Penny S may be thinking of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill: an essay on myth and the frame of time", which (namedrop) was recommended to me by Paul Feyerabend and (brag) I got cheap from the Library of Science Book Club in the mid-70s. It interprets a bunch of ancient myths as coded descriptions of planetary movements, including the precession of the earth's axis. A Neolithic or Bronze Age astronomer couldn't have discovered the Einstein precession of Mercury's orbit, though.