Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, Clive Ruggles, Yale University Press, 1999, hardback, 285 pp.

Ruggles’ book includes original research into megalithic astronomical alignments in the British Isles together with commentary on previous work, notably Alexander Thom’s research and results (which in part formed the basis of modern archaeoastronomy). Ruggles also comments on the intellectual climate within which archaeology operates, with significant conclusions for the history of science and ideas. He writes

Ironically in view of the ‘science v. symbolism’ debates in archaeoastronomy in the early 1980s, answers are not to be found by searching for proto-Western science but in the very symbolism that was once seen as its antithesis. If we see non-Western systems of thought as substituting (superstitious) myth, ritual and ceremony for (rational) explanation, we fail to recognize that the conceptual structures underlying them themselves constitute mechanisms for explanation that are perfectly logical and coherent in their own terms. Correspondences such as that between the Barasana Caterpillar Jaguar constellation and earthly caterpillars, have explanatory power within a non-Western world-view, and symbolic expressions of such correspondences – such as that between quartz and moon-light – possess the power to express perceived reality in such a framework (p. 155).