Ancient culture torched its own homes every 60 years
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
So what's that got to do with Scotland? Well, Scots myths claim an origin in Scythia of all places which is pretty much in the area covered by the map in this article!
I wonder if you could pull this off in the modern world. It would be amazing to see sheer walls of granite, completely fused together as one solid mass.
>The expert consensus explains vitrified forts as the product of deliberate destruction either following the capture of the site by an enemy force or by the occupants at the end of its active life as an act of ritual closure.[6] The process has no chronological significance and is found during both Iron Age and early medieval forts in Scotland.
The only way I can imagine is building a clay/mud oven around the entire wall and then having people pump massive bellows for an entire day.
Allot of times a local mystery hasn’t involved making the connections that a seasoned traveler might simply notice
"Away in the distance eastward they could now see a line of hills. The highest of them was at the right of the line and a little separated from the others. It had a conical top, slightly flattened at the summit."
Of course, the geography doesn't line up what with Rivendell being in Switzerland ;-)
I'd be curious if any of the partially vitrified stones are more commonly present on the windward side of the fort, if there are prevailing winds.
An advantage of this approach is that the craftsmanship necessary to build these structures is preserved. Unlike the stories you hear about in Western culture where preservationists have to reconstruct long forgotten techniques.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
But not all Japanese buildings are like this.
No.
The new tools and tech were bound to succeed in a culture that valued reductions in time and labor costs. But there's nothing inevitable about such a culture, and it seems perfectly possible for there to be others that would have ranked the new tools and techniques inferior to the old ones for a variety of reasons.
Imagine a scenario where some people's hand farm, but their traditional trade partners elected to buy into the globalist system: there's simply no way for them to compete against industries of scale. So they're disintegrated from their neighbors and can't rely upon them for trade. And if you look at the record, there is evidence of widespread trade networks from people's dwelling in South/Central America to the North American East. If we take Diamond's word for it, that's a considerable disruption due to the sort of intrinsic constraints he proposed (poor progenitor species for agriculture/beasts of burden) that may present if extremely strict conservativism is abided.
Most of it is just really utilitarian and miserable.
And I’m a person that lives old buildings and their methods!
But there’s also lots of great modern architecture that will survive the test of time. The Calatrava train station in NYC for example. Most public transit stations are unremarkable but that one is amazing.
We still build great things. And crap too. But we always have.
But yeah you’re probably right that in the early 20th century you saw a bit more craftsmanship in vernacular architecture. We had a lot of guys over from the old world with those skills that worked for cheap.
Also - compare a building from the 19th cent. To earlier 20th. Those same building you say are intricate are not nearly as much as just decades earlier. Carpenters had access to a lot of new tech starting in the late 1800’s.
Others, like the Nara Todaiji temple, are very old structures and preserved as best as possible, being repaired and rebuilt only when necessary eg. due to fire or structural damage.
The practice of frequently renovating or rebuilding residential houses is quite unrelated, and more of a postwar trend.
Since the buildings are simple to build, it's plausable.
The Japanese don't remain attached to their buildings, usually because their buildings have been historically likely to be destroyed by earthquake, typhoon, fire, or invasion. In more recent years, yeah -- houses a few decades old will be knocked down to make way for new developments and no one bats an eyelash, but it's because Japanese culture sort of respects the ephemerality of all things, especially manmade things -- one way or another, any given building is going to fall on a timespan of 30-60 years.
I feel that this is the likely reason. There might have been a common sort of bug or mold or other slow-acting form of infestation which they routinely got rid of by “resetting” the building by burning and rebuilding.
It is believed to ward off evil spirits. Is some sense, it is true, as the smoke has antiseptic and repellant properties - especially from plants such as woodworm.
Stands to reason that any culture which smokes food to preserve it might try fumigating with it
If a fungus sets into wood, and smoke treatment is done after the fact, the smoke won’t be able to penetrate deep enough to completely eradicate something that’s well established.
Unless the birthrates were higher. If people gave birth to litters of fifty of which all but a few were expected to die, the average lifespan would be in the single digits.
I suspect it was exceptional if a woman bore more than 6 children, although obviously some women would have more than ten. I believe the baby boomer generation had large families due to excellent modern medical care post WW2.
Longer average contemporary lifespan in the west has a lot to do with infant/child mortality.
Also I doubt antifungal properties are needed if temperatures in use can hit 60-80+ C. The spores might survive but even in weekly cycle there is unlikely to be persistent growth that survive.
Others just bought land from a neighbour, and paid them over a few years. And of course, even into the early 80s, there were still places in Canada where you could go, stake (fence) and work land in for 5 years, and it was then yours.
> saved, bought land, and slowly built their house.
That's what I'm trying to do now. It seems like there is opposition of some kind every step of the way. For example, it isn't uncommon to have a time limit on your building permit. So you can't just slowly build. And you can easily end up buying land that you're not allowed to build on at all. And I'm not just talking about zoning.
But bear in mind, even building codes were entirely missing, or very lax, especially in rural areas, 70 years ago.
That's not exactly a modern building technique. Ancient Mesopotamian wall inscriptions sometimes brag about how the bricks in the wall have been baked. (Making for a higher-quality wall; presumably sun-dried clay was still in use for non-prestige projects.)
Yes, obviously. As I just mentioned, this is a technique that dates back several thousand years.
https://daily.jstor.org/burned-house-mystery-why-did-this-an...
Adobe techniques, found in many different parts of the world, get along just fine without baking the clay walls, and the results can last for hundreds of years.
That said, I had an interesting conversation a couple of years ago with the head of a local (Santa Fe) company that specializes in historic adobe repair and restoration. They were called in to look at a monastery (either in the Arabic world or somewhere in S. America - I don't recall) which had just been "burned to the ground" in a fire. The walls were still standing even if the wooden roof beams, doors and windows were all done. The monks were worried about the structural integrity of the walls, but this guy assured them, given the now-obviously high-fired nature of the surface of the walls, that if anything the building was likely now stronger than ever.
Clay walls of cities and forts, where invaders are trying to break them, and rip them down?
Or Rayen, in Iran: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Rayen_Ca...
Even if they did this for ritual reasons, how would this practice even get started? I can’t imagine cutting down 250 trees worth of firewood for my 2 story home, even with modern equipment. That is an enormous amount of work and they were doing it without chainsaws.
To build the barn on our property, my great grandfather fell trees, cut planks, and assembled it without power or gas tools. One tree made up the entire floor, loft, and feed bunk walls (~8000 sq.ft.) of 2"x12" lumber. He moved that tree roughly 3 miles by himself (with mules). There are tens of thousands of board feet of lumber making up this barn.
What I'm getting at is that this amount of work is just unbelievable. I would never even think of trying it, and he did it in two months. By himself.
So. Take the fact that they had no choice, and it was all they knew, it doesn't seem surprising. Modern life really is much, much easier than it used to be.
I wonder if there was a good body of common knowledge about how to work without injuring yourself. That would have been important given the absence of advanced medicine.
Not wanting to be insensitive, but was your grandfather an outcast; no relatives or friends that would help?
It’s still possible to see it, just not as common. A lot of folks in the west go hydraulic all the way. Once you do, even picking up a shovel feels like you screwed up somewhere hah.
Source: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
I wonder what the archeological data looks like, 6 burned down houses and a very active imagination?
Bankoff and Winter are not the only researchers who committed arson in the name of science. In 2018, a team of Ukrainian and British archeologists burned down not one but two historically accurate structures.
Still, the results were nearly identical. The walls of both buildings were left intact, as were various clay pots and figurines the researchers had placed inside them. What’s more, neither fire managed to spread, indicating that the practice was safe and controllable.
There's no real suggestion that all the houses were all burned all at the same time, just that all the houses were regularly burnt out, with suggested reasons:
* burning houses of dead people,
* burning to strengthen clay walls
I looked for and didn't see "burning to clear out bugs and nasties in thatchwork | organic woven walls, etc".
Once a generation "maintainance" isn't a bad theory - drop the roof, replaster the walls with wet clay pushed into cracks and washout sections, new walls for new rooms, etc. and then torch to cleanse and 'fire' the clay.
They also have strict construction laws about blocking your neighbour's sunlight.
Apparently in Florida it's very hard/expensive to get home insurance too, because of frequent termite, tornado, flood, humidity damage. So Nature might be doing the same there.
There are still sparse farm lands everywhere but a lot of those turning into apartments and car parks recent years. Abandoned houses are converting too.
This was from story where young Julius Caesar defeated such war party, and instead of massacring all of them spared them and IIRC made them their vassals. I mean 4th official Swiss language is still raeto-romansch, with origins in Roman empire just south of them and whole current Suisse was a Roman colony back then if that's the right term.
http://www.whitehole.net/storyPages/files/misc/Nightfall.pdf
As a home owner, I have a number of theories about why someone would burn down their own property. Obviously the archaeological record would not provide evidence of the Cucuteni-Trypillia standing a short distance away, cackling with wild glee as the flames danced in their eyes.
Aren’t we rebuilding most houses every 60 years in Europe and USA?
At least around here in Bulgaria, there is no such thing as developers building entire neighborhoods as seen in the US movies.
Or, more seriously, any other infectious and/or parasitic problem that you want to get rid of.