151–160 of 199 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why you couldn't have a highly hierarchical society that also has a "in death we're all the same" philosophy when it comes to burial.
So this person is at the top of the social hierarchy, dresses, eats, lives better than everybody else, then their child dies and they shrug and throw the body away in a common grave?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts. As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuo…
Some years back an aunt and uncle owned a cottage in Devon (near Exeter) with 1649 carved into the wall by the front door. Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things jus…
We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks. I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things…
Like, "why are more people not building impractical fire hazards? It must be because people these days are incompetent" is a pretty weird take.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya
you can make a tiny battery with ancient-style materials. It’s essentially a vinegar (or lemon juice) galvanic cell using copper and iron inside a porous clay jar. People often call this the “Baghdad battery"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it. I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools. I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor…
just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian. definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy…
It is absurd to claim "hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian" and "had no hierarchy." We know that tribes in north west of the Americas, pre European contact, did not practice agriculture and had slaves. What evidence exists counter to this that supports your view? I assert it is literally impossible to make your assertion. Just because burial perhaps didn't differentiate or demonstrate a hierarchy, that doesn't support that the living didn't.
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on. At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be th…
How a society which is supposed to be of the hunters gatherers era raised such monuments and set up that site?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetl…
PPNA? KT? GT? ANE?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts. C…
Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions. The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists the…
Do you think recent findings about early human sites on other continents (Americas etc) change any of this, or does that still mostly fit with our understanding? My layman's knowledge is that the exact date of when people reached certain landmasses shifts around based on new evidence but I'm not sure if that's an important part of the timeline generally