Iberian Citadel of Calafell, Iron Age Village | Hacker News Reader

Iberian Citadel of Calafell, Iron Age Village

atlasobscura.com

For folks who wonder how life would have been in those times, or just romanticize transporting to some time in history, I would highly recommend The Source by James A Michener. It covers thousands of years through multiple fictional stories across time but located in a fictitious town in Israel. There's "paganism", fun engineering challenges solved, the crusades, rise of islam, famine, plagues etc. Highly rated book that I love.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12657.The_Source

Just want to jump in and show some appreciation for Michener’s historical fictions. The Source is great, and Hawaii is one of my all time favorite books.

Had read it, IIRC. He has written a few others too. Don't remember the names. The South Pacific may be one.

Worth mentioning the obvious: Herculaneum is a tiny village close to Naples buried by the same Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompei.

What makes it interesting is that it is much better preserved than Pompei (although it is smaller).

Fun fact: a big part of the restoration funding in Herculaneum came from David Packard, the "P" in HP computers.

I enjoyed visiting Herculaneum more than Pompei as it’s so much more complete. The added bonuses are how few people are there, how compact it is and how great the food is in surrounding streets.

We ate pizza in what may or may not have been someone’s front room while the chef argued with a neighbour and a car was stolen off the street in front of us. Very intense, very inexpensive and an excellent day out.

Visited this one in Sweden last summer: https://www.eketorpsborg.se/eketorp-fort/ Not everything was available/open due to Covid-19. But very interesting place from early Scandinavian iron age. (300 AD).

Another really neat one is Ötzi-Dorf[1] in Austria, a recreation of an ancient village modeled after the items and equipment found on the body of Otzi the Iceman. Very cool to walk around.

[1]https://www.oetzi-dorf.at/gb/

Another fun one is Jamtli [1] (Jämtlands läns folkhistoriska museet) in Östersund, which holds a museum and about ten acres of grounds with historical reconstructions of Swedish homes, farms, and businesses from roughly the 18th c. to the present day. Since 1986, actors have moved into the historical buildings every summer and recreated how people lived, worked and spoke in the past. [2] It's similar to colonial Williamsburg in the US but not focused on one particular point in time -- great fun!

1. https://jamtli.com 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamtli

I lived near Calafell for many years. I visited this site a few times, including once as part of a school trip. It does a good job at making what you have read in a textbook come to life, even for an area where ancient ruins are common. The article mentions Tarragona. Definitely visit Tarragona if you want to see very well conserved and documented ruins of a large Roman city.

> Red lines can be seen painted on the walls in the reconstructed village: These lines mark the line between the original ancient structures and the parts that have been rebuilt.

The red lines are pretty low on some of those tall walls. How do they know how high to reconstruct the wall? An educated guess, or is there some other evidence to point to how tall they were?

I don't have knowledge of this particular reconstruction, but it depends. Stone walls can often be reconstructed directly by taking a designated section of rubble and rebuilding the wall to see how high it is. Some walls in the original site may also have retained their original height depending on construction, environment, materials, etc. Everything else is about constraining the range of possibilities based on evidence. It takes a certain base width to support x height in the local soil, the wall had some human purpose and probably wasn't overly tall for that (height = $$$), etc.

All of this is to say that reconstructions are largely a series of educated guesses in most cases. That's generally fine as the goal isn't to be perfectly accurate, but instead to give tourists an engaging historical experience.

How can it be experienced authentically without the stink of human and animal waste flowing in the streets? Without the dread of disease hanging in the air. Without the threat of attack by the "foreigners" in the next valley.

> Experience this Iron Age village the way that its original residents would have.

Wow, I would hate the dirty clothes, bad health care and being away from my phone.

But seriously, I really enjoy these historical re-creations, maybe I am in a minority.

I always like some good full restorations / recreations. Traveling in Europe right or wrong I got the impression that there were few of those than in the US (but that might just be anecdotal random chance).

Granted, I did enjoy going to a concert at the theater at Orange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Theatre_of_Orange

Sometimes you don't need much restoration at all:

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

Edit: or this one:

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

but certainly I would love some furniture was added to some:

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

The Roman Theatre of Mérida (15 BC) is another example, where an annual classic festival has been held since 1933: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Theatre_(M%C3%A9rida)

Skara Brae, which is 5000 years old, does have buildings and even furniture in a remarkable state of preservation:

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

I've visited it and found it very worthwhile, but one needs to remember that at the same time they were building the pyramids in Egypt.

Different kinds of buildings though - I've been into one of the pyramids at Ghiza (Khafre's) and it actually doesn't look that interesting. I find the buildings at Skara Brae interesting because they are more human scale (beds and other furniture) and were where people actually lived for many hundreds of years - quite a bit before the pyramids at Giza at least.

Skara Brae was occupied as early as 3180 BC. Egyptians didn't finish the first pyramids until ~2600 BC.

It is truly a wonder - especially given the different circumstances than a fertile river valley.

Of course 2600 BCE is about half way between the early Pre-dynastic period and the end of the Ptolemeic period. And only about a third of the way to present day.

Egypt is mind bogglingly long lived.

I don't think you really need to compare / remember that... we're talking history here, not some sort of building scorecard.

Perhaps I can share a different perspective. I like unrestored ruins. I perceive a restoration as admixture of modern techniques and fresh touch onto an old and genuine core, and a recreation as a modern construction made to look old. When I explore those without having noticed or been forewarned about their true origins I feel cheated. When I do notice or someone tells me they really are new, I still feel they are inauthentic.

I suppose I expect to see not just how people lived in the past, but also to see the effect that time has had on what they made. I like looking at a fragment of a wall and contemplate the amount of time that separates me from the folks who put it up. Knowledge that the wall was built in my lifetime just completely ruins it for me (no pun intended).

That said, I did see some great recreations and I learnt much more about the past from them than I had from ruins. Some folks do impressive amount of research about what life used to be like and recreations are probably the best way for them to share what they learnt.

Agreed. The 'reconstruction' at Knossos on Crete[1] is a tragedy. Reinforced concrete everywhere, truncated walls capped with cement and an entirely invented upper storey.

The reconstructed fascia on the Neolithic burial mound at Newgrange in Ireland[2] is almost as bad: "a bit brutal, a bit overdone, kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age".

In contrast, the slowly-eroding, uninterpreted mud-brick Khorezm fortressess in the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan are highly evocative. The scale of the defensive fortresses tell you so much about the wealth and organization of the clans who built them. They stand magnificently alone in the desert. There's no interpretive centre, no gift shop. You'll have an entire fortress to yourself, where you can spend hours picking through millions of ancient potsherds.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knossos_(modern_history)

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khorezm_fortresses

History never felt more alive than when I was walking through the USS Bowfin.

But you would love having lots of children to play with, everybody is young, lots of food in front of the Mediterranean sea when it was not polluted nor crowded.

As an adult you would have lots of sex and live would be an adventure every day.

I doubt the adventure part. Couldn't travel very far back in those days. Also most definitely a decent amount of old people.

Not quickly by land, but you could travel far enough by sea.

how/why lots of sex?

Not saying this article qualifies, but I hope everybody keeps in mind that pop sci reporting on pre-historic finds and archaeology is particularly bad in a lot of cases. We attach a lot of romanticism and supposition to scant data about our forbears, and that's reflected in the reporting.

Luckily the research papers behind the articles are always very readable—especially in archaeology—and very easily accessed through libgen or email.

Researchers also use Twitter more and more, it’s not difficult to just skip the reporting entirely for the source in some areas!

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