| Summary: | Summary Because of a quarrying threat the carved rock surfaces at Greenland were recorded afresh in 1984 but the site fortunately still exists. On the two carved outcrops are many cup-marks (some with tails) and a variety of cups-with-rings, mostly with short tails. The site is the first which can be shown to have been carved in two distinct phases, far apart in time, and the first at which the carving (as opposed to the re-use) of some of the symbols can be approximately dated. The later petroglyphs were evidently done after the main outcrop was quarried, and the construction nearby of a timber-framed dun in the late Bronze Age provides an explanation for this damage. Other archaeological evidence supports this view which has important implications. (EWM) The Greenland carvings have been used to test the hypothesis that many cup-and-ring carvings were initially laid out using a very elementary 'equal width' geometry using a simple trammel and, further, that the diameters of such rings were usually measured in multiples of a unit of measurement approximately equal to the 'megalithic inch' of 0.816ins proposed by Alexander Thorn. Most of the rings from the Greenland site have shapes consistent with the geometrical hypothesis, and evidence for the proposed unit of measurement is obtained which is statistically significant at the 2%level. (AD)
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