"The test of whether a line containing stones is prehistoric, in the sense we would use it, is whether it contains a 'significant stellar alignment'. The absolute proof would be a photograph of that alignment happening."
The sun rising in a notch, or an alignment on a sacred hill, I like those and am more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in the Chance/Deliberate assessment, since there's only one notch or only one Sacred Hill, so the term Likely seems a very appropriate one to use.
But purely stellar, non-landform related alignments, they're different, as there's always an irritating voice in the back of my mind saying how many stars are there, how many do we think might have been thought significant (and how would we know) and how accurate must the alignment be to qualify as possibly deliberate. Sometimes, it says take the number of possibly significant stars and plot for each one it's positions on each of the possibly significant days of the year, add a 5% margin of error, and there's not a spot in the sky that you could regard as insignificant.
The only way round this, it seems to me, is boring statistical analysis to see if there's a locational or monument class tendency to a particular alignment. I don't see how a photograph of a single particular alignment happening gets us any further forward than a photograph of my garden fence....
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