Let us not forget that the stealing of the Stone of Scone by Scottish students in 1950 gave birth to Scottish Nationalism. Spooky.

The SNP was formed a long time before the 1950s.

Anyway here's some more on the Egyptian standing stones. There are things buried beneath them and the whole area has been computer modelled to constellations and stars in around Four to Six thousand BC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FPN3V7arFI

Nice video, thanks.

Have we mentioned Nabta Playa before?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabta_Playa

Due south of Alexandria. Hmm...

I fully sympathise, Borry, but we have to distinguish between the two purposes of academese. Far and away its most useful attribute is to say nothing without revealing the trite set of truisms and can-never-be-provens contained in the paper. The other, much rarer use, is to disguise a position that is quite radical without scaring the sleeping horses. Thus

THEORETICAL SAMPLING OF SIMULATED POPULATIONS

sounds like at least one made-up number too far but could be applied to our own Megalithic Empire model by taking the present rural population and making various adjustments to take into account purely modern and non-agricultural additions -- I am assuming 'populations' refers to people and not statistics. Similarly

TRANSCENDING THE INDIVIDUALISTIC FALLACY IN ARCHAEOASTRONOMY BY CONSIDERING MONUMENT DESIGN AND LANDSCAPE PHENOMENOLOGY AS COUPLED SYSTEMS

might appear gobblededooky but we ourselves hold that Stonehenge and Avebury are coupled whilst 'normal' stone circles are to be considered, not individually, but as a system. And so on. The scattergun listing of the author's titles is also revealing but not necessarily damning. I am myself a one-time part-time lecturer for the WEA but I wouldn't put it on my resumé if I was a head of a university department however emeritus. This by the way might indicate a case of Old Turk Syndrome i.e. someone who can afford to kick over the traces. Unless I wanted to signal my left-wing credentials but that hardly seems appropriate in this context.

We need to know more but I am loath to set Hatty loose on the paper itself as she has just returned from a holiday and needs a rest.

Thom's Megalithic Yard died the death of the wrong, I think, not academic hostility. In TME we claim that Stonehenge is the metrical centre and Avebury the navigation one, so so far so good. Presumably the north needed its own set. There are three large circles up there (Thornhill, is it?) so maybe they have a similar set up, albeit on a smaller, out-station, repeater-signal sort of way.