Megalithic Yard - Reception

Reception

Thom's claim was initially ignored or regarded as unbelievable by mainstream archaeologists.

Clive Ruggles has said that both classical and Bayesian statistical reassessments of Thom's date "reached the conclusion that the evidence in favour of the MY was at best marginal, and that even if it does exist the uncertainty in our knowledge of its value is of the order of centimetres, far greater than the 1mm precision claimed by Thom. In other words, the evidence presented by Thom could be adequately explained by, say, monuments being set out by pacing, with the 'unit' reflecting an average length of pace." David George Kendall had previously argued that pacing would have created a greater difference in measurements between sites, he concluded after investigation for the Royal Academy, that "The hypothesis of a smooth, non-quantal distribution of circle diameters (for Scottish, English and Welsh true circles) is thus rejected at the 1% level."

Douglas Heggie casts doubt on Thom's suggestion as well, stating that his careful analysis uncovered "little evidence for a highly accurate unit" and "little justification for the claim that a highly accurate unit was in use".

In his book Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland. Aubrey Burl calls the megalithic yard "a chimera, a grotesque statistical misconception."