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The megalithic story of Professor Alexander Thom
Author(s) -
Sixsmith Edmund
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
significance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 1740-9713
pISSN - 1740-9705
DOI - 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00368.x
Subject(s) - megalith , classics , archaeology , history , statistician , ancient history , mathematics , statistics
Fifty years ago Alexander Thom, engineer, master surveyor and statistician, published a famous paper in a Royal Statistical Society journal and started a controversy. Our ancient ancestors, he said, had used a standard and astonishingly accurate measurement, the megalithic yard, to construct Stonehenge and hundreds of other megalithic monuments, all across northern Europe, and to align them as lunar observatories. Edmund Sixsmith rakes the ashes of Thom's intriguing claims.