Archaeologists Versus Astronomers - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 5

tracing the Moon's complex movement in the sky with a thor-
oughness and precision going far beyond the needs of the calen-
dar or of any imaginable ritual. Along the way it seemed that the
megalithic astronomers would have realized that Earth is a sphere
and discovered the slow wobble of Earth's axis, which we call
the precession of the equinoxes. Since many archaeologists were
already committed to the position that the Stonehenge alignments
were coincidental, Thom's thesis met with widespread hostility.
It was perhaps unfortunate that at that time the Thoms' surveys
had not so far included Stonehenge itself: critics tended to lump
all the astronomical theories together, as if arguments against one
applied to all, whereas in fact there were very important differ-
ences between Thom's claims and those made by Hawkins, fol-
lowed by Sir Fred Hoyle [ 8 ].
Within the relatively compact boundaries of Stonehenge,
Hawkins had allowed the postulated astronomical alignments to
be wide of the mark by as much as a degree and a half, either way,
altogether six times the apparent diameter of the Sun or the Moon;
however, the sites that Thom had studied were alleged to show
very careful exploration of the landscape, lining up astronomi-
cal events with features on the horizon to an accuracy of a few
minutes of arc. And whereas Hawkins and Hoyle maintained that
Stonehenge was a computational device, used to predict eclipses,
Thom was claiming that the sites he surveyed were the product
of an observing program, locating each alignment precisely on the
ground before it was immortalized in stone. The sophistication
which then followed, in the layout of the various types of stone
rings, was pure mathematics - based on right-angled triangles and
inspired by a wish to make the key dimensions multiples of a stan-
dard unit of length.
The hostile reaction of the archaeologists to the new discipline
- generally called “astroarchaeology” or “archaeoastronomy,”
according to the background of the speaker - was directed to both
sides of the question. The astronomy involved was alleged to be
far too subtle for Neolithic people involved in a daily struggle for
survival, possessing no metal tools, instruments or even the art of
writing. But the principles involved are not that hard to grasp (see
below) and the mathematics are only of first-year undergraduate level.