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key edits to Archaeoastronomy article

fringe balance 3 online since 15:23 March 31, following 3 deletions by Alun and 3 restores by me. First version posted online at 23:11 March 30

fringe balance 2b everything in section after footnote 108 was erased by Alun Salt at 20:27 March 24 with synopsis rv and deletion of pre-Clovis material from Fringe Archaeoastronomy as it's not Archaeoastronomy. See talk on Precursors and Fringe Archaeoastronomy

fringe balance 2a everything in section after footnote 106 new by Scott Monahan at 21:59 March 22 with synopsis add perspective and balance, what is fringe vs. mainstream, Smithsonian archaeologist Stanford on how brethren can chill novel investigations, TIME Magazine on straightjacket of archaeological dogma, first sentence reworked by Steve McCluskey within half and hour as alternate definition to include pseudoarchaeology, peer review and journals as internal WP topical links

fringe balance 1 everything in section after paragraph ending in the word claims was erased by Steve McCluskey at 20:11 on March 21 with synopsis rv off topic discussion then edit skirmish ending at 20:49 with Steve McCluskey synopsis OK, Fell is out

Reisenauer included in history as it has appeared since 20:20 March 24 with minor repairs, first added by Scott Monahan at 18:12 March 23 with synopsis contextual clarification Reisenauer's account of the Egyptian metrology debate which influenced UK astronomers to write about the Great Pyramid years before Lockyer, otherwise cited as UK's first a.a.

History open

In 1777, two hundred years before Michell wrote the above, there were no archaeoastronomers and there were no archaeologists, but there were astronomers and antiquarians.

The Great Pyramid of Giza (a.k.a. Kheops or Khufu) near Cairo, Egypt, constructed ~2570 BC, world's tallest building until 1300 CE.

And way back in 1646 when Oxford professor of astronomy John Greaves published on his Egyptian pyramid surveys, no one imagined Great Britain would wrestle over the Great Pyramid two centuries later in a fractious, nationalistic debate enduring decades. The French metric system was threatening to replace familiar English measures in the late 1800's. So when Scotland's Astronomer Royal Charles Piazzi Smyth surveyed the Great Pyramid and determined the British inch to be all but identical to the pyramid inch, traditional Britain seemed relieved and vindicated. Yet the belief by Piazzi Smyth and others that this measurement was decreed by God shocked science into a reformation of sorts. Astronomer Richard Anthony Proctor, a prolific author and international lecturer, blasted Piazzi Smyth's thesis in his 1883 book The Great Pyramid: Observatory, Tomb and Temple. Proctor quoted from a commentary on Plato's Timaeus:

For we learn from Proclus that the pyramids of Egypt (which, according to Diodorus, had existed 3,600 years before his history was written, about 8 B.C.) terminated above in a platform, from which priests made their celestial observations.

Astronomy had matured and was on the verge of diversifying. Great Britain's metrology debate was a catalyst for novel scientific specialties as the antiquarian age was drawing to a close.

  1. Reisenauer, E.M. 2003
  2. Proctor, R.A. 1883