A follow-up to The Orientation of Roman Camps and Forts. This is an application of the Binomial Distribution test that I’m using in my own work applied to the data from the original paper, which is why you may have the impression you’ve already read this recently. My analysis may not be correct, so I’m putting it up on iScience and submitting that to Carnival of Mathematics and Tangled Bank to see if people think the maths is wrong. I’m also putting it up on Revise and Dissent where it will get submitted to the History Carnival and Four Stone Hearth to see if it’s intelligible and sounds reasonable to Historians and Archaeologists.

Roman Camps and their Orientations reconsidered.

There is currently a debate in the pages of the Oxford Journal of Archaeology on the orientations of Roman camps and forts. Richardson (2005:514-426) argues that the orientation of these camps is non-random and relied on some form of astronomical observation. He presents data which he argues supports his case. Recently Peterson (2007:103-108) has argued this relies on a flawed use of the Chi-squared test. I accept Peterson’s findings that Chi-squared is not a useful method. However examining the camps as a binomial distribution would More >