Customer Reviews

Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

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4 star:		(2)
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I love this book. It takes a skeptical, but positive approach to evidence that ancient monuments in Britain and Ireland were deliberately aligned to astronomical events. It presents very recent academic work with the point of view that astronomers and archeologists need to be more familiar with each other's work. To be clear: this is a textbook rather than a pop archeoastronomy book, but since it is written for astronomers who know nothing of archeology and archeologists who know nothing about astronomy, it provides all the background you need to understand the material presented.

Ruggles presents excellent arguments against prior texts by Alexander Thom and others who claimed that many stone rings and alignments demonstrated a highly sophisticated technology in prehistoric times. While Ruggles' approach is quite good, it lacks an understanding of common sense that dictates humanoid activity. In essence, he would be one who takes the viewpoint of many academics who have never lived in the real world outside of a university environment. For example, such academics could find a drinking glass, but state that we can never prove it was used as such because there are no lip imprints on it. Common sense says you don't create a drinking glass, unless it is for that purpose. He takes this same approach to the orientation of stone rings, recumbent stone rings, etc. While, he does demonstrate that Thom's accuracy claims are not valid, he doesn't give credence to rough alignments where if a declination of 29 degrees is ideal, a scattering a couple of degrees off this number is not indicative of 29 being sought. The builders of these rings did the best they could and if they were off by a couple of degrees, they still intended to hit close to the 29, 19, etc. Also, there were many traders moving goods in the regions of interest during the millenia of interest. To keep each other "honest", they would have to agree on some standards, such as "how much leather for how many stone axes"; hence a moderately standard "megalithic yard" as demonstrated by Thom is certainly valid. If Ruggles had assumed a "real world" view, the book would certainly rate 5 rather than the 4 stars.