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Alexander Thom (26 March 1894 – 7 November 1985) was a Scottish engineer most famous for his theory of theMegalithic yard, categorisation ofstone circles and his studies ofStonehenge and other archaeological sites.[1]
Thom was born inCarradale in 1894 to Archibald Thom,[2] atenant farmer atMains farm for Carradale House, and his wife Lily Stevenson Strang from the family ofRobert Louis Stevenson. His father trained the Churchchoir while his mother was pianist.
Thom spent his early years at Mains farm until moving toThe Hill farm atDunlop, Ayrshire. Instilled with a goodwork ethic by his father, Thom taught himselfindustrial engineering and entered college inGlasgow in 1911 where he studied alongsideJohn Logie Baird. In 1912 he attended summer school atLoch Eck where he was trained in surveying and fieldastronomy by Dr David Clark and Professor Moncur. In 1913, aged just 19, he assisted in surveying the Canadian Pacific Rail Network.
Thom graduated from theRoyal College of Science and Technology and theUniversity of Glasgow in 1914, earning a BSc with special distinction in Engineering.
He suffered from aheart murmur and was notdrafted during theFirst World War. Instead he went to work in civil engineering of theForth Bridge and later designedflying boats for the Gosport Aircraft Company. In 1917 he married Jeanie Kirkwood with whom he shared a long and lively marriage.
He returned to the University of Glasgow and worked as a lecturer from 1922 to 1939, quickly earning his PhD andDSc degrees. He built his own home calledThalassa in 1922, along with awindmill to power it with electricity. His father died in 1924 and he took over running the farm where he fathered three children, Archibald, Beryl and Alan. Thom helped to develop the Department ofAeronautics at the University of Glasgow and lectured on statistics, practical field surveying,theodolite design andastronomy. From 1930 to 1935 he was aCarnegie Teaching Fellow.[3]
During theSecond World War, Thom moved toFleet in Hampshire where he was appointed Principal Scientific Officer heading theRoyal Aircraft Establishment team that developed the first high speedwind tunnel.
Later, he was professor and chair of engineering science atBrasenose College,University of Oxford where he became interested in the methods thatprehistoric peoples used to buildmegalithic monuments. Thom became especially interested in thestone circles of theBritish Isles and France and their astronomical associations.[4]
Thom (1955)[5] in which he first suggested themegalithic yard as a standardised prehistoric measurement. He retired from academia in 1961 to spend the rest of his life devoted to this area of research. TheThom Building, housing theDepartment of Engineering Science at Oxford, built in the 1960s, is named after Alexander Thom.
From around 1933 to 1977 Thom spent most of his weekends and holiday periods hefting theodolites and survey equipment around the countryside with his family member or friends, most notably with his son Archie. From studies measuring and analysing the data created at over five hundredmegalithic sites, he attempted to classify stone circles into differentmorphological types, Type A, Type B, Type B modified, and Type D flattened circles, Type 1 and Type 2eggs,ovals and truecircles.
His son Alan died in aplane crash in 1945.
He suggested several were built asastronomical complexes to predicteclipses via nineteen-year cycles. Thom went on to identify numerous solar and stellar alignments at stone circles, providing the foundations for the scientific discipline ofarchaeoastronomy.
He further suggested the prehistoric peoples of Britain must have used a solar method of keeping calendar. Based on statisticalhistograms of observeddeclinations at horizon marks with no convenient star at −22°, +8°, +9° and +22° (except possiblySpica at +9°) between 2100 and 1600 BCE, he suggested a year based on sixteen months; four with twenty two days, eleven with twenty three days, and one with twenty four.
Thom's suggested megalithic solar year was divided bymidsummer,midwinter, and the twoequinoxes into four and then subdivided into eight by early versions of the modern Christian festivals ofWhitsun,Lammas,Martinmas, andCandlemas (seeScottish Quarter Days). He found little evidence for further subdivision into thirty two, but noted "We do not know how sophisticated prehistoric man's calendar was, but the interesting thing is that he obtained declinations very close to those we have obtained as ideal".
Thom explored these topics further in his later books
The last was written with his son Archie, after they carried out a detailed survey of theCarnac stones from 1970 to 1974.[6]
Thom's ideas met with resistance from thearchaeological community but were welcomed amongst elements of 1960scounter-culture. Along withGerald Hawkins' new interpretation ofStonehenge as anastronomical 'computer' (seeArchaeoastronomy and Stonehenge), Thom's theories were adopted by numerous enthusiasts for 'the lost wisdom of the ancients' and became commonly associated withpseudoscience.[citation needed]
In 1975, his wife, Jeanie died. In 1981 he underwent an eye operation and in 1982 he broke afemur falling onice. He continued to write papers and undertook interviews and correspondence using a dictaphone with the assistance of audio typist, Hilda Gustin. He moved in with his daughter Beryl in 1983 inBanavie. Registered asblind, he concluded a final bookStone Rows and Standing Stones, a 557 page tome published posthumously with the assistance ofAubrey Burl in 1990. Thom died on 7 November 1985 atFort William hospital, aged 91. His body was buried nearAyr.
Alexander Thom is survived by his daughter Beryl Austin, and his grandchildren. His son Archie survived him, but died ten years later, in 1995, from a brain tumour.
In 1970, Thom appeared on a television documentary produced by the BBCChronicle series, presented byMagnus Magnusson and featuring well-known archaeologists DrEuan Mackie, ProfessorRichard J. C. Atkinson, DrA. H. A. Hogg, ProfessorStuart Piggott, DrJacquetta Hawkes, Dr Humphrey Case and DrGlyn Daniel. The programme discussed the difference betweenorthodox archaeology and the radical ideas of Thom. A pinnacle of his career, Thom finally got to publicly deliver his message on national television.[7] Despite the heavy criticism, he never vented his frustration on the archaeological profession; as he said in theChronicle programme, "I just keep reporting what I find."
Thom's proposed length for theMegalithic yard has been reused as such in several controversial books that claim this unit of measurement is a subdivision of the Earth'scircumference in an alleged366-degree geometry. One such book is 'Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought It Was', byChristopher Knight and Alan Butler who propose the366 geometry theory.
Clive Ruggles has said that both classical and Bayesian statistical reassessments of Thom's data "reached the conclusion that the evidence in favour of the MY was at best marginal, and that even if it does exist the uncertainty in our knowledge of its value is of the order of centimetres, far greater than the 1mm precision claimed by Thom. In other words, the evidence presented by Thom could beadequately explained by, say, monuments being set out by pacing, with the 'unit' reflecting an average length of pace."[8]David George Kendall had previously argued that pacing would have created a greater difference in measurements between sites, he concluded after investigation for theRoyal Academy, that"The hypothesis of a smooth, non-quantal distribution of circle diameters (for Scottish, English and Welsh true circles)is thus rejected at the 1% level."[9][10]
Douglas Heggie casts doubt on Thom's suggestion as well, stating that his careful analysis uncovered "little evidence for a highly accurate unit" and "little justification for the claim that a highly accurate unit was in use".[11]
Euan MacKie, recognising that Thom's theories needed to be tested, excavated at the Kintraw standing stone site in Argyllshire in 1970 and 1971 to check whether the latter's prediction of an observation platform on the hill slope above the stone was correct. There was an artificial platform there and this apparent verification of Thom's long alignment hypothesis (Kintraw was diagnosed as an accurate winter solstice site) led him to check Thom's geometrical theories at the Cultoon stone circle in Islay, also with a positive result. MacKie therefore broadly accepted Thom's conclusions and published new prehistories of Britain.[22] In contrast a re-evaluation of Thom's fieldwork by Clive Ruggles argued that Thom's claims of high accuracy astronomy were not fully supported by the evidence.[23] Nevertheless, Thom's legacy remains strong, Krupp wrote in 1979, "Almost singlehandedly he has established the standards for archaeoastronomical fieldwork and interpretation, and his amazing results have stirred controversy during the last three decades." His influence endures and practice of statistical testing of data remains one of the methods of archaeoastronomy.[12]
In his bookGenes, Giants, Monsters and Men,Joseph P. Farrell states, "If Thom was right, the development of human civilization may have to be rewritten!" This Farrell surmises is why Thom encounters such opposition from certain groups.[13][unreliable source?]
In his bookRings of Stone: The Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland.Aubrey Burl calls the megalithic yard "a chimera, a grotesque statistical misconception."[14]
Archaeoastronomical publications.
