Ancient Web: Jim Alison Drew a Great Circle Through Ancient Monuments

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

If you draw a line around a globe and keep adding ancient monuments to it, eventually you may suspect the monuments are trying to tell you something.

Visit Jim Alison's Great Circle essay

Jim Alison's A New Look at an Old Design: The Prehistoric Alignment of World Wonders is a thirteen-part personal Web essay centered on a proposed great circle passing through celebrated archaeological locations. The opening chapter names Easter Island, Nazca, Giza, Ollantaytambo, Tassili n'Ajjer, and other sites.

Alison uses latitude, longitude, angular distances, and maps to argue that their locations form an intentional prehistoric geometric system. The subject is the author's hypothesis, not an established archaeological discovery. A selected list of points fitting a circle does not demonstrate coordination among societies separated by centuries or continents.

Hyperlinks for a planet-sized theory

The construction is distinctive. The first chapter puts a numerical table of locations beside links to individual monuments. Later chapters move to the golden ratio, Nazca, Ollantaytambo, Angkor, Easter Island, sine waves, and Atlantis.

In part two, Alison discusses phi and pi and proposes relationships among the distances between Giza, Angkor Wat, and Nazca. A later section on Ollantaytambo continues turning geographical distances into triangles and numerical ratios.

The calculations are part of what makes the artifact interesting as an example of fringe-history publishing. The page does not merely make a vague mystical claim; it gives readers coordinates, diagrams, and enough numbers to inspect the author's choices. It also shows how a coherent-looking mathematical presentation can make selective comparisons feel much stronger than their evidentiary basis.

The essay has demonstrable early-Web roots. A separate paper dated December 24, 2000 refers readers to Alison's work on the great-circle idea. This is evidence of contemporary circulation of the concept, not independent verification that the hypothesis is true.

The pages preserve an older personal hosting address, multi-part navigation, direct image links, and the familiar confidence of someone publishing a very large idea without waiting for an academic publisher.

From a Web-history perspective, the curiosity is not whether hidden designers arranged the planet's wonders. It is that one person's theory could become a globe-spanning hypertext document with its own small ecosystem of related essays.

Read the original great-circle argument and the golden-section chapter.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.