Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 79

F IG . 4.22 The Phaistos disc
evidenced by the carved weapons on the sarsen stones (Chap. 5 ),
is it possible that the Phaistos Disc is an import from the British
Isles - a Neolithic planisphere?
Speculation in the field of megalithic archaeology is power-
fully tempting, and Glyn Daniel strongly criticized those who
engage in it. In his Scientific American article he wrote:
Many people, no doubt bored by the prosaic account of mega-
liths to be got from archaeological research, jumped on the
Hawkins-Thom bandwagon, accepting the builders of mega-
liths not only as experts in Pythagorean geometry and possess-
ors of accurate units of mensuration but also as skilled astron-
omers who studied eclipses, the movements of the moon or
the positions of the stars. To me this is a kind of refined aca-
demic version of astronaut archaeology. The archaeoastron-
omy buffs, although they very properly eschew wise men from
outer space, very improperly insist on the presence in ancient
Europe of wise men with an apparently religious passion for
astronomy. It seems to me that the case for interpreting mega-
lithic monuments as astronomical observatories has never
been proved. The interpretations appear to be subjective and
imposed by the observer. Already new surveys are showing the
inaccuracy of some of the earlier observations and undermin-
ing the hopes of those who believe the builders of megaliths
were slaves of an astronomical cult [ 15 ].