What I want to do here is examine two specific problems. The first is what has happened to the British discipline of astroarchaeology or archaeoastronomy, the study of ancient responses to the heavens. This was established in the 1970s, on a wave of excitement created by pioneering works of the 1960s. It was confidently expected to become an integral and important component of the investigation of prehistory. Instead it has shrunk into an academic sub-subject, isolated both from most archaeologists and from an enthusiastic popular movement, which focuses on alignments between prehistoric monuments and the sky. It is notable the very terms astroarchaeology and archaeoastronomy, spelt exactly as employed by practitioners, are not recognised as valid by the spell check on my computer. The second question is why most current British archaeologists should be so uninterested in the sky. After all, two movements have dominated the development of their discipline since the 1990s. One has been landscape archaeology, and the sky is not only a major component of any landscape, but the only one which remains much as it was during prehistory. The other has been cognitive archaeology, the study of the way in which ancient people perceived and experienced their world, and the sky again must have formed a major aspect of both processes. Instead it usually plays at most a minor part in the interpretation of archaeological sites. So let me set about some answers. To explain the fortunes of astroarchaeology itself, it is necessary to explain the context in which it appeared and had to operate, and there were four significant features to that. Some complemented each other, and some were in competition and contrast. The first was the admiration for big science, which pervaded Western society in the mid-twentieth century. A widespread belief which had commenced under Queen Victoria was that scientists would eventually find remedies for virtually all human ills and limitations, and reveal all of the workings of the universe. People most invariably search for kindred spirits in the past. This created a disposition to admire anybody in history or prehistory who seemed capable of anticipating or matching modern scientific achievements. The second relevant feature of the age was the professionalization of the discipline of archaeology between the nineteen twenties and the nineteen fifties, until now it had been carried on mostly by amateurs in their spare time. Now it became rooted in university courses, and the qualifications that they gave, and its prime tool of excavation was reserved to those equipped with these. The higher the academic status of archaeologists, the more dominant they were in the discipline. For those with a passionate interest in prehistory, who are unable or unwilling to join this exclusive club, only two aspects of the subject remained, which were not under that club's control. One was the relation of prehistoric monuments to other landscape features, the other was their relation to heavenly bodies. Built into the development of professional archaeology was a third contextual feature. The belief in evolution as the motor force of natural development, which had appeared under Victoria. It was coupled with another Victorian feature, the cult of moral and technological progress, as an admirable and perhaps divinely inspired phenomenon. This created a tendency to regard ages which were technologically primitive as debased in their social and moral characteristics as well. The twin words habitually employed for more traditional societies, savages and barbarians, summed up this tendency. It was embodied in textbooks written by the most prominent archaeologists, such as Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Stuart Piggott. It was also, and perhaps more influentially for the general public, personified in the illustrations provided for works on prehistory, the ubiquitous drawings of Alan Sorrel, for example, provided for the readers of the 1950s and 1960s, a succession of prehistoric Britons with unkempt hair and beards dressed in animal skins, no soap, razors, combs, or needles were in evidence. This last, intellectually dominant view of the remote past ran counter to an older one, which remained very powerful in twentieth century Britain, especially outside the Academy. It was ultimately derived from the Bible, which had remained the basis for a general understanding of history and prehistory until the eighteen sixties. Even among people who had themselves ceased to be Christian, it remained potent as an instinctual position a hundred years later. This was a belief that in the very remote past humanity had shared a single primal good religion, perhaps based on divine revelation or a deep instinctual knowledge of the truths of the cosmos. In this view the religion and the knowledge concerned had been fractured and mostly forgotten in the course of the millennia. Many people who held it brought with it a desire, to a greater or lesser degree, to recover this lost wisdom and revive this good primal religion in the modern age. Some felt in the true Christian apocalyptic tradition that the survival of humanity depended on this achievement. The professional archaeologists of the earlier twentieth century were certainly aware that some of Britain's prehistoric monuments, and some elsewhere, had important alignments on the sky. The most famous of all was Stonehenge's orientation on the Midsummer Sunrise, but there were others. Scotland's greatest single Neolithic monument, the passage grave of Meiss Howe, was aligned on the midwinter sunset. None of these leaders of the new profession, however, were much interested in astronomy, mathematics, or engineering. This was partly because those are simply different disciplines, but also because the elements of all those in prehistoric structures seemed simple enough to require no special study. Occasionally an outsider had taken an interest in them, sometimes to spectacular effect. The most distinguished was Sir Norman Lockyer, the discoverer of helium, who published a series of works on the astronomical significance of ancient monuments between 1896 and 1907. Archaeologists just didn't know what to make of these ideas, and most decided to ignore them, which more or less did the trick. As the twentieth century wore on, most people forgot them. A few less conspicuous outsiders continued to publish articles in learned journals, drawing attention to the heavenly alignments of prehistoric sites, but these were neither controversial nor much noticed. This situation ended almost overnight in 1965, when one of those authors, an astronomer called Gerald Hawkins, teamed up with a friend J.B. White, to publish a book called Stonehenge Decoded. It became a rapid bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and continued to be one, in paperback, in the 1970s, deliberately pitched at a popular market. Its selling point was that it was the first attempt to apply computer technology systematically to an archaeological problem. In this case, the problem was the purpose of Stonehenge, which Hawkins discovered to have been itself a giant prehistoric computer. As such it had been used to reflect and monitor the workings of the heavens, including the prediction of eclipses. Other astronomers like Sir Fred Hoyle immediately took an interest in the stones, all agreeing with Hawkins that the stones had been a marvellous scientific instrument, but all providing their own interpretations of it instead of his. This left archaeologists baffled and resentful, able to fault the scientists every time they touched on archaeology, but otherwise trying to cope with a mass of conflicting alien information. Almost immediately, moreover, they had a much worse problem. This was represented by a retired academic called Alexander Tom. He was a very distinguished one, having been the professor of engineering science at Oxford University, where a building is named after him. Ever since 1930, he had been interested in the astronomical and mathematical properties of prehistoric monuments, and devoted many holidays to surveying them, especially in his native Scotland. From 1954 he began to publish his ideas regarding prehistory, but in the usual scientific journals where only astronomers and statisticians read them. It was probably the example of Hawkins and White which made him turn to books, releasing in 1967 the first of a series which brought his theories before a large public. They were the first works to support the hypothesis that prehistoric monuments were aligned on the heavens with statistical evidence from many sites, produced by extensive field work of high quality. What he argued from this was that the stone circles and rows of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain had primarily been observatories, for studying the night sky in particular with considerable sophistication and precision. He also believed that these observations were used to construct and maintain a general prehistoric calendar of eight annual festivals. Furthermore, he contended that the monuments had been laid out with marvellous mathematical ability, using a standard unit of measurement, which he termed the megalithic yard. Tom did not mock archaeologists for failing to perceive all this, but nor did he make any attempt to integrate it with their own findings, and their reconstructions of prehistoric culture and society. Instead, he behaved as if his research had rendered the latter redundant, and that's how many of the public perceived things. As a result it was immediately and enthusiastically taken up, together with that of Hawkins and White, by the Earth Mysteries movement, which burgeons in Britain and the late nineteen sixties. This was explicitly countercultural, being closely aligned with the hippie subculture of the period, and largely inspired by the writings of John Michelle, especially one book, The View Over Atlantis, published in 1969. This introduced a wide public to the concept of lays, straight lines of mysterious natural energy covering the surface of the earth, along which ancient monuments had been aligned. Three points should be emphasized about this concept and the movement with which it was associated in the present context. The first was that it was bound up with an intense post-Christian religiosity. It depended on the biblical concept of a single, primordial true religion, from which humanity had deviated to its cost. Michelle himself used an apocalyptic language, declaring that acceptance of his ideas represented the rediscovery of access to the divine will and the restoration of the Holy Spirit. The second pertinent point was that it was explicitly hostile to Orthodox prehistory as part of a general condemnation of established ideas and institutions. Michel sneered at professional archaeologists as treasure hunters and grave robbers who had to be thrown from power. The third point is it is most unlikely that he and his fellows would have launched their crusade with such enthusiasm had it not been for the apparent discoveries of Alexander Tom. He seemed a classic example of an outsider who'd shown the whole of Orthodox prehistory to be flawed. As such he was taken up as a hero by Michelle and by the other authors who followed him in the Earth Mysteries tradition, or as many practitioners called it, alternative archaeology through the 1970s. Tom's own relationship with this movement was complex. He lacked its mysticism and its contempt for academics. On the other hand, his ideas consciously or not, sometimes drew on those of the counterculture. For example, he proclaimed that Neolithic Britain had observed that ritual calendar of eight festivals, composed by blending the solstices and equinoxes with the quarter days which opened the seasons. He strove to prove this from the alignments of megalithic monuments. In fact, this calendar was the one observed by modern pagans, and developed by the newly appeared witch religion of Wicca. Although often claimed to be prehistoric, it had actually been adopted by Wickens in 1958. Tom also gave support to the idea of ley lines, by declaring in 1971 that Neolithic engineers could survey straight between mutually invisible points. His claims were of course a great deal less convenient to professional archaeologists, especially as the latter had no skills with which to test them. To do that demanded an expertise in astronomy, mathematics, and statistics, and these were all separate sciences. In nineteen seventy five, one famous archaeologist, Richard Atkinson, the leading authority on Stonehenge, declared an acceptance of Tom's basic principle that megalithic monuments were bound up intrinsically with astronomical observations. He was rewarded for his courage with mockery from John Michele. In a work published in 1977, the latter called Atkinson the first rat to abandon the sinking ship of Orthodox archaeology. Michelle made astroarchaeology his key example of an apparent heresy which had turned out to prove established scholarship completely wrong and become an orthodoxy itself. The lesson was that other unorthodox theorists, like Michelle himself, would become the acclaimed experts of the future. By the late 1970s, therefore, two things had become very clear. One was that Tom's claims needed to be examined properly by experts in the necessary sciences. Tom himself was now out of the picture, for by 1974 he was already too old to engage in further research. The other clear lesson was that established experts in prehistory now had the strongest possible reason to hope for a disproof of Tom's ideas, as the latter had been set up, especially by Earth Mysteries authors, as the test case of the value of professional archaeology, archaeologists needed to pass that test. Nonetheless, they could not do so themselves. The span of scientific expertise required for the task demanded a coalition of practitioners, most from disciplines outside archaeology. It is worth stressing also that contrary to the assertions of outsiders such as Michelle, archaeologists could adapt to fundamental challenges to their views, swiftly and well. The same period between 1965 and 1975 had seen a complete revision of their dating methods for sites based on radiocarbon analysis. This had overturned their basic model of European prehistory, and then simply produced a new one. It was this need for a coalition of experts which engendered the new academic discipline, or interdiscipline, of archaeoastronomy. It secured something like official recognition in 1979, when the Journal for the History of Astronomy created a supplement for it. The first conference devoted to the subject was held at Oxford in 1981, and in the course of the 1980s a coalition of experts emerged within it. Some like Douglas Heggy were respected scientists, and some, such as Aubrey Burl, had an existing fame in archaeology. Others, such as John Barnett, Gordon Moyer, and Clive Ruggles, were scholars who were establishing careers. None of them belonged to any existing archaeological establishment. The nearest to that was Burl, who was a polytechnic lecturer at the time, not a university one. Some, such as Burland Ruggles, had collaborated with Tom in his work. By the mid-1980s, a consensus was starting to emerge from their joint efforts. The whole of Tom's mathematical theorizing was rejected. Stone circles which he claimed to have been built with marvellous precision, seemed now to have been laid out purely by eye. There was no good evidence either for a common system of geometry or a common system of measurement. The verdict on his astronomical arguments was more mixed. Most stone circles and rows turned out to have no obvious alignments on any heavenly bodies, which in itself seemed to overturn Tom's central thesis. A significant number, nonetheless, did seem to be built to correspond to the movements of the sun or moon, and some to both. This, however, fitted the traditional model for prehistoric society assembled by archaeologists better than that of Tom. After all, those archaeologists had always accepted that some monuments, including some of the greatest, such as Stonehenge, had clear alignments on bodies in the sky. They had accepted these as significant components of the religion or religions, in most respects mysterious, which had inspired the construction of those monuments. Tom's argument had been that the same structures had primarily been astronomical observances. Observatories, erected by people with a shared scientific knowledge, which had been marvellous even by the standards of the modern age. It was this key argument which had appealed so much to the Earth Mysteries movement, seeming as it did, to prove the existence of an impressive and universal ancient wisdom. A close examination of these critiques suggests that Tom's conclusions were not in fact directly disproved. Instead they were all shown to be susceptible to alternative readings of the same evidence. They were not hard science of the kind represented by the correction of radiocarbon dating. For virtually all professional archaeologists, this was sufficient reason to disregard them. It was time to go back to business as usual. As a result, the coalition of scientists and archaeologists who had investigated Tom's ideas more or less dispersed. Some continued to meet at an international level in the European Society for Astronomy and Culture, founded at Strasbourg in nineteen ninety-three. The most prominent British member was the academic who emerged during the nineteen nineties as the most respected archaeoastronomer in Britain. He was, in effect, the only one of those who'd worked in the area there during the nineteen eighties, to remain consistently and prominently in it. This was Clive Ruggles. Apart from devoting his career to it, he's also shown a notable breadth of mind. For example, when he investigated the Stone Rose and the lined pairs of North Mull and the Kilmartin Valley in Scotland, he found that all had a similar orientation. The only celestial event which matched it was the major southerly lunar sandstill. What worried him about this was that there are no traditional peoples on Earth in recorded history which have shown an interest in the movements of the Moon along the horizon. The conclusion that the Neolithic British were somehow cleverer and more scientifically minded than any other seems counterintuitive, at least to modern liberal thinking. Ruggles got round it by suggesting that in Scotland's latitude the Moon might seem to move along the horizon at major sandstills, as it did not elsewhere. He was still plainly unhappy, however, and admitted what he called the fundamental problem, that evidence acceptable to a numerate scientist is of a very different nature from that acceptable to his counterpart trained in the humanities. This is a point of central importance to the whole subject. By the end of the 1990s, and especially in a big book published in 1998, Ruggles had summed up that subject in Britain for his academic peers. He ruled decisively against any high precision alignments on heavenly bodies in British or Irish prehistoric monuments. Instead there was some evidence for rough and symbolic alignments on either the sun or the moon, with regional traditions that inclined to one or the other. These were fairly clearly expressions of a belief system focused on ritual and cosmic truths rather than observation for its own sake. After all, there was always a logical flaw at the heart of a tom thesis. Prehistoric farmers could determine the time of year quite easily by watching the horizon. They had no need for any markers to do so, let alone massive stone markers, requiring huge efforts to build. In addition, Ruggles acquired the knowledge of anthropology, needed to raise one further concern that many modern indigenous peoples have taboos against pointing directly at sacred things, so all the alignments may be deceptive. Ruggles' career was crowned in the year 2000, when he became the first and only professor of archaeoastronomy in Britain. To many archaeologists his views seem to represent not just the end of the debate, but the end of the subject. In nineteen ninety six a respected astronomer, John North, published a huge book in which he suggested that most Neolithic monuments were aligned with precision on heavenly bodies. Above all Stonehenge. The next year the British Academy produced a set of essays on science and Stonehenge, and Ruggles was invited to provide that on astronomy. He argued against North's precise alignments on the grounds that they were incapable of absolute proof. To him Stonehenge only had one certain alignment on the solstices, and some possible rough alignments on the moon. In 2007 Julian Richards, by then the leading archaeological expert on the monument, published a popular book called Stonehenge The Story So Far. North was never mentioned, he was not part of the story. Instead, Lockyer Hawkins and Tom were introduced as misguided, before Ruggles was brought on as the voice of sanity, and his views quoted as official to Stonehenge. They are indeed the only opinions found in the official guidebook, and in the popular pamphlet on Stonehenge produced by the Royal Astronomical Society. In behaving like this, archaeologists do not seem to be treating Ruggles as the representative of an extreme sceptical position. Rather they see him as occupying a minimalist consensual position, with which all astronomers can agree, even if many would like to go much further. It might be expected that this situation would give Clive Ruggles himself great satisfaction. Instead he has come regularly to complain of the new lack of interest in astronomy on the part of archaeologists. Since nineteen ninety many have not bothered to give any special consideration to possible heavenly alignments of the sites that they have investigated. As a result, while archaeoastronomy is flourishing across the academic world, in Britain it remains neither integrated nor even in constant conversation with either of the primary disciplines from which it was formed. Ruggles himself has suggested two main reasons for this. One is that archaeoastronomers draw their language from modern Western science, and so it grates on the ears of contemporary archaeologists as both ethnocentric and anachronistic. The second reason is that academic astroarchaeology remains contaminated in the opinion of academic archaeology because it shares interests with an alternative astroarchaeology. The latter, Ruggles has perceptively remarked, is not only booming, but has remained characterized as it was from the very beginning, by an association with an anti-academic counterculture. The same impulse that made it popular in the nineteen sixties remains, that it is one apparent way of coming up with new ideas about the prehistoric past, which requires no excavation and no acquaintance with current thinking about prehistory. The microchip revolution has produced exciting new tools to the amateur archaeoastronomer, such as software, which represents the configuration of the night sky during different eras of prehistory, and satellite pictures of sites. To give some sense of the range of thought at present existing in alternative astroarchaeology, I'm going to consider three bodies of work. The first is that of Robin Heath, who's emerged as the most prominent and prolific recent figure in the field, with a series of books issued since the late 1990s and his own website. He is an engineer who's taught at various colleges of further education, and held an honorary research fellowship at Lampeter University of Wales. This is a reminder that the frontier between mainstream and alternative archaeoastronomy is not one between academic and non-academic. His heroes and mentors are Hawkins, Tom and Michelle. What he does is to restate their claim to have proved the existence of a worldwide ancient scientific wisdom of awe-inspiring magnitude. From the geometrical and mathematical properties of stone circles, especially Stonehenge, he has concluded that the builders use them to predict eclipses, calendar dates, tides and phases of the Moon. He's also asserted in partnership with John Michelle that Neolithic people accurately calculated the dimensions of the planet. He has made no attempt to integrate any of this information with the findings of archaeology. Instead the supporting evidence that he employs is taken from a personal reinterpretation of medieval Christian legends and of selected parts of the Bible and Apocrypha. Again, a post Christian spirituality. In his earlier work he dismissed archaeologists collectively as characterized by ignorance and prejudice. He has shown them some respect in his most substantial book, an extended defence of Alexander Tom published in 2007. Nonetheless, he still makes it clear that to reject Tom's ideas is to display not just a difference of scholarly opinion, but serious moral failings. He divides experts in British prehistory into villains, traitors, and collaborators. Ruggles is his chief case of both a villain and a traitor, and I am his main example of a collaborator. This highlights two of the problems for an archaeologist or historian in dealing with countercultural authors. Their books can't be found in most libraries, public or academic, or on interlibrary loan. The only sure way of obtaining them is to buy them, which involves doing a favour for somebody who is abusing you. Archaeologists who ignore writers like him get condemned generally and anonymously. Those who take the trouble of reading and engaging with their ideas then get attacked personally and directly. It's so much more temptingly easy just to ignore them, especially as their actual evidence consists of mathematical data, which most prehistorians cannot evaluate. Heath is, in my opinion, the most typical, as well as the most prominent of my three case studies. The other two in different ways buck the normal trend. One is a recent arrival on the scene, a computer programmer called Tom Flowers. He has actually set out to attack Alexander Tom by proving his calculations wrong with a book and a website. This enterprise, however, has been designed to demonstrate Flowers' own surveys of Stonehenge and other Neolithic sites to be superior. In particular, he's wished to establish his theory that the monuments concerned were designed to bring the sun and moon together to produce a baby son. He in turn has shown no real interest in the recent findings of archaeology. Instead he has announced that, on sending his conclusions to English Heritage, he received a polite acknowledgement, but it did not adopt his views. He has therefore condemned archaeologists in general as stuck in the past, even though English heritage is not a body of archaeologists, but of administrators. Here we see a further deterrent to engagement with alternative views, that the propagators disagree among themselves, whilst being equally aggressive. My last example is a different sort of exception to the rule. It is a lengthy study of the Neolithic monuments of the Boyne Valley, the most famous in Ireland, which appeared in 2006. The authors were Anthony Murphy and Richard Moore, a journalist and an artist from that district. In many ways it's absolutely typical of the genre of pop archaeoastronomy. Its inspiring figure is Tom, and it proposes, after his manner, a large number of alignments between the different monuments and the sun, moon, and stars. It is also rooted firmly in the Earth Mysteries tradition, drawing straight lines on the ground between the various sites, and finding a giant figure picked out in the landscape. Both are classic phenomena which Earth Mysteries researchers claim to have detected elsewhere, and the book likewise treats the ancient world as having a wisdom to teach the present. It also, like Heath, places an emphasis on medieval legends as supporting evidence for these claims. What is so distinctive about it is its tone. The authors have made every effort to understand archaeologists, to incorporate their findings, and to show their respect for them. They never, in fact, abuse any opponents, and their work is proportionately free of a religious and evangelical rhetoric. They admit that their arguments are speculative and offer them as a contribution to a general debate. Nothing quite like their work has, as far as I know, appeared in Britain. The difference is not a national one, because relations between archaeologists and popular astro archaeologists in Ireland seem traditionally to have been as embittered as those in Britain. It seems to be simply one of personality. It's time to conclude. I'd like to state firmly that my own position in these debates is one of strict neutrality. I lack any of the scientific qualifications needed to become a participant in them. What I can suggest, as a cultural historian, is what they tell us about the modern British, and perhaps even about the processes of history themselves. One such suggestion is that they provide powerful support for great personalities as motive forces in human development. Without the towering figure of Alexander Tom, neither academic nor popular interest in the field would have taken off as it did, and it may be that the Earth Mysteries would not have developed into a coherent movement at all. The same story reveals some interesting differences between approaches to data on the part of scientists and of scholars in the humanities. It throws into high relief the basic problem of how truth can be established in scholarship, and especially in the study of the remote past. To me, however, it is most revealing as a lesson in the power politics of knowledge, expressed here in the relationships between different kinds of professional scholar, between popular and academic culture, between secularism and Christianity in the modern age, and between mainstream society and counterculture. One of my own key arguments as a scholar is that academics should look more at the way in which their own perceptions are affected by those of the times and places in which they live. In this particular case, the interaction between professional and countercultural attitudes to the past seems to have been much more important than has generally been acknowledged. I do not believe that the neglect of the sky by most archaeologists would have been so marked or remained so, had an emphasis on it not been built into an ongoing attack upon their fundamental status as experts, and there I rest my case.