goaten wrote:

> It _is_ difficult by any means, tape, pole, rod or
> rope. Imagine laying out 100 MY (272 ft
> thereabouts) on a specially prepared flat surface.
> For instance this could be an excavated channel
> previously leveled by water. The MR would be used,
> that's 40 rods, each meticulously machined (bad
> word) to 81.6 inches, checked against ?? which in
> turn would probably have been checked against ??
>
> In the field, if made out of wood, all rods would
> have to be checked daily. The ends of the rods
> would have to be perfect flat and at right angles
> and remain perfectly flat and at right angles. A
> little rain and frost and all the wooden rods
> would have to replaced.
>
> We wonder about the master rod and where that was
> kept. If it's function was only to duplicate rods
> then with continued use it too would have to be
> replaced.

>
> Back in the field 40 rods are laid end to end.
> There is a lot of adjusting going on. Some of the
> rod ends are lifted to remove dirt and then
> replaced. More adjusting. Someone looks down the
> line and notices the rods form a slight curve, and
> so an and so forth. I admit that all of these
> problems could have been overcome but what about
> the "standard" they worked with. How did they
> maintain a MR at 81.6 inches? The master rod which
> is continually used to duplicate rods eventually
> has to be replaced itself. Do we now have to
> contemplate a master, master rod?


In the mediaeval era, standards (usually made of metal) used to be kept in central places like palaces or guildhalls … but it’s difficult to imagine anything comparable in the kind of prehistoric context in which henges and megaliths were constructed …


> This is all crazy stuff


Many reasonable people might be moved to protest that it really does seem something out of a cross between Astérix and the Flintstones …


> and I think Thom realized
> that something was wrong, in fact I'm sure he did.
> Put simply, man made objects suffer from wear and
> tear, so much so that a "standard" cannot possibly
> be maintained.
>

As you’ll know, in mid-20th-century North America, they used (inter alia) Gunter’s chains; this site [www.orbitals.com] represents an attempt to reconstruct one: but it entails a massive amount of technology.

Hogben MM: 159 fig. 54 has a diagram that shows how to measure the width of a river using a convenient tree, a primitive protractor and a 30/60/90 triangle. On the (admittedly, somewhat tenuous) hypothesis that the MY, the MF and the Scandinavian Quantum are units representing each of the three sides of such a triangle, might a primitive form of triangulation used to set out these sites? Might the application of trigonometry account for the illusion that these site-surveyors were working with many standard rods? Could there perhaps have been just one standard in use at each site … made of stone, possibly, so that wear and use would be less of a problem? (Although, in that case, why have no such stone standards survived in the archaeological record? To say nothing of the fact that one would still have to account for the origin of such a standard … )

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