Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought it Was (3 page)

Thom’s interest in Megalithic structures began in his native Scotland, where he noticed that such sites appeared to have lunar alignments. In the early 1930s he decided to study some of the sites and began a process of careful surveying that was to take him almost five decades. In addition to his lecturing, Alexander Thom was a highly-talented engineer in his own right and he taught himself surveying, which enabled him to look at more Megalithic sites – and in greater detail – than anyone before or since.

From his first survey at Callanish, in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, Thom realized that far from being crudely erected these structures had been carefully designed. He began to appreciate that the prehistoric engineers had an advanced knowledge of geometry and astronomy and must have been highly-skilled surveyors.

Thom continued his careful surveying before publishing an article in 1951 in the
Journal of the British Astronomical Association
entitled ‘The solar observations of megalithic man’. The results of his careful measuring of Megalithic sites were also published in three articles over several years in the
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,
the first appearing in 1955 and also in his three books.

The approach taken by Professor Thom was entirely different to that adopted by any archaeologist. Looking at the scale and obvious planning involved in Megalithic sites, Thom had been forced to conclude that the planners and builders must have been very able engineers – just like himself. He knew that their level of knowledge was far below his own but he had no reason to doubt their intellectual ability and ingenuity. He therefore carefully analyzed what remained of each site and then tried to imagine what it was that the builders had set out to achieve. Once he had a picture in his mind of what he thought their plan had been, he went away to create his own solution to the assumed problem. Having drawn up his own design he then returned to compare the site layout to his own blueprint.

This simple yet radical approach was a stroke of genius. Thom quickly developed a total empathy with the Megalithic builders. After all, who else can better understand the mind-set of an engineer than another engineer? Here was a leading academic who had changed his thinking to look at the other side of the Great Wall of History. Thom did not assume anything about the Megalithic builders other than to acknowledge that they must have been skilled engineers. Unlike the archaeologists of the day he was not searching for more clues to confirm existing theories and he had gathered data for many years before he even attempted to make sense of it.

Thom developed an understanding of the Megalithic mind and found that he could predict the location of missing stones; on further inspection, he would usually reveal the socket hole that confirmed his expectation. This engineer had a view of the landscape beyond the Great Wall of History that was denied to standard archaeologists who were limiting themselves to increasing numbers of similar excavations. Reassembling broken pots and analyzing discarded food items in rubbish heaps can indeed be very revealing about the realities of day-to-day life in the Neolithic Period, but it tells us virtually nothing about the aspirations of the builders and sheer enthusiasm for knowledge that appear to have emanated from the souls of these people.

Thom made detailed studies of every site he explored and developed a new statistical technique to establish the relative positions of the stones. Slowly, something totally unexpected emerged from the amassed data. It appeared that the vast majority of these prehistoric sites, from the islands off northern Scotland down to the coast of Brittany, had been constructed using a standard unit of measurement. According to Thom, the units he discovered were extraordinary because they were scientifically exact. Virtually all known units of measurement from the Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians through to the Middle Ages are believed to have been based on average body parts such as fingers, hands, feet and arms, and were therefore quite approximate. Thom identified a unit that had been used in an area that stretched from northern Scotland to western France, and appears in Neolithic structures built during the 4th–2nd millennia
BC
. His definition of this unit of length was that it was equal to 2.722 feet/82.966 centimetres.
⁵
He named this unit a ‘Megalithic Yard’ because it was only a few inches less than a standard yard. He found that this Megalithic Yard had been used in multiples, including half and double forms as well as being divided into 40 sub-units that he called ‘Megalithic Inches’.

In 1955, after analysing the data from the surveying of 46 circular stone rings, Thom concluded that they had been laid out as multiples of a standard unit of measurement that had been used throughout Britain.
⁶
Alexander Thom and his son Archie, who had begun to assist him in his work, eventually arrived at a definitive length for the Megalithic Yard of 2.722 feet +/– 0.002 feet (82.96656cm +/– 0.061cm).
⁷

Thom found small variations in the length of his Megalithic Yard but the distribution of error was utterly consistent, centring on a tiny range – not a fuzzy zone as would be expected from an ancient measure. The distribution graph of variations kept powerfully centring on a single point.

The engineer was utterly perplexed, since he could not begin to explain his own findings. He was well aware that even if there had been a priesthood that cut poles to the required length and then passed them on over the tens of thousands of square miles involved and across many generations, such uncanny accuracy could not have been the result. In 1968 he wrote:

‘This unit was in use from one end of Britain to the other. It is not possible to detect by statistical examination any differences between the values determined in the English and Scottish circles. There must have been a headquarters from which standard rods [a rod could be of two types, but in this context they are pieces of wood cut to represent the Megalithic Yard] were sent out… The length of rods in Scotland cannot have differed from that in England by more than 0.03 inch
[0.762 mm]
or the difference would have shown up. If each small community had obtained the length by copying the rod from its neighbour to the south the accumulated error would have been much greater than this.’
⁸

At that time Thom’s data could not be explained by any mechanism known to be available to the people of the late Stone Age other than to assume that all rods were made at the same place and delivered by hand to each and every community across Scotland and England. Eventually he would find the unit in use from the Hebrides to western France, which makes the central ruler factory theory look most unlikely. He also found it impossible to imagine why these early communities wanted to work to an exact standard unit.

Although he could not explain it, Thom stood by his data. While he was puzzled, many people within the archaeological community were not. For most archaeologists it was a simple case of an engineer playing with something he did not understand and getting his facts wrong. This was not an unreasonable response because the culture that produced the Megalithic structures had left no other signs of such sophistication. Thom’s data was accepted but its interpretation was almost universally rejected. However, when the Royal Society under the auspices of Professor Kendal was asked to check his work in order to find the error, it responded by stating that there was one chance in a hundred that Thom’s Megalithic Yard had
not
been employed on the sites surveyed.

Despite the fact that a number of leading archaeologists has subsequently identified accumulations close to whole number (integer) multiples of a unit of approximately 0.83 metres.
⁹
Thom’s work is still largely ignored on the basis that it is wholly inconsistent with scholarly opinion of the abilities of Neolithic Man. A failure to explain how this culture could have achieved such an accurate system of measurement has caused the archaeological community to disbelieve Thom’s findings and put them down as some kind of statistical blunder. A suggestion was put forward that Thom’s extensive data might reveal nothing more than the average pace or footstep of all the people involved in the building of these structures. After all, if enough data is collected and examined it is bound to produce an average, assuming that people paced out large distances and used their palm-widths for smaller ones. At first this explanation sounds very reasonable, even probable. But Professor Thom was not a fool – and he would have been a very poor mathematician to make such a basic mistake. The reality is that the ‘human pace’ theory is not a possible solution to the finding of a standard unit for two reasons. First, because the human stride varies far more than the small deviations found and second, because the distribution curve would be an entirely different shape. This ‘solution’ to the data is simply wrong.

The difference in approach between Thom and the general archaeological community is fundamental. In simple terms, archaeologists are experts in the recovery and cataloguing of manufactured artefacts that allows them to understand rates of development and influences between groups. They dig up the remains of human settlements and piece together some idea of the community involved from written records and from lost or discarded items. This process works well in places such as Egypt where there is an almost boundless supply of artefacts and documents to give us an insight into the lives of its people. However, the procedure is less than satisfactory when considering the structures of Megalithic Europe because there are few artefacts to be retrieved and no written records at all.

Dr Aubrey Burl, the highly respected archaeologist whom Thom quoted extensively, confirmed to us that he did not believe in the reality of the Megalithic Yard, stating that he had excavated many Megalithic sites but had never found the measurement. This statement reveals a collision of techniques since it is difficult to itemize one specific Megalithic Yard at any ancient site. This is because the unit in the sense Thom often found it only reveals itself from the careful gathering of huge amounts of data extracted from every site.

Although individual standing stones have been shown by Thom to have moved very little over the centuries, an entire site must be meticulously catalogued before the Megalithic Yard really makes its presence felt.

Douglas Heggie of Edinburgh University gives the arguments against the validity of the results claimed by Thom in their most complete form in a book, where he questions the validity of the statistical approach.
¹⁰
Heggie suggested that having ‘found’ what he thought was the Megalithic Yard, Professor Thom, particularly in his later work, might have had his findings coloured by the expectation of certain results. He also questioned how Thom had decided on the point on any given stone in any structure from which to take his measurements. From his own approach to assessing Thom’s work Heggie came to the conclusion that if the Megalithic Yard existed at all it probably only did so in Scotland, and even then to a much less accurate degree of tolerance than Professor Thom had claimed.

Douglas Heggie is a highly respected professor of mathematics and Alexander Thom was a highly respected professor of engineering – so who is right? Most archaeologists prefer to side with Heggie, almost certainly because the whole idea of a prehistoric unit of measurement is at odds with their view of Neolithic achievements. But archaeologists who have carefully reviewed Thom’s work in the field have a different view. For example, Tony Crerar, a researcher and engineer in Wales and Euan Mackie, an honorary Research Fellow at the Hunterian Institute in Scotland are strong supporters of the concept of the Megalithic Yard. Dr Mackie has recently said of Thom:

‘By exact surveying and statistical analysis he (Thom) demonstrated that most stone circles could have been set out much more accurately than previously supposed. Most are truly circular with diameters set out in units of a ‘megalithic yard’ of 0.829 metres or 2.72 feet. Other circles had more complex shapes like ellipses and flattened circles, whose dimensions appear to be based on pythagorean triangles, also measured in megalithic yards. By similar means he showed that many standing stone sites pointed at notches and mountain peaks on the horizon where the Sun or Moon rose or set at significant times. Not only does a sophisticated solar calendar seem to have been in use, but the Moon’s movements may have been studied carefully, even up to the level of eclipse prediction.’
¹¹

There were question marks over the Megalithic Yard but the challenge laid down by the late Professor Alexander Thom still remained. In our opinion there were only two main possibilities:

1. Thom’s data gathering and/or his analysis were flawed, and the Megalithic builders did not use the Megalithic Yard as a standard system of measurement.

2. Thom’s data and his analysis were both correct. The Megalithic builders did use this standard unit of measurement and it was applied with great accuracy.

It is a matter of record that the academic establishment prefers a gentle evolution to revolution in its thinking. No academic authority enjoys having its finely-tuned paradigm challenged. But it is time to put the Megalithic Yard to the test. So, was there a way forward to resolve the authenticity or otherwise of Thom’s findings? Was it possible to investigate the suggested Megalithic Yard? The problem was that there was still a relative absence of informed opinion regarding this subject. The situation brought to mind the words of Mr Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’
Hard Times:

‘Now, what I want is, Facts... Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them… Stick to Facts, sir!’

Facts can be tricky things, as the point of view of the observer will always have a bearing on them. However, we came to the view that the only way to resolve the matter was to try to put some more facts on the table: facts that could help everyone concerned to have a more informed view. To do this we decided that we needed to try and discover how the Neolithic people could have produced the Megalithic Yard to such a high degree of accuracy across so large a geographical area and over such a long period of time. If we could find a realistic explanation of how the Megalithic unit of 0.8296656 metres could be created, it would justify a reappraisal of the existing paradigm of prehistory and potentially repair a substantial hole in the Great Wall of History.