Below the Surface: Archeological Finds from the Amsterdam Noord/Zuid Metro Line | Hacker News Reader

Below the Surface: Archeological Finds from the Amsterdam Noord/Zuid Metro Line

belowthesurface.amsterdam

100 pointsstefanvdw117 comments

My favourite station is Rokin, because it includes an amazing display of these artifacts (from Roman dishes to Nokia 3310s) in between the escalators that take you to the platform. It's incredible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/knolling/comments/e3e86r/at_rokin_m...

I love that this includes modern artifacts as well. The nineties mobile phone already looks archaeological by comparison to modern ones.

Brings back a range of memories. I was one of the archaeologists on the project near the Amsterdam central station, a dig site accessible through an airlock because it was inside of the "caisson" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering)) that was lowered into the old Amstel riverbed. It was the weirdest archaeological project I have participated in, by quite a wide margin, being inside a complex engineering project.

Also, after making a career switch from archaeology to software engineering, even weirder to see my former occupation and project dig site re-emerge here on HN

This is basically just a massive database of litter that documents what people threw in the canal over the centuries. It is interesting to see the materials change as you scroll from the older dates up to the present day.

There's an Ericsson GH388 phone I used in 90s!

IIRC it was my first mobile.

Never used Nokia though it had major market share those days.

I used a Nokia in the early 2000s. But my fondest memories are of my W810i (much “newer” than the GH388… by about 11 years ).

I notice most of the phones seem to be missing SIM cards = intentional disposal ? Or have they just come apart over time?

Yeah likely just thrown away.

My early phones were all Ericsson later Alcatel which had a nice AA battery powered one! That was in 2000-01. First camera phone I think was a Siemens.

What a decline for European brands!

Uitstekend!

Crazy to see how they just destroy historical artifacts for their agenda of building. We need to build less and preserve the past.

Wholly disagree here. The past has immense value, but, well, it's the past. Historical artefacts are only valuable through our cultural lense. I think I would always choose building the future over preserving the past.

All your stuff would be historical artifacts a century from now. Do you ever just throw anything away? You should consider preserving it instead, for the generations that come after you. How will they feel if they knew you just threw historical artifacts in the garbage bin?

That is to say, keeping anything historical has its limits. If we always keep everything historical, we will keep literally everything, and the planet will be quite full pretty quickly, with no place to build anything.

We should be careful to preserve truly historically relevant things. But most historical things are just old trash...

Any large scale project will usually generate similar artifacts. They're just not usually put on display for the public.

Doing rescue archaeology is a common way for archaeologists to make a living in-between more interesting projects.

the only reason they found all this stuff is because they had to dig deep to make this station, if they hadn't this stuff would just have stayed below ground because there was a whole city on top of this and it is not economically viable to just go dig for this stuff in the middle of the city.

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