Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 70

aligned in a general way, particularly to the east or to the summer
sunrise, or to the winter solstice, but that is very different from say-
ing the megalithic builders had astronomical knowledge [ 12 ] .”
This is what philosophers call a 'persuasive definition.' The
Sun is a heavenly body; to align something with its solstitial ris-
ing one must know where that is; to acquire that knowledge one
must observe, and knowledge of the movement of a heavenly body
acquired by observation would be called “astronomical” in any
ordinary context. To accept even one lunar-standstill alignment,
as Burl does for the Avebury Cove, is to recognize systematic
observation over a period of years long enough that some family or
group must have been devoted to it. At the very least, they might
be called amateur astronomers.
The reasons not to do so turn on the question of motivation -
which draws perilously close to a question of semantics. The argu-
ment, again, is that the work should not be called astronomical,
because it was not done for scientific reasons but for ritual pur-
poses, and the alignments were set up more or less unconsciously
as part of Neolithic man's unity with nature; assuming, that is,
that they are genuine at all.
Three points arise in response. First, there is little or no
evidence for ritual function at the sites that are claimed to be
accurately aligned observatories. (Once again, Stonehenge is an
exception. The burial of cremated remains in the Aubrey Holes
was far more important than early excavators imagined - see
Chap. 6 . ) Second, and more importantly, it can quite reasonably
be argued that motivation has nothing to do with the definition
of astronomy. The history of the science is full of examples that
would be ruled out of court if this kind of hair-splitting were car-
ried throughout. In Chap. 3 , we gave the example of scientific
work on Project Apollo.
For another, before the invention of the marine chronometer
there were determined efforts to find astronomical phenomena
that could be predicted with sufficient accuracy for an observer to
determine his longitude from the difference between the predicted
time of the event and the local time when it was seen to happen.
Lunar eclipses fitted the bill, but were too infrequent to be use-
ful. With continuing improvements in astronomical telescopes,
however, the eclipses, occultations and transits of the moons of