Archeologists working on a Hill Fort excavation in England have started to argue that ancient stone structures were meant for security during warfare in the Iron Age. This counters the more predominant theory, formed over the past 30 years, that stone walls served an ornamental function — represent prosperity and prestige rather than a military purpose.

The prestige theory apparently was based on an absence of evidence of threat, rather than evidence of the absence of threat (as Carl Sagan might have put it).

The dig site at a spot called Fin Cop is said to give new evidence of threats. It provides unique insight because the remains have been better preserved by limestone, which is harder and more acidic than other dig sites. Bones found in a mass grave, for example, are known to be women and children. Dr Clive Waddington of Archaeological Research Services suggests that they must have been victims who suffered a violent end after their fort was defeated.

“For the people buried at Fin Cop, the hurriedly constructed fort was evidently intended as a defensive work in response to a very real threat.”

The skeletons are of women, babies, a toddler and a single teenage male. The archaeological team believe they were probably massacred after the fort was attacked and captured.

All were found in a 10m long section of ditch, the only part to be excavated so far. The ditch was 5m wide with 2m deep vertical edges and would have guarded a 4m high perimeter wall.

Animal bones, also found in the ditch, suggest the fort’s inhabitants kept cattle, sheep and pigs. There were also remains from horses which indicate some of the fort’s inhabitants were of high status.

Ok, I’ll bite. What was the very real threat? It must have been something so powerful to eliminate or enslave all the men in the fort without leaving any trace of them. There is a curious disparity between bones found in the ditch. Was the ditch a pre-existing spot where animal waste was hauled outside the fort and then it was converted into a mass grave by attackers?

I wish they had given more evidence on how they formed the new hypothesis. The BBC fails to mention whether the skeletons have marks from iron or stone weapons, for example.

Given all that they’ve revealed to the BBC, maybe there are other angles to explore.

The men and women may have migrated away from another area to start a new fort and ran into harsh weather. The men went off to hunt or get help as the women hastily built the structure. The food soon ran out and the women died of natural causes.

Maybe the group was ostracized because of disease or other differences.

The men either died during the hunt or came back and found everyone expired. The bodies would have been dumped in the ditch, which already had the animal remains, and covered with the rocks of the failed settlement to make it into a grave.

The Guardian picks up some of these alternate theories.

There could be gentler explanations for the deaths: none of the nine skeletons show signs of violence, suggesting death would have been from flesh wounds or suffocation – or possibly disease.

Explanations could include a disastrous plague or the punishment of a household by the rest of the community.

We really don’t know whether the threat to the women and children was inside or outside the fort walls.

A clearer picture and more compelling analysis can be found on Diggings.

The fact that the bones were found together rather than scattered by weather or the depredations of wild animals indicated that she had been buried rather than simply discarded in the ditch – but all that buried her were the tumbled stones of the wall! In other words, whoever tossed her body into the ditch had then deliberately demolished the defences of the fort and covered her with the stones of the dismantled wall.

Jim Brightman, one of the project managers, said: “Quite a lot of very important finds cannot look like much on site, but when you get back to the lab and throw the scientific techniques and analysis at them, that’s when you start to get the story out. The bones are a great example of that, we found out so much more by analysing them.”

On the other hand, if you pull forensic data too far from the target you might lose the context necessary to make sense of it despite your best scientific techniques and analysis.

Reuters gives us a story that says America is losing the “cyberspy vs. cyberspy” competition to China. They provide some amusing evidence to show how the scores are being tallied:

In mid-2009, representatives of the China Institutes for Contemporary International Relations, a nominally-independent research group affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, contacted James A. Lewis, a former U.S. diplomat now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Lewis said that in his first meeting with his Chinese counterparts, a representative of the China Institutes asked: “Why does the Western press always blame China (for cyber-attacks)?” Lewis says he replied: “Because it’s true.”

Lewis followed-up with “na-na-na-na China sucks” and “we are rubber you are glue…”.

He does not even bother to go into the superficial international political analysis that I have warned of before.

Seriously, though, does a US Diplomat sound prepared, let alone diplomatic, in the above quote?

Call me biased but if you ask the Saudis why they say birds are working for Mossad I would expect some to say “because it’s true”.

I did not expect this from Lewis. The litmus for evidence in the Bush Administration’s hunt for WMD comes to mind. America can surely show better leadership than this. Or maybe not…

Before Bush was fixated on “proving” WMD in Iraq, conservatives in the US government often had China on their mind. Lewis is likely calling them back from the terrorist distraction more than he is signaling any new development.

I remember a picnic in 2001 when a CIA official went on and on about China having their fingers in every market, every conflict. He warned that the US was not focusing itself enough on a fight with China. The best anecdote of what he meant could be the Bush and Cheney (both Dick and Lynne) reaction to the Hartman-Rudman report of January 2001.

Lynne Cheney tried to insist that China was the top threat to America. She was leading the commission at the time. Others failed to agree with her and proposed things like terrorists as a greater threat. Instead of proving her case or demonstrating something believable, she just picked up her ball and quit the commission.

The commission had 14 members, split 7-7, Republican and Democrat, as is de rigeur for bodies of this type. Today Hart told me that in the first few meetings, commission members would go around the room and volunteer their ideas about the nation’s greatest vulnerabilities, most urgent needs, and so on.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China’s back!)

Today Lynne Cheney and her allies outside the commission might have to admit their mistake in dismissing it. Tom Donnelley at the Project for the New American Century gave the following perspective in 2000 on Cheney’s behavior and what he called the commission’s “bias”.

The first bad sign was the resignation of commissioner Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and wife of former defense secretary Dick Cheney, in a dispute over the panel’s first report. Cheney was unhappy with the suggestion that American power was bound to decline: “Emerging powers will increasingly constrain U.S. options regionally and limit its strategic influence. As a result, we will remain limited in our ability to impose our will. . . .”

It sounds fairly accurate to me. Keep in mind that at the time Donnelley was holding this up as an example of a mistake in planning — how America should focus itself on conflict with China instead of worrying about the threat of non-state and emerging state actors like al Qaeda.

Here is another example where Donnelley likewise blasts the commission for predicting what in fact has turned out to be true.

..a close reading of the Hart-Rudman strategy report shows that the commissioners’ bias is for stability over liberty. The report whines that “America must not exhaust itself by limitless commitments,” especially military ones, in regard to which “a finer calculus of benefits and burdens must govern.”

The key to why Bush fumbled this crucial piece of threat analysis is found in the phrase “the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office”. It would be so much easier if China were the only bad guys as Bush and the Cheney family had wanted to believe. A simple view is not always the correct view, unfortunately.

The revolutionary thinker Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) why some could insist on initiating a war (against something they brand as evil) in order to feel good about themselves. He pointed to Zarathustra (11th or 10th century BCE) as the first to see that all things related to one another through a struggle between good and evil. This bipolar view of threats in the world grew in popularity before being adopted by the later religions as they were revealed, such as Christianity.

Assumptions are once again being floated and we are being led to believe the Chinese are the only bad guys. I think it is fine to toss forward a few assumptions to get the discussion started, but if nothing can be provided to substantiate a point….

American diplomats and officials should be able to produce better analysis and explanations than “because it’s true” when discussing national security threats. Otherwise, they have no business complaining about the lack of critical thought in China.