South Georgia Archaeological Research Team (SOGART); Golden Isles Archaeological Society (GIAS, Executive Committee). So where are the skeletons?
Today's Daily Giant is a continuation of yesterday's. We held a boardroom meeting with all the shareholders and determined it was the right thing to do to avoid a 1200 word post. When we left off, Dr. Preston Holder had unearthed 7 foot skeletons at the Sea Island site in Georgia. This case is a prime example of how troubling data gets sanitized through the information filter The end result is that Anthropologists and Archaeologists become unaware of this phenomena. On top of that, a paranoid environment has been actively created, one that makes it, if any professional were to consider exploring this topic, the equivalent of career suicide. Although Dr. Holder as well as Dr. Seltzer and Dr.Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian examined and commented on the evidence, I could find no mention of the giant stature of the skeletons after the initial report. This in spite of photographs being taken at the site. I did find the following information regarding this episode however. Kevin Kiernan, professor of English Emeritus at the University of Kentucky in his paper, Preston Holder on the Georgia Coast 1936-1938, informs us.
"Very little information is in print about Preston Holder’s extensive, seminal, Works Progress Administration (WPA) era excavations of prehistoric and early contact Indian sites on the Georgia Coast, from Savannah to St. Simons Island, between April 1936 and February 1938. For reasons that remain obscure, his WPA supervisors in Washington (Smithsonian Instituition) and Georgia did not permit Holder to publish his work-in-progress, discouraged the use of his results for his Columbia doctorate, and effectively hid his formal unpublished reports and relevant papers from scrutiny. In some cases, the supervisors expunged the reports and papers. Under his name, only one meager, two-page note, which was never intended for print publication, briefly describes five of the sites that he excavated in 1936 and 1937 on St. Simons Island."
These are the words of a cautious and respected professor and trust me after reading his material I can assure you, he has done his homework. Look at the words he chose, "reasons that remain obscure", "did not permit", "discouraged", "effectively hid", "expunged" and "never intended". Professor Kiernan is a member of the Board of Directors for the Society for Georgia Archaeology 2008-2012 as well as a member of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA); Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC); Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA); Society for Georgia Archaeology (SGA, Board of Directors); South Georgia Archaeological Research Team (SOGART); Golden Isles Archaeological Society (GIAS, Executive Committee). So where are the skeletons?
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