Alexander Thom

Alexander Thom (born March 26, 1894 in Carradale Mains , Argyll , Scotland , † November 7, 1985 in Fort William , Scotland) was a Scottish engineer and amateur archaeologist ( archaeoastronomy ).

Life

He studied at the University of Glasgow , where he was also a lecturer from 1922 to 1939. From 1945 to 1961 he was Professor of Engineering at Oxford . Since 1934 he was interested in prehistoric stone circles .

He became known for his theory of a “ megalithic yard ”, the length of which, according to his assumption, forms the basis for the construction of many megalithic buildings and which has spread throughout Europe since the Neolithic . Alexander Thom extracted a unit of measurement of 82.9 centimeters from the measurement of numerous British megalithic buildings . His findings were published in 1955 in the article A statistical examination of megalithic sites in Britain in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society . Two further articles from 1962 and 1964, which he published in the same magazine after his retirement, caused a sensation and made his research known internationally.

In addition to metrology , Thom worked out a typology of megalithic stone circles. He classified them into six types: real circles, ellipses, two types of egg-shaped circles, and two types of flattened circles. In addition, he developed a theory about the so-called megalithic calendar .

criticism

Thom's theories met with opposition from the archaeological community, but were enthusiastically received by sections of the New Age movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Similar to Gerald Hawkins' interpretation of Stonehenge as an “astronomical computer”, his ideas were associated with the supposedly lost knowledge of perished cultures. Thom himself regretted this, as it gave his work the reputation of pseudoscience .

The astronomical alignment of many megalithic stone circles is hardly doubted even today. Thom's theory of a “megalithic yard” is not scientifically recognized and is still controversial. He was particularly criticized in the 1980s by research colleagues who accused him of systematic and methodological deficiencies. Today his hypotheses are considered discredited in British megalithic research and are no longer discussed. Some see signs of a renaissance of his ideas in the USA, where Thom's work has met with a more positive response than in Europe from the very beginning.

Book publications

• Alexander Thom: Megalithic Sites in Britain. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1967, 1976, 1979. ISBN 0-19-813148-8
• Alexander Thom: Megalithic Lunar Observatories. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1971, 1978. ISBN 0-19-858132-7

literature

• Edmund Sixsmith: The megalithic story of Professor Alexander Thom (PDF; 2.6 MB). In: Significance , June 2009, pp. 94-96.