Thank you! It is very expensive, though. The mainstream one will be far more reasonable.
It sounds interesting - like the kind of thing I would read. Is the idea that the shape of Stonehenge encodes certain information (animal behaviour, astronomy etc) in order to preserve that information for the future?
If so, which things are you suggesting it encodes?
The fact that that one’s been batted around for about a hundred and sixty years without becoming mainstream is probably going to make your task considerably harder.
I really wish I could explain simply. I apologise for the vagueness. Stonehenge has to be considered in terms of the simple stone circle which it was for 500 years before the big guys (the sarsens) in the middle arrived. The circle is probably simply because knowledge is often stored in a cyclic form in non-literate cultures. Rows and other shapes also work. It is the sequence of stones that is critical, each individual.
The theory is all based around the most effective memory method known, usually referred to as the method of loci, or memory palaces. That method is attributed to the ancient Greeks and still used by contemporary memory champions. My research has shown that all non-literate cultures also use this method and it can be shown that it has been used in Australia for far longer than the age of monuments such as Stonehenge. Using physical locations for memory is a result of the human brain structure, as shown by the Nobel Prize (2014) winning medical research.
The information I am arguing is stored is all the practical stuff, including a great deal on which survival depends. I acknowledge there is a spiritual domain, but my focus is entirely on the way non-literate elders can memorise an entire field guide to the plants and animals - the Navajo have been shown to have a memorised classification of over 700 insects alone! Then navigation charts and extraordinary methods to cross oceans, deserts, through forests and even on moving, featureless ice. Complex genealogies, laws, trade negotiations, resource management, geology … the list goes on and on. My research question was (academically worded): how the hell do they remember so much stuff?
It is all to do with recognising song, dance, story, mythology and music as forms of mnemonic aids. There is a whole body of research on this called ‘primary orality’. I then looked for the physical indicators of the memory methods - landscape, features of performance spaces and handheld devices. There is a universal pattern. I am using some of these devices now and they are incredibly effective.
I then found those indicators in the landscape of monuments built by small scale oral cultures in the transition from mobile (not nomadic) hunter gatherers to small settled communities. Once you get individual wealth and a warrior class, my theory tends to break down. It is also when the monuments are abandoned. Increasingly restricted societies are a feature of early settlement as are seen widely in the Americas and Africa. That’s when the sarsens come into play at Stonehenge and the public space is created at Durrington Walls.
The resistance for the academic domain was because I could not explain with sufficient support in a paper. It took a book. Plus they were (rightly so) suspicious of someone from way outside the domain making such claims. The academic process does allow for such claims, but not overnight!
I’d be coy in many places, but that is why I like the Straight Dope so much. No need to here. How are you going about your research? At a university? Independent researcher?
How are you ‘advocating’?
But then the story of Jesus has been around for c.2000 years, so it’s actually a pretty recent idea. For some reason, when the Christians were giving them problems, the Romans never thought to claim that there was no such person as Jesus. Likely as they knew there had been.
Oh haha nothing as serious or involved as what you’ve accomplished. 
I’m just doing casual internet discussion/debate stuff.
I have ideas of writing a pop-level book about maybe, but that’s just a notion in the back of my head.
OT: Would such knowledge, if it existed, really have stopped them from claiming otherwise, had they believed it would serve their purpose? Feeding Christians to the lions was OK, but not touting lies? :dubious:
I suggest a new thread, in GD, would be more appropriate for discussing the topic of Jesus’s historical existence.
Gilles-Eric Seralini is still cranking about publications about alleged GMO-related harms, long after his original “groundbreaking” study was widely discredited in the scientific community, retracted by the journal it was published in (and later republished elsewhere, to the accompaniment of further criticism and catcalls).
So Seralini would amply qualify on the basis of what his colleagues in related fields overwhelmingly regard as crankery and poorly conducted research, yet he manages to retain some academic standing and continues to get published (albeit largely in low impact/open access journals).
Wow, Lynne. I’m ashamed of you for proselytizing your crazy views on the Dope. Why don’t you admit the truth about Stonehenge? It’s given by a guy with a real doctorate that I’m sure is more admired in his academic circles than yours is.
Jacques Benveniste was promoting homeopathy and was technically published in Nature but with a lot of caveats (much like Targ & Puthoff’s work with Uri Geller some years before). When push came to shove his methods were found severely wanting. He complained about the additional protocols but his reputation was trashed.
From the stories of how his lab was run, his credibility ruin was well earned.
Perhaps a liberal sprinkling of smilies might help this post, Lynne is new here, she might now know you’re joshing with her. 
She has a join date of 2003.
You may want to review the responses when very similar questions were asked in 2010 and 2015:
–Mark
Lionel Milgrom seems to fit the OP’s paradigm.
Milgrom was (apparently) a long-time respected researcher/lecturer in chemistry, specializing in porphyrins. He held a faculty position at Imperial College London before getting into homeopathy in a big way (he was convinced that homeopathic treatments helped his partner’s pneumonia, according to Wikipedia).
Subsequently Milgrom (to the eye-rolling and/or hilarity of his colleagues) began publishing incredibly esoteric articles attempting to explain homeopathy on the basis of “quantum field theory” or “quantum entanglement”, interspersed with attacks on skeptics who he termed “new fundamentalists”. His latest paper listed in PubMed is entitled “The vital force “reincarnated”: modeling entelechy as a quantized spinning gyroscopic metaphor for integrated medicine”, emphasizing the difficulty one has in dismissing garbage that is dressed up in such impenetrable verbiage.
[Hangs head in shame]. I shall withdraw my book immediately. It only went to the printers yesterday, so I should be able to stop it. Oh well, so much for eight years work.
P.S. Thank you, DrDeth, for worrying that I would take this seriously. Much appreciated. You are right, Exapno Mapcase, I’ve been on SD a long time and get it (most of the time).
The article I linked to quoted Ralph Holloway, who said Gould was a charlatan. Here’s a few quotes from Robert Trivers, one of the most influential evolutionary theorists of all time, who appears to agree with Holloway’s assessment:
Part of his problem with his Gaia hypotheses (maybe not the whole problem with it) was that some people saw it has having religious connotations, that the earth is LITERALLY a living organism. But Lovelock probably did go a bit too far in his book, and something that should have been no more than an observation became a ‘theory’.
FYI – Lynn Margulis, one of Lovelocks’ main ‘disciples’ visited my school, Caltech, from scripps to be one of 4 professors of an earth history class (it was a multi-disciplinary class taken by both geo and bio majors). The disdain that the geo professors held her in was palpable. I wrote a little 4-part story about an ‘adventure’ our class had many years ago: The Field Trip: A True Story (Chapter 1) – Graham Z.
Well, there was Isaac Newtonand all that alchemy crap.