My prectical failure involved two unsuccessful research proposals requesting funds to investigate the function of recently discovered fortification surrounding some Early Neolithic (ca. 5000 B.C.) villages in northeastern Belgium. Such sites represented the settlements of the first farmers to colonize central and northwestern Europe. These two proposals to the U.S. Naional Science Foundation (which had supported my previous research) requested funds to excavate several Early Neolithcal village sites near to already excavated "frontier" site of Darion. My Belgian colleague, Daniel Cohen, had found that Darion had been surrounded by an obvious fortification consisting of a 9-foot-deep pitch backed by palisade. My research proposal claimed that Darion's defences indicated that the Neolithic frontier was a hoctile one and predicted that excavations at nearby sites would reveal similar fortifications. The archaeologists who reviewed these proposals could not accept the defensive nature of the Darion "enclosure" and therefore could not recommend funding a project predicated on what they regarded as an erroneous interpretation. A third proposal was successful only after I rewrote it to be neutral about the function of the Darion ditch-palisade, which was referred to as an "enclosure" rather than as a fortification. In other words, only when the proposal was cleansed of references to that archaeological anathema, warfare, was it acceptable to my colleagues.
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timeasmymeasure
