Burned house horizon | Hacker News Reader

Burned house horizon

en.wikipedia.org

180 pointscurtis62 comments

An oddly interesting mystery. I could imagine a culture deciding that there is some worthy symbolic value in renewal by fire.

In Japan there is the Ise Grand Shrine which is torn down and rebuilt every 20 years since year 692. The design is unique, specified exactly and never changes so it is always both ancient and freshly new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine

Irish "travellers", related to Romany gypsies, still burned the caravan of someone who died, at least up to 25 years ago (when I was a kid living close to a halting site). Maybe someone should ask them why they do that.

They still do this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3613126/Travellers-b...

Clearly, this is what they did when they found a spider of sufficient size in their hut.

This idea is actually in the article:

> Fumigation: Another theory posits that the fires were used for sanitary reasons to smoke or fumigate a building, in order to get rid of pests, disease, insects, and/or witches. However, the evidence does not support this viewpoint. All of the structures within these settlements were completely burned and destroyed. Because the damage from the fire was almost total for the entire settlement, it would be illogical if fumigation was the only intent.

But if the problem was of general sanitation, there might be a tipping point where the offal and the flies and the fleas and the bed bugs got to be too much and they decided to burn it and start over.

The offal would also burn in the fire.

Many of the ideas people have brought up are mentioned and debunked for reasonable reasons in the article. The culture of TL;DR lives.

while I enjoy the spider meme I liked the last proposed idea that the culture treated it as the end of life for the house. perhaps it was tied to a certain number of generations having come and gone.

the question I have is, how much at risk did this put these people at, did it retard their ability to expand?

I have my own theory - artificial scarcity. They needed to keep their builders, potters and glass makers in business.

Yeah, they were probably already aware that real estate bubbles are dangerous for the economy.

Now on HGTV 'Flip or Flop: Neolithic'

So why not keep the house and just give what they would have payed directly to the builders, potters and glass makers?

They would probably pay much less because the builders, potters and glass makers time would not be taken up building, potting and glassmaking. And they wouldn't have had to to destroy their house.

Or, are you simply saying they just wanted a new house? Who else would they pay to make it for them?

The broken window fallacy is still not very widely understood. Expecting everybody to understand it 4-8,000 years ago may be a bit too much.

If you live in a small subsistence community with a barter economy or primitive trade, then it's a great deal more obvious that destroying capital just makes everybody poorer.

But we know potlatch really happened in North America in just those conditions.

Did those cultures have writing?

Remember proper fumigation would have no observable effect now other than maybe there seemed to be "too high" population density for a predictable untreated parasite load.

Even crazier look at the time intervals.

"Hey Ug, hold my beer and watch this, I'm gonna light the ceremonial fires now... sure are a lot of fleas this season but they're going up in smoke for sure. Ya know, Ug, when I was a wee lad my grannie who's been dead 30 winters now, had some crazy story about destroying the whole village when she was a young lass herself because the chief used too much wood and doing it in the dry season, but you know crazy old people, our generation invented sex and music and I'm not going to listen to old wives tales from a woman seen elves in her garden bout every other day ... gosh those are some really big flames, maybe using ten times as much wood as usual wasn't a good idea after all. Ug? Hey Ug! Why you runnin' from the fire, bro?"

"Did those cultures have writing?"

Well, it seems that they were just working on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%83rt%C4%83ria_tablets

Despite the fact the article suggests it's not the probably cause, this does make me abstractly wonder if there could be some sort of virtue in firing a clay house. In modern times we'd probably go with concrete if we were going to go that route, but ceramic is more available back then. Then again, getting good kiln temperatures from a neolithic fire could be a challenge. Although depending on how you constructed your clay house it might just be possible to fire it with a fire from the inside and retain enough heat to fire the house. Though possibly you're designing a house from the get-go that won't have adequate airflow.

Anyone familiar enough with ceramics to comment on it? (Bearing in mind I do fully expect this to be impractical on the grounds that nobody seems to do it. I'm more interested in the process of intellectually kicking the idea around than the probably-trivially-easy act of shooting it down.)

It seems like an uncontrolled and inefficient way to create ceramic building materials. If you wanted a ceramic house, it would be more sensible to make ceramic building materials on purpose in a kiln.

'Geltaftan':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_houses

Thank you! That is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to scare up. Didn't even occur to me that there might be a result for that sort of a search.

The article touches on this theory. They dismiss it because the fire appears to destroy the structure (as part of the firing process the walls crumble). It does provide them with a set of "bricks" to build the new home with however, so it is a partial answer.

According to the article, to get the temperatures high enough you have to add a whole bunch more wood to the fire, which is why they didn't think it was an accident.

I wonder in 3,000 years (after a loss of many records) if they'll be debating a "Burned Man Theory", and trying to figure out why some weirdos kept setting up and burning a man every year in the middle of nowhere.

If they do, the Burning Man crowds need better lessons in "Leave No Trace"

They might not have traces of the actual event. Rather, there will be mentions of it in articles and leftovers from social media. Pictures and stories of it.

It will likely be written in some weird version of English, and they won't really know for certain if they have the terms correct.

And this is just going by what we have now.

And then some occult kids somewhere will think it is pretty cool, and make up a story to go with it. And the cycle will continue. (or not, but it seems like a good ending).

One could argue that the Holocene extinction event is a pretty good exercise in "Leave No Trace".

I don't think there will be a complete loss of records, just incomplete ones. The writing will evolve, so it'll be hard to understand.

It's a western splinter of the Wicker Man cult, obviously.

My first thought was disease or outbreak prevention.

Yes. Makes sense to me, and probably the habit had been ritualistic. Hence a combination of fumigation and religion.

What kind of diseases would actually be prevented by burning down single towns though?

The halt of otherwise systemic and cyclical mold infestations? There are other documents from that time period which quite explicitly call for the burning of a domacile which was infested with mold.

This was prehistoric. How much knowledge did they actually have of diseases and their causes?

You'll still contract smallpox from your neighbour regardless of whether you burnt your village down or not.

The cool thing about religion is that the only thing that counts is that it "works".

Also some of the traditions in the old testament might be beneficial w.r.t. health for example. There is a lot about diet (pork meat, blood, milk, seafood). There are social rules about leprosy, children, elderly. It's not such a stretch to think that those rules filter the societies that survive. It's Darwinian but on the level of religious/spritual memes. Don't tell Dawkins. :-)

Ah but critical to note, the odds of surviving that smallpox are better in a freshly rebuilt mold free dry draftless house than some old dump of a place with leaky roof and crumbling drafty walls. Also theoretically if you're stuck at home trying to rebuild the village you can't be at the next village over trying to romance some farmers daughter while accidentally catching smallpox. So both the physical act of rebuilding and the result of rebuilding both increase odds of survival.

An interesting resource allocation problem is they may have liked building houses out of older hardwood but if they any random dude chop down and use wood they might very well exceed their carrying capacity so nobody build nothing unless we all split the "house wood" stand of trees equally, perhaps after we burn the village completely down.

Another interesting idea is you can burn the bark off trees for building if you're really careful, but if you're not careful, you'll burn the whole log, maybe take the whole village down. So annual barkless log house construction... 95% odds the village gets a new hut and the fleas get fumigated, 5% odds the whole village goes up in flames. Well sometimes ya gotta roll the dice, I guess.

They didn't have to know any details about diseases and their causes. It's enough if they noticed that people living in the village were getting sick all the time, while people living outside were not. Apparently 'something' had gotten into their village and it made sense to burn it down and build it up again.

And I guess it worked because burning their villages was a way to get rid of disease spreading pests and insects.

Driving out evil spirits is a perfectly workable theory in a culture lacking both the scientific method and microscopes.

Presumed witchcraft, bad harvests, a year in which half the goats died, something that came to a shaman could probably have been enough.

Rats, fleas, bubonic plague

In 4000 BC?

Other diseases can be carried by rats, fleas and other pests - e.g. typhus which was possibly the cause of the one of the earliest known epidemics in classical Athens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

This doesn't sound all that different than the tear-downs I see happening in 50-60 year old neighborhoods in Denver. (And presumably other cities.) The cheaply built post-WWII homes are wearing down, so developers bulldoze them and build something bigger and shinier. Stick-built suburban homes are probably looking at the same fate in a few decades, too. So if your building technology has a lifespan, and bulldozers do not exist, sure, why not burn and rebuild? It would provide better shelter than trying to sustain a structure that is falling apart.

YES. As an architect currently renovating a nightmare of a 100-year old building, I completely agree with you here. I feel like the article is missing a little bit the perspective of people making buildings.

The older and more broken a building gets, more often than not it's easier and quicker to rip everything out and build anew than to fix a problem. Contractors hate fixing other peoples' work and would rather rebuild pipe, conduit, masonry, etc, rather than fix it.

I can imagine that with Neolithic building technology, buildings had a limited lifecycle - cracking, mold/rot, etc, and eventually got to a point where each building would have to be demolished. Burning would probably make demolishing earlier - be the quickest way to turn everything into easily moveable ash and rubble so the lot could be cleared for building again.

See also: stubble burning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubble_burning)

And yet when I lived in Rome I was in a building that was built in 1499, yet the interior was very sleek and modern. Turns out if you build with good bones you can maintain the place without sacrificing your history.

Then again, this was Italy, where you can't dig a hole without an archaeological battalion making sure that a Roman didn't clip a toenail anywhere near the site you need to work.

Didn't find it in the article but is "scorched earth" a possible reason? I am guessing not as the article would have said so. And there were not large organized armies during that time...

That's mentioned under the "Theories" section, #3 Aggression. It says it's unlikely because they haven't found burned remains inside the houses, or nearby remains that show signs of a violent death.

That's different. I saw the "Aggression" paragraph. That implies burning happening during the battle with victims in the buildings?

"Scorched Earth" means burning buildings, destroying crops, covering up wells ahead of time to deny invaders those facilities. Then presumably fleeing into the woods or mountains...

It seems "scorched earth" can have two closely related definitions:

"A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy that targets anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area. [...] The practice can be carried out by the military in enemy territory, or in its own home territory."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth

Still though, the "Aggression" paragraph seems to imply that researchers believe that war was not common in these societies.

I thought about that too. The people around Carpathian Mountains had a habit of playing hide-n-seek with invaders all the time, it's too tempting to think that they somehow haven't learned to do this just recently. But then there was this Kurgan culture invasion that was very prominent, with clear signs of its occurrence (ending the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture, BTW), whereas the house burning were a recurring event long before that with no clues of a possible conflict. And it's also unlikely that after fleeing from an invasion they would return to the same place and just continuing their peaceful life, and this whole process happening over and over without mistakes.

Doesn't look likely. They were a peaceful culture. There is little evidence of them ever fighting on a larger scale. Until a warlike Proto-Indo-European culture invaded and ended theirs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture#De...

Just to add to the discussion, there is a mythical practice in my part of the world called lapot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapot.

As far as I know, the existence was never confirmed. But maybe the purpose is the same?

"In some places corn mush was put on the head of the victim to make it seem as if the corn, not the family, was the killer."

Simpler times..

In this case, "horizon" is used in the archaeological sense of "a level of an excavated site representing a particular period."

Wait, no one else here does this?

Yes, but with JavaScript frameworks every year or so

Perhaps they had a primitive insurance system and an easy claims process. /jk

It isn't easy to look at a civilization from so far away and determine why they did things. But in a primitive society, burning might be the easiest method of demolition.

In Romania it's well known that we used to burn down our crops and poison the wells before the Turks or Ottomans would come.

About 10 years ago I was told that Detroit MI has/had a similar "tradition" around Halloween.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Night

The final theory in the article, #7: "Symbolic end of house" makes the most sense to me based on the refutations listed for the other theories...

Obviously dragons.

Maybe they crave light so badly during solar eclipses that they burn their entire settlements just for the light?

For those unfamiliar: Nightfall

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