Carretera 83 (Vía Corta) Zaragoza-Victoria, km 27+800. Of all crossings of the Tropic of Cancer with Mexican federal highways, this is the only place where the latitude is marked with precision and where the annual drift between the years 2005 and 2010 can be appreciated.
THEORETICAL SAMPLING OF SIMULATED POPULATIONS AT WEST KENNET AVENUE, WILSHIRE, ENGLAND: TRANSCENDING THE INDIVIDUALISTIC FALLACY IN ARCHAEOASTRONOMY BY CONSIDERING MONUMENT DESIGN AND LANDSCAPE PHENOMENOLOGY AS COUPLED SYSTEMS
The dominant methodology in archaeoastronomy is the statistical testing of regional groups of monuments. Such tests for the null hypothesis cannot be used for unique monuments like Stonehenge and Avebury monument complexes in England, nor do they raise inquiry to the level of the meaning of these or even regional groups of monuments. To interpret the collective representations of the ancient monument builders an additional method for archaeoastronomy is to treat monument design and landscape context as a terrain of choices and, together with skyscape, as coupled systems. Competing models of meaning can then be tested by theoretically sampling these domains.
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".
The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
Lionel Sims is Emeritus Head of Anthropology at the University of East London, Vice President of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC), member of the Avebury Sacred Sites Forum, part time lecturer for the Worker's Educational Association.
Investigating knowledge of mathematics and the use of standard units of measurement in prehistoric societies is a difficult task. For the British Neolithic period (4000–2500 bc), attempts to refine our understanding of mathematical knowledge for this period have been largely unsuccessful until now. Following recent research, we propose that there is a direct link between the design of the monument of Stonehenge and the chalk artefacts known as the Folkton and Lavant Drums, in which the Drums represent measurement standards that were essential for accurate and reproducible monument construction. This has important implications for future analyses of artefacts and monuments for this period.
The Folkton Drums are a unique set of three decorated chalk objects in the shape of drums or solid cylinders dating from the Neolithic period. .. The dimensions of the drums may be significant: archaeologist Anne Teather notes that the circumferences of the drums form whole-number divisions (ten, nine and eight times, respectively) of ten long feet, a widely used unit of measure in Neolithic Britain
The Neolithic long foot, first proposed by archeologists Mike Parker Pearson and Andrew Chamberlain, is based upon calculations from surveys of Phase 1 elements at Stonehenge. They found that the underlying diameters of the stone circles had been consistently laid out using multiples of a base unit amounting to 30 long feet, which they calculated to be 1.056 of a modern foot (1243⁄64 inches or 0.3219 m).
Furthermore, this unit is identifiable in the dimensions of some stone lintels at the site and in the diameter of the "southern circle" at nearby Durrington Walls.
Evidence that this unit was in widespread use across southern Britain is available from the Folkton Drums from Yorkshire
and a similar object, the Lavant drum, excavated at Lavant, Sussex, again with a circumference divisible as a whole number into ten long feet
Mick Harper wrote:Thom's Megalithic Yard died the death of the wrong, I think, not academic hostility.
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