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words fell on deaf ears. In the years that followed, the Egyptologists took refuge in their belief that by having silenced Lockyer and having thrown him off their turf, they had shaken off all those pseudoscientists, dilettantes, and hangers-on who dared to oppose their views. For a while it did seem that they had succeeded.
    In 1963, however, another archaeoastronomer came to haunt them again with a vengeance: the American professor Gerald Hawkins of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hawkins infuriated archaeologists by publishing in Lockyer’s now highly influential academic journal
Nature
a series of articles on the vexed topic of the alleged astronomy of Stonehenge, and he followed the articles with the publication of his now-renowned book
Stonehenge Decoded.
Hawkins went much further than Lockyer: he claimed that the alignments at Stonehenge were definitely astronomical and had been deliberately aimed at the sun and moon
azimuths
(positions at rising and setting). He also asserted that the fifty-six holes of the so-called Aubrey Circle were representative of the fifty-six years of the moon’s full eclipse cycle of three nodal revolutions of 18.61 years each. The implications were huge. This interpretation meant that the ancient builders of Stonehenge, far from being primitives and illiterate barbarians, were sophisticated astronomers who also knew that Earth was a sphere or globe. This, of course, was pure anathema to the archaeologists, and soon they were again up in arms. As our colleague and friend John Anthony West once remarked:
    There are few things in this world more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas. That reaction is always and invariably some combination of contempt, outrage, abuse and derision. . . . However, this standard reaction may be seriously muted or further enhanced by a potent new wild card, added to the deck only in the latter half of the twentieth century: the PR factor. If the unconventional idea attracts wide public interest, that is to say if it is easily understood and is “sexy” enough; especially if it results in bestselling books, extensive TV coverage or movie blockbusters, the attack gets ratcheted up. . . . As long as the public interest is there, Hollywood and television can be relied upon to keep stirring the pot no matter what the “experts” say. And sooner or later the cynics, skeptics and debunkers at the
New York Times, Scientific American
and
Skeptical Inquirer
will be forced to confront the offending
idea. 13
    This time, however, they faced a less accommodating opponent than the passive Sir Lockyer. Hawkins’s book became a bestseller, and, with his solid academic reputation, the archaeologists had much trouble quenching the huge interest and support Hawkins received from the public and media. Hawkins had singlehandedly forced the scholars out of their ivory towers and made them face up to the challenge. What made matters even worse for the skeptics was the support that he received from academic heavyweights such as Sir Fred Hoyle, who not only confirmed Hawkins’s calculations but also agreed that “a veritable Newton or Einstein must have been at
work” 14 at Stonehenge three millennia ago.
    Hawkins was soon followed by a Scotsman, Alexander Thom, an engineer with a keen interest in the ancient megaliths and prehistoric monuments of the British Isles. After years of meticulous investigation of the astronomical alignments of these ancient sites, Thom was convinced that all were the collective work of a pan-generation construction program that reached its pinnacle in 1850 BCE. He was able to show that many of the megalithic sites incorporated a common canon of geometry and mathematics that resembled what was supposedly invented by the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece—yet they appeared in the British Isles more than a millennium earlier! According to Thom, the