h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There certainly has been an historical consciousness in Ancient Europe. I think specifically of Herodotus and Pliny and, to a lesser extent, Thucydides. But they went about documenting what was visible and recording stories, not systematically excavating anything. And when you consider that Rome, even at its greatest glory, was an agrarian society whose principal power source was human muscle, it's not surprising that they didn't divert a lot of that energy into archaeology. Even today the grunt work on most excavations is done by students and often they pay for the privilege of sweating in the dirt. Public funding is usually tight as there are generally more immediate concerns.

Yes, that's pretty much what I said in my first post. People learned about the past from texts rather than excavations. Quite a bit of excavation is privately funded now (by those who want to develop the land), in the UK at least.

Wasn't most excavation in the 17th and 18th century, not only privately funded but privately motivated?
I.e. it was far more about grave robbing and treasure hunting than any kind of scientific discovery or venture.

If you visit Pompei for example you will see the bare bones of what was actually there as the original digs back in the late 18th century were at the expense of the Duke(King?) of Naples as he ripped the classical statues and treasures out to decorate his palaces with. Many of them can still be seen in the National museum in Naples as they have now been recovered. Heaven knows how much was destroyed in the process.

The history of 'archaeology' in Egypt is also a rather tawdry tale until you get to the late nineteenth century at the earliest.

Sadly scientific method to archaeology was not applied to any significant extent that I'm aware of until then.

Well, I guess greed and possessiveness is a fairly basic human motivation.
If we can get the discipline of chemistry from alchemy and the search for eternal youth and buckets of gold then I guess we can't complain overly that archeology has a similar grounding.

And to be fair I suppose there plenty of people alive today with more on their minds than wondering exactly how old those ruins are and who used to live there. Whether that be due to the need to find food and water or just where the next DVD machine and score are coming from.

But I do agree that the 19th century on has seen a massive change in peoples lives so that an argument could well be made that this has put emphasis on the idea that the world is not a static place.

Oh yes, I think the growing comfort we enjoy in the western world has very much contributed to a differing perspective on the world around us.

Yes, tolerance of, and a willingness to understand, others is perhaps the most significant change in our behaviors now that we are comfortable enough to explore those possibilities. It could be argued however that this new found tolerance may be our undoing - we do have a limited number of cheeks we can turn after all.



The mention of the fountain of youth brings to mind some further thought on the exploration and discovery of ancient treasures. I'd like to learn more about the date or age of certain myths of magic swords, magic lanterns and mysterious miracle working arks.

Stories of these magic but lost treasures seem to be extant in many cultures. I suspect the idea that something wondrous has been hidden away and awaiting discovery by an adventurer is a very ancient theme (meme?).

There also seems to be a consistent theme of Giants who lived in the past. This largely due perhaps to the impression made by ancient ruins upon wandering tribes of less technologically advanced hunter-gatherers. No doubt, they often found 'useful' and, by their standards, 'miraculous' devices in the ruins.


~jwf~

the magic sword/armour thing I would guess has several strands feeding in to it. Not least of which is that of an explanation of things unknown to the people of the time.

Bearing in mind, of course, that in european society the blacksmith was a quasi magical figure in themselves (apparently in, for example, many Indian cultures the blacksmith was really nothing special.)

The fact that some swords held a particularly good edge or that certain armour was particularly good at resisting blows couldn't be understood in terms of the chemical makeup of the steel used since they did not have the knowledge. But to explain it as blessed or magical would be perfectly feasible in light of the general culture.

And of course it explains the cursed items too. Helping to explain why King Glod's sword was able to cut straight through Sir Waffles breastplate.

The biblical ark of the covenant is one of the older references to
lost magical power. Probably too mixed up in religion to be a fit
subject, but I wonder if there are any earlier mythic treasures.

Arthur's Excaliber myth likely dates from the Crusades era, the
result of newfound iron working technologies picked up in Byzantium.
The name is popular reworking of the Latin 'ex calibre' referring to
the new foundry methods.

King Solomon's mines is quite an old story, possibly the prototype
'buried treasure' legend.

But Aladdin's magic lamp is probably fairly ancient as well. And I seem
to recall a 'magic rope' that perhaps became the basis of the old Indian
rope trick.



Meanwhile, new digs keep finding new oddities and delights.
This from today's news:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39399336/ns/technology_and_science-science/


~jwf~

And it seems new discoveries are made everyday:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130207259


~jwf~

Look what happens when you send a bunch of irresponsible and not-to-be-trusted students into an empty field so as to learn to use proper equipment in a place they can't damage anything...

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/articles/monumental-discovery.html

Cardiff, eh?
Capt Jack and the Torchwood team spring to mind.
Maybe it's a rift generator.

Sorry, don't mean to be silly. I really do appreciate
learning about this new discovery. It's just that from
way over here, a 'team' of amateur archeologists is hard
to distinguish from the Torchwood gang. And, god bless 'em,
I do believe their discovery is significant. I have only
recently come to appreciate the scale of the Roman legions
and the logistical and technological support they required.

Hollywood only ever shows the marching and the swords and
arrows and catapults. It never explains where they slept or
how they got fed or where they made their weapons. Granaries
and warehouses and foundries and armories and loading docks
only look good in films when they're on fire.


~jwf~

>Sorry, don't mean to be silly.<

Ooh, don't apologise, I love a bit of silliness


I just love the irony of that story. They were put in a field where presumably they could learn to use the equipment without trashing the classical archeological record and lo - they make possibly one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the UK of recent times

Show's what us more senior academics know huh?

Been away for a week. I spent a bit of time tramping around this bit of ancient ruins: http://www.takemytrip.com/images/448x_can_DSC03329_adj.jpg

Edited entry here: A3176129


Yep. Almost a century old.

"...the CPR town planners seemed to have forgotten the inevitable
and made no provision for a cemetery in Bankhead."

That's no way to run a railroad.


Excellent entry!
And now I have a hankering for some rhubarb.

~jwf~

don't tell anybody (removing material from a National Park, and all), but a few years ago I slipped a few Bankhead rhubarb seeds into my pocket and now I have it in my garden.

I wonder what I did a few days ago when I was here : http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/bc/kootenay/natcul/natcul32.aspx

"Mineral claims... were gradually phased out due to a growing
awareness by the Parks Branch that mining activities were
incompatible with the role of parks as scenic areas and
protected landscapes."

I'm sure that means your landscapes are as protected as your
portraits and your abstracts.


~jwf~

"1) A lot is made of early archeology of the 19th century (I think that's when it really began in the UK anyway?). But people must have been digging stuff out the ground before that! What did they make of it? What did they think of Roman broaches and coins? Say people of the dark ages or medieval ages for example. I'd guess the angles/saxons/jutes had a different idea of the Romans to the Tudors. Or any other period."

Depressingly, up until the enlightenment there wasn't much respect for ancient ruins or monuments. They were frequently raided for building materials (the reason the Colloseum is half ruined is because the Romans kept taking parts of it for such building, it was only the Catholic church protecting it as a place of Christian martyrdom that means most of it is still there) and buried "archaeological" treasures would just have been dug up and sold on, or melted-down if made of precious metals. The totality of Christianity in Western civilisation at the time meant that the only ancient items treated with reverence were religious relics (many of which were fake). The idea that anything from the past, distant or otherwise, has intrinsic worth is quite a modern one and, like I said, I think it dates to the enlightenment.

This applied elsewhere as well. When European explorers went to Egypt in the 18th and 19th century they found fragments of ancient Egypt all over the place and asked the locals if they could have them. The local people were actually quite happy to be rid of them since they were "pagan" and, therefore, of no interest to them. Thankfully, attitudes have changed there as well.

"2) Which made me wonder what they knew and what they thought of those societies that went before them? What did the tudors know of the romans?"

Good question. They certainly knew about them - Shakespeare wrote a play about Julius Caesar after all - but probably only scholars had any real understanding. To most people they were probably more like King Arthur - stories from long ago.

I've just been reading (yes, my reading list is a little eccentric) T.E. Lawrence's (of Arabia fame) B.A. thesis (standards were, I think, quite a bit higher a century ago) on 'Crusader Castles' and this passage made me think of this thread:

'In Britain the invasion of the Saxons meant the burning and laying waste of the walled cities of the half-Romanised inhabitants. The Saxons had a horror of living within stone walls; and examples such as the sack of Anderida quite well account for their peopling their sites in imagination with devils. . .'

Anderida is Pevensy Castle, and I presume that the sack Lawrence refers to is the sack by King Aelle of Sussex in 491. In that attack, all of the defenders were killed, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.


I think Lawrence is rather Romantically speculating on the basis of little evidence, but the sack and defense of Anderida is another example of the Antique being used pragmatically: The Romanised Britons occupied the crumbling Roman fort as the best local defensive position against the barbarian English and the barbarians treated that defensive position as nothing other that a contemporary stronghold which needed to be overrun. Lawrence's Romanticising notwithstanding, Anderida was simply a defensible location to the Britons and Saxons, not an archaeological site.

Strange, I was just reading Gombrich's "A little history" and he firmly places the re-awakening of interest in the Romans & Greeks with the Renaissance & Florence in 1420. As already stated in earlier posts this was partly due to a rise in a middle class seperate from the nobility who were looking to do more than build fortifications and cathedrals.

He ascribes a lack of interest in the ancients as a result of them being viewed as pagan, heathen or generally "not Christian" therefore not worthy.

>> What did the tudors know of the romans?"
- Good question. They certainly knew about them - Shakespeare...
- but probably only scholars had any real understanding... <<

In Britain there was the unique situation of Henry VIII's separation
from the Roman Church which set off a virtual industry in the study
of canon law and the authority (historical precedence) of the Papacy -
all muddied of course by very real concerns for God's Will and Divine
Interventions. (Sir Thomas More etc)
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/tmore.htm

I'm sure this mini-industry turned over a few old rocks. It certainly led
to a rise in post Renaissance scepticism and a whole new level of critical
treatment and attitudes toward the Classics of Greece and Rome.

If not an interest in specific artifacts and architectural ruins the Tudors
must be credited with opening the door to new understanding of the Classical
Whirled, beyond a narrow selection of approved texts which fortified and
justified the Roman Church's grip on Europe. Until then any critical examination
of the authority of 'the Word' and 'Holy Writ' would have been condemned as
heretical, pagan or demonic.



~jwf~