Stone Circle Design and Measurement: Standard Units and Complex Geometries: 2: Stylised Plans and Analysis of over 300 Rings

Megalithic Metrology

Archaeologists bemoan the fact that the discipline is plagued by outrageous suggestions concerning the past - prehistory in particular - emanating from an uninformed and untutored group operating on its fringe. The group was formerly referred to as a ‘lunatic fringe’ presenting ‘bullshit archaeology’, but is now a more politically correct ‘pseudo-archaeology’ practising ‘bad archaeology’.

Fringe researchers frequently challenge archaeological perceptions of the past on the basis that thinking in the discipline may be blinkered by absolute confidence in its models, and that absence of evidence is being construed as necessarily evidence of absence. One such bone of contention is the suggestion that a common unit of measure is present in stone circle diameters across Britain and Ireland, if not also mainland Europe. Such a hypothesis was presented by former Oxford Professor of Engineering Alexander Thom from statistical analysis, but was dismissed as untenable by archaeologists on the basis of its lack of fit to their model of the period, its unlikely claimed precision and a borderline level of statistical confidence.

This book, based on analyses of surveys conducted at some 350 megalithic sites, looks at the topic from a completely new perspective. The work derives from a feeling that, in their eagerness to debunk and dismiss the common unit hypothesis, archaeologists may have missed something potentially highly significant about megalithic ritual architecture.It should be noted that such work is only pseudo-archaeology because archaeologists declare it to be so based on subject matter alone, and without having seen it, rather than from a failure necessarily to conform to the philosophy of science.

Is such a stand justifiable, and should investigation into the existence or otherwise of the Megalithic Yard have been relegated to the purview of a disparaged fringe?