Heid the Ba wrote:but there was a lot of shameless self promotion and bullshit from Dan Fucking Snow,
To be expected. I assuming since you're posting there was no chack kicking and subsequent arrest.
He wasn't there! He appeared, talking shite of course, looming over us on a couple of big screens. His entire motivation seems to be to have been seen to be associated with the project. I wonder if he would have turned up if the remains had indeed been those of Lovat.
Heid the Ba wrote:and a surprisingly interesting (though also self promoting) contribution by an author who talked about something that I’ve only ever heard myself talking about before.
You can't just leave this hanging, enquiring minds want to know.
As a comparator: yesterday I was involved in an online discussion about why
some CofE vicars wore moustaches in the early C20th. So nothing is too obscure to confess to.
Ha, excellent! It was just that there are a lot of forgotten victims in the Highlands, that there's a lot said about the atrocities carried out by the British empire abroad but almost nothing about what it did here to what in theory were it's own British people and that most people don't even know it went on. I talk about it a bit when I'm doing my guided walks of 18thC military stuff for the archaeological society.
Heid the Ba wrote:That throws up more questions than it answers.
It does indeed. There was some criticism of Sue for stopping abruptly with an "oh, it's just some woman" sort of shrug, but the research question she was to answer was "are these the remains of Lord Lovat", so she's done that. Some of the
Outlander twats in the audience were asking if any of the other bones in the coffin (bones from 5 individuals found) could have been his, even though she'd already explained how they'd ended up in there. Basically clutching at straws. Other folk asking if the surviving wood from the coffin could tell us anything, to which she said it wasn't her field and she didn't know. The answer by the way is yes, likely the date, age and origin of the wood depending on it's condition, but that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about who's in it - or indeed the coffin itself, which could have been made in Edinburgh from timber imported 20 years earlier from Norway then sat unused in an undertaker for 30 years before being sold, sent north and used to bury a local Inverness woman, for example. What about isotope analysis to tell us where she came from? You need teeth for that, and this wifey is missing her skull..... It's interesting to speculate, though. Did the folk that were there to collect the body in London, and there really were people there to do that, realise when they were unable to get Lord Lovat that it's a sealed coffin and they could get away with taking just anybody back and say it's him? Where is her skull? Removed by a souvenir hunter who believed the plaque on the coffin that said Lovat was inside? Did somebody that knew it wasn't really Lovat look at the body and think "he's no supposed tae huv a heid" and hoof it away? It's all interesting, so I hope the research continues. Minus Dan Snow, of course.