Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Clive Ruggles is an archaeoastronomer, and this academic book, published by Yale University Press, critically examines claims about prehistoric British and Irish monuments such as Stonehenge having precise astronomical alignments, applying statistical rigor to distinguish genuine astronomical intent from coincidental alignment. Its strength is exactly that critical caution, Ruggles is explicit about which claimed alignments hold up to careful statistical testing and which popular claims about prehistoric astronomy do not, correcting a genre prone to overstatement. Its limit is that, because so much of the underlying evidence is necessarily inferential, working from stone positions rather than any surviving written record, even Ruggles's more careful conclusions remain interpretive rather than certain, a limit inherent to the evidence rather than to his method.