Romans may have destroyed Moray metal-working site | Hacker News Reader

Romans may have destroyed Moray metal-working site

bbc.com

42 pointsdiodorus30 comments

The (almost certainly invented by Tacitus) speech by Calgacus at the Battle of Mons Graupius is rather stirring e.g.:

"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace"

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

Although I am originally from Moray I now live in Fife and the hill behind our house is where Agricola's army is said to have camped on the way North after having crossed the Firth of Forth.

It may have also been torched by the workers before they fled to prevent it from falling into Roman hands.

It's my belief, iron and ironstone being high value, they'd have taken what they could with them, the inputs. Charcoal aside, the remains otherwise are more marginal value, you can do Iron in a mud brick hearth, there wouldn't have been a lot of immovable fixed infrastructure to take really. The charcoal is a pain to make, time consuming. Maybe they burned that to avoid the romans having access, but I tend to think the Romans did this, to deny re-use when the inevitable re-occupation came. They'd have lifted what they could, and destroyed the rest.

Not an archeologist. The best way to get good input is to post bad input and wait to be corrected!

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

>Not an archeologist. The best way to get good input is to post bad input and wait to be corrected!

This is so true. If you ask for help, people will ignore you. But... if you post the wrong answer--people will fall over themselves to correct you. It's like a hack for human behavior.

And actively harmful in implementation. It spreads bad information, confidently posted for others to trust and duplicate.

Bad information labelled with an appropriate confidence rating can be useful as a starting point to others. ("I'm not sure but this looks sort of like a rail spike nail, maybe start there?") But labelled as good, to others that can't label it themselves, it just degrades the average value of the other information and also the confidence in it too.

HN loves this "hack" and often tells others to use it but then unironically complains about the quality of answers on Stack Overflow and the overconfidence of Dunning Kruger

I feel like your comment only further proves the point I was making.

Well.. no archaeologist took the bait. The scots Roman ironfoundry mystery continues

This seems highly plausible. The Romans likely did similar things themselves, for instance burying and concealing several tons of iron nails and other goods before abandoning a fort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchtuthil#The_Inchtuthil_hoar...

> When it was excavated in the 1950s by Richmond, a large pit was found in the summer of 1960 containing 875,400 complete iron nails (Square shaft) ranging from 50–410 mm (2–16 in) plus another 28 (round shaft nails) weighing 7 tons, together with other iron objects, including cartwheel rims weighing a combined total weight of ten tonnes (Inchtuthil Nails by “Roddy Fraser”). The pit was elaborately concealed, and the nails and ironwork were almost certainly buried by the troops to deny them to the local tribes when they dismantled the fortress before they finally left.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Apart from roads, sanitation...

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Built the template for western and civilization which influenced most of the rest of the world. And spread it.

It's a movie reference, to Life of Brian.

Romanes eunt domus

This is a good example of why archeologists shouldn't be believed. They've extrapolated the universe from a piece of fairy cake here. They found : burned buildings and a pot inside another pot. There are an infinite number of explanations for those two findings.

You're saying that Romans destroying the mental works is just one possible explanation?

So are the archaeologists.

>Archaeologists suggest one possible explanation could be that it may have been the actions of Roman soldiers following their victory over Caledonians at the Battle of Mons Grapius around AD 83.

I think you’re reading journalists, not the actual archeologists.

They saw evidence and suggested a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

I personally have never read an archeologist state a conclusion they didn’t directly observe. Sometimes they’ll note loose threads for further study.

Scientific literature has gotten terrible about drawing conclusions from too few points and over reliance on flawed statistical analysis.

But archeology doesn’t even pretend from what I’ve seen in the past few years.

> I personally have never read an archeologist state a conclusion they didn’t directly observe.

Ritual. It's literally a running joke, and it's every. single. paper.

https://animalarchaeology.com/2018/10/09/what-is-old-is-new-...

Wengrow/Graeber speak to this at length in their recent book Dawn of Everything, from perspective of anthro/archaeology

How exactly is an archeologist ever to directly observe anything? Short of tardis tech, all they can ever do is pull logical conclusions form evidence. A worksite quickly burned and abandoned? During a time of strife with Roman armies? Valuable objects left untouched. It wasn't aliens or a dragon attack.

Archaeologists directly observe artifacts. For example, there's a class of artifact that have been called "storage jars" but there wasn't any evidence of what was "stored" in them. Some hypothesized that they were used as chamber pots, but they're too large to sit on. Recently, an archaeologist directly observed the eggs of a human fecal parasite inside of such a "storage jar," evidence in favor of the chamber pot hypothesis. They further hypothesize that these "storage jars" were housed in a wooden frame so that people could sit & do their business -- an ancient port-a-potty -- with little expectation that such a wooden structure would have survived the millenia. And, note the title "ceramic pot was probably a portable toilet."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/this-ancient-roman-c...

The criminal justice system works in the same way. Detectives look for evidence that a person was at the scene of a murder, and evidence linking the person to the murder weapon, and establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt even though no other living person directly observed the murder.

Yes but the "direct observations only" crowd, which includes various conspiracy theories, would have them only report on evidence without drawing any other statements. Some historians would have archeologists do only dig reports, leaving everything else to historians. Conspiracy nuts would have police only create evidence reports, leaving everything else to lay juries.

This is a boring, overplayed, anti-science trope. The uncertainty is even visible in the title: "Romans may have destroyed..." It's a headline to draw interest to the story about a dig. Journalists need a hook. Nobody clicks on "Archaeologists found a pot on Tuesday."

Mostly agree, but I would click the shit out of "Archaeologists found a pot on Tuesday." :)

Same here. There is something about the mundaness that piques your interest.

Calling something “anti science” is a boring overplayed trope by itself.

> This is a good example of why archeologists shouldn't be believed.

Sometimes, a spade is a spade. What I responded to isn't just a shallow dismissal of the article, it's a shallow dismissal of an entire field of study based on a malicious interpretation of an article's title. That's anti-science.

There is a nice book about this concept, called “Motel of the Mysteries”.

The idea is that a group of archaeologists find a derelict motel in the future and try to explain what the mundane items were used for. It’s hilarious.

I read this a long time ago, too! It's great.

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