Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 92

F IG . 4.28 Stone ring geometries (After A. and A.S. Thom, Megalithic
Remains in Britain and Brittany [ 9 ])
The reference to Pythagorean geometry “before the Greeks” is
a red herring, intended, like the allusion to “astronaut archaeology”
which follows, to attach a discreditable aura to Thom's work. If we
took it literally, as the reference to the Greeks appears to imply,
then every schoolboy knows what Pythagoras proved about the
squares of the sides of a right-angled triangle; but Thom has never,
it seems, suggested that the megalith builders were aware of that
proof, nor used the squares of the sides in the suggested geometries
of the stone rings. In his account, the designers were Pythagorean
only in the sense that, like the ancient Greek cult that bore that
name, they believed in the mystical significance of numbers.