bigideas

I was looking at The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth by Heath and Michell this morning in connection with the upcoming Align performances (if you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late). In Michell’s section I noticed a couple of claims that are wrong, but in interestingly different ways. (It should be said that, arguably, there are lots and lots of things wrong with Michell’s stuff; consider these as examples).

The Icknield Way

The first appears in the caption for a map of England on p.93, which identifies a line as “Icknield Way, often referred to as the St Michael Line”. I see no way to read this except as a claim that the Icknield Way — a well-known set of prehistoric tracks that, joined together, run between Norfolk and the South West of England — is identical with the St Michael Line — a proposed ley line that runs all the way from Norfolk to land’s End.

This identification is incorrect for at least two reasons. The first is that on no definition of the Icknield Way that I have been able to find does it extend as Michell represents it on the map. The second is that these are two different kinds of thing: the Icknield way is a set of physical trackways whereas the St Michael Line is an ideal line linking specific mark-points. Hence the caption is not only factually but categorically wrong.

This must be either an error on Michell’s part or a deliberate sleight of hand to conflate controversial ley theory with respectable archaeology. Either way, in an ideal world it should have been picked up during fact-checking. But claims in books like this rarely get carefully checked, and in any case Michell’s book has been in circulation so long now and his claims reproduced so often that there’s really no point shutting the door on it now.

Latitude

A few pages later Michell makes another statement, rather more remarkable. Giving reasons for the choice of Avebury for the building of “the national monument”, he says:

Avebury stands upon the line of Icknield Street and at the significant latitude 360/7 degrees.

Leaving aside the question of alignment, the “significant latitude” seems to me to be an astonishing leap. It assumes that neolithic Britons were capable of measuring latitude, which seems wildly unlikely. What’s more, they used the same units as we do, derived from the Sumerian base-60 counting system, which was certainly in use at the time that the original henge was built.

So far as I am aware, though, there is no reason to believe that Sumerians and Britons were in contact anywhere near this time. The Britons, for example, are not literate, and it was literacy that was the Sumerians’ great cultural strength and its great export. What’s more, they would have to have measured latitude using the modern equator as zero. That seems pretty far-fetched.

Nobody knows why the site we now call “Avebury” was chosen for the building of a number of large earthworks and standing-stone and timber structures. We will almost certainly never know, and the choice may well have been more or less arbitrary, at least in relation to large-scale planetary geography. It seems unlikely that its builders would have travelled hundreds of miles to the site, for example, if they had originally lived somewhere else just so they could build it at that latitude. Possible, but unlikely. Especially if you consider that, when they built Stonehenge, they deliberately dragged hundreds of tons of sarsen stone south, away from that latitude to one that is seemingly numerologically insignificant.

Two Types of Counterfactual

I’ve called these two claims — one about the Icknield Way and the other about Avebury — “counterfactuals”. I think they’re slightly, and interestingly, different. The first, as I’ve suggested, looks like a straightforward mistake or fabrication. The Icknield Way really isn’t the same thing as the St Michael Line even by Michell’s own lights.

In fact I think this may have arisen because of a desire to link the two things for local rhetorical purposes. I don’t think Michell really wants us to believe that they’re the same thing, but wants us to associate the two and find the association suggestive. As I said, this should just have been corrected. If Michell wants us to note the striking similarity between the two then it doesn’t help him to say that these are two names for the same thing.

The Avebury claim is a lot more elusive. Of course, we don’t think that neolithic Britons were in touch with Sumerian astronomers, or that either would have known how to measure latitude in the way we do or wanted to do so. It’s much more likely that Avebury’s latitude of 360/7 is a coincidence. But in New Age thinking, there are no coincidences, and in fact Michell’s theory does not require contact between the Britons and Sumerians — he speculates a division of the circle according to the number of days in the year, with an approximation to give a number that has lots of prime factors.

There’s no possible evidence that could be provided for this, of course, and no evidence that could be brought to bear against it except that it looks like an ex post facto attempt to kit out our prehistoric ancestors with some modern units of measurement.

No proffered theory for the selection of the site at Avebury, however unlikely, can be said to be flat out wrong. It seems to me that, in the context of Michell’s ideas about “sacred geography”, his explanation has some coherence. It fits with his picture. True, his picture is bizarre, highly speculative and unlikely-looking, on which basis we could say that we dislike it or don’t have to take it seriously because of some considerations that are of importance to us but not to Michell.

The counterfactual about Avebury, therefore, seems to need to be evaluated in the context of Michell’s theory. Out of that context it’s just a daft statement that nobody should spend any time on. But in context it makes some sense, and that’s the context in which it should really be evaluated. Here we can, of course, still criticise Michell for arbitrariness or inconsistency.

The challenge I’m offering here is: do we have any procedural way to tell the difference between these two situations in less exotic settings? And do we have a way to take whole “contexts” — ones like Michell’s New Age belief system, only more everyday — and evaluate them as gestalts? My instinct is that we don’t.