The Time Bomb Under Archaeology

Text from the Spectator archive, November 14, 1970. The programme was broadcast on October 31, 1970 (the Spectator came out once a fortnight). An edited excerpt from their review of TV programming. It is coming up for fifty years since the programme was broadcast, and the 'time-bomb under archaeology' may be about to explode. There is new information.

Magnus Magnusson wrote and narrated an excellent programme about even older good old days, four thousand years ago, when some of the natives of these islands were 'prehistoric Einsteins.' Chronicle: Cracking The Stone Age Code' (BBC 2) was about Professor Alexander Thom's study of megalithic mathematics and astronomy. Now seventy-six, Professor Thom, a retired engineer, has spent the past thirty years studying ancient stone circles. His measurements have demonstrated to his satisfaction that Stone Age man was no barbaric simpleton but erected stones in patterns founded on Pythagorean geometry two thousand years before Pythagoras.
Professor Thom discovered that stone circles all over Britain used a standard megalithic unit of measurement, precisely 2.72 feet in length. Using the crudest instruments, the Stone Age astronomer-priests were able to predict accurately various astronomical events, such as lunar eclipses.

Mr Magnusson suggested that Professor Thom's findings have put 'a time- bomb under archaeology.' Archaeological sceptics were given opportunities to voice their disagreement on the programme, but Thom appeared to be entirely undisturbed by expressions of dissent. Chronicle enterprisingly sent him to Carnac, a megalithic site in Brittany. His findings there fitted his British observations and demonstrated, as Mr Magnusson said, that 'there was an intellectual common market four thousand years ago.' Perhaps Malcolm Muggeridge is right,... when he says that our civilisation is in decline.

The original programme is available from the BBC Archive, and is an extraordinary time capsule from the time in which it was made. There was no consensus about the implications of Thom's work, or even that his suggestions about the basis on which the monuments were laid out were reliably rooted in Thom's phenomenological and statistical analysis.

Since then a resurvey of 300 of the monuments by Clive Ruggles, using a highly unorthodox and inconsistent methodology, has removed the need for archaeologists to engage with the implications of Thom's original study of the monuments. *1 This is because many of the things which Thom drew attention to are now understood by the archaeological community to be the product of a 'selection bias'. As the archaeologist Euan MacKie (who appears in the programme) has pointed out however, Ruggles resurvey was conducted in such a way that it could not possibly verify some of Thom's findings, such as the deliberate orientation of the monuments on foresights in the landscape, even if those findings were correct.

Thom was an engineer, mathematician, and an excellent surveyor. He detected some key components to the construction of the monuments, such as a near obsessive interest in whole numbers, and what appeared to be the use of pythagorean triangles in the laying out of the structures. Those aspects of the circles and ellipses he did not over-interpret, because he had nothing to go on. He reported on what he could see, and how the structures might have been laid out given those clear interests of the original designers of the monuments.

Being an engineer, and a mathematician, there were other things he must have noticed during his surveys, but for which he could offer no sensible explanation. And at the time this documentary was made, nobody else could have either. The phenomenological and statistical analysis of the monuments remains however as a remarkable body of work. There is more information in those surveys than meets the eye.

The interpretative frame has moved forward in the meantime. We know much more about the nature and origins of Pythagorean thought than we did - it is possible, for example, to understand Pythagoreanism as a way of thinking which is rooted in the consideration of natural puzzles. Such an interest necessarily has a bearing on the human response to such puzzles, which can be a religious response (and was, in the case of the later Pythagoreans). Many constants in nature are mathematically irrational, such as pi and phi, etc, which makes them a phenomenon of interest to those disposed to philosophical inquiry. These are staples of Greek philosophy. Such an interest also offers an explanation of how a Pythagorean way of thinking could have arisen so long before the advent of the Pythagorean sect we know from much more recent times.

***


1. Ruggles describes his resurveying work in a chapter in Records in Stone. His 'methodology', might have seemed to him to make sense at the time, but now it looks like what it is: an attempt to unsee a large body of unpalatable evidence for which the discipline of archaeology was entirely unprepared. It was about protecting an academic and cultural narrative, which then, as now, was firmly entrenched. [Records in Stone: Papers in Memory of Alexander Thom, edited by C.L.N. Ruggles, CUP, 1988]

[Readers of this article might be interested in reading Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain, which explores the pre-Pythagorean Pythagoreanism which Thom said was suggested by the evidence. Much of Pythagorean thought was evidently derived from Pythagoras's travels around the ancient Near East, which are documented, and elements of Pythagoreanism might have been a staple ingredient of religious thought from the Neolithic onwards].