What I most love about it though is that they've found a bunch of buried walls, which lets face it, Britain isn't exactly short of, what with half of the Roman empire being buried... or still visible... across most of the country; and they immediately know it was King Arthur's palace and the piece of clay pot they found was for distributing food at banquets. What if this was the bar from that other famous myth, the one in separate but adjoining buildings in the town that disappeared one night ne'er to be seen again, where Steve the Blacksmith got drunk that night he caught his wife making out with John the Lesser (who she said was much more than his name suggested) and threw that pot across the room smashing it on the wall in a jealous fit of rage before he got wrestled to the ground by the sweaty un-credited barbarian who was staying across the road with Jeff the Cobbler and was thrown out in the torrential downpour that caused the landslide which buried the town... I mean, shit happens.

What I fail to understand is how they reach their conclusions without any real evidence and the media jumps all over it with language proclaiming certainty that this was King Arthur's birth place... a king that while we'd all love to believe in him because he is as much a part of our British heritage as Robin Hood and James Bond largely appears to be a fabrication of our own yearning for a more noble ancestry than we have evidence to support.

What's up with that?

*This story is entirely fictional and any similarity to the Steve at the top of this thread is purely coincidental

The Arthur part is possibly some wishful projection, but the rich people living there part is backed up by the expensive and exotic things found there.

> Arthur is just a name, and there's not much direct evidence the legend was a "Romano-British Chief" except via hand-wavy reasoning about themes.

Well, the earliest source we have that talks about Arthur (Historia Brittonum) is talking about a British leader. And the Battle of Badon has more/earlier sources that mention it. Was one of the leaders at the Battle of Badon actually named Arthur? We don't really know, but it does seem more plausible than the story of Atlantis.

And who even knows how many Arthurs there were.

Well, adding a bit to this, it's also a huge boom for the town and surrounding area. I've been there, and it's quite overrun by tourism, so anything flying around royal-arthur-castle and adding to the local folklore will be milked appropriately.

I'm not saying that disparagingly regarding archaeology: is is way cool, but the Disneyland grade treatment this particular find will get will be a bit nauseating.