Growing acceptance that the Neolithic and early Bronze age people who lived on the western shores of the British Isles and of Brittany set up their stone alignments with a precision and purpose hitherto unsuspected (Ref. 1) perhaps permits the collection of data that suggests a way in which they may have been used.
Written 1974
Download this paper
(1.4 Mb Acrobat .pdf)
More information
>
It is as well to be clear about that as the proposition is at best a complex one; the subject has, however, been beset for long enough by what can loosely be called “Controversy”.
There is the body of people who claim too much; Alfred Watkins’ Ley lines will serve as an example. The evidence is not there, but a romantic fringe has grown around the idea to the point where archaeologists cringe at the suggestion that three stones are in line!
The Jigsaw Puzzle, an allegory. Logic and Algebra: some additional considerations. Propositions. And ... Or. Sampling a Multinomial Distribution. PLnP. Expected Values. Degrees of Freedom.
Constant Declination Navigation. Arab Navigation being an extract from Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Dec. 1836 Found at the Cambridge Univ. Library UL No Q 620.C5.1. The Ancient art of land finding in the Pacific, being an abstract from We, the Navigators by David Lewis (1972) Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp.54—61.
This paper is reproduced without alteration from a paper submitted to JHA in 1976. The first part concerned the alignments between sandy beaches; the second part is included here. The editor, rightly, rejected the paper and showed me the referees comments. It was obvious the idea on its own was much too unsupported; the first part not sufficiently related to archaeological knowledge. And the tide was running against the idea of prehistoric archaeo-astronomy.
Quite the most difficult question to tackle is that of the assertion that there is evidence in the Rude stone monuments for a unit of length of widespread application, of great consistency and over a lengthy period of time; this is the Megalithic yard (MY) or Megalithic Rod (MR) equal to 2½ MY.
There are, along the Western Coasts of Britain and France, a collection of Neolithic structures which the Victorians styled Rude Stone Monuments and which nowadays we tend to style Megalithic.
Written 1988
Download this paper
(6.6 Mb Acrobat .pdf)
More information
>
These are the sites that Thom surveyed and published in his book Megalithic Sites in Britain. Clarendon Press 1967