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Fortunately, none of these would be found at a vegan café opened by @edmundro, whether Pompeii-themed or not. :)
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A very interesting and under-investigated Roman-era site is Viroconium, today near the present-day village of Wroxeter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viroconium_Cornoviorum
Here, you see the enormous progress from old-style archaeological research methods to modern ones, mainly remote sensing. Before the advent of computers, everything had to be done laboriously by hand, but as you can see here, even early computer methods, while endearing from today's perspective, were pretty crude
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~slb/arch/arch1992.html
Magnetic gradiometry is a long-established technique to find evidence of archaeological remains, to map sites and to decide where to excavate if at all:
This survey was very interesting, because contrary to previous assumptions, it suggested that Viroconium was completely built-up within its walls and not a lightly-settled 'garden city'. (As I've often said, I think that we have systematically under-estimated ancient populations, and I'd be surprised if Viroconium had 'only' the 15,000 inhabitants that have traditionally been estimated for it.)
However, even this is laborious compared to LIDAR. A few years ago, Wroxeter was LIDARed:
https://nitter.snopyta.org/markwalters_/status/830867293160751110
While this is a great tool, its main use so far, it seems to me, is in dense vegetation such as the Mayan jungle, where it has had very impressive results in bringing out contours of ancient man-made features hidden by the jungle. It is clearly useful in revealing large-scale earthworks even where there isn't much vegetation cover, but it doesn't seem to reveal much where a site is covered by soil, as in Viroconium.
The most fascinating kind of remote sensing, to me, is still the work of Sarah Parcak et al., as posted before:
In Egypt, her specialty area, she and her team have expanded the civilization’s known scope, spotting more than 3,000 ancient settlements, more than a dozen pyramids and over a thousand lost tombs, and uncovered the city grid of Tanis, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame. After the Arab Spring, in 2011, she created, via satellite, a first-of-its-kind countrywide looting map, documenting how plundered tombs first appeared as little black pimples on the landscape and then spread like a rash. She has pointed out the ruins of an amphitheater at the Roman harbor of Portus to archaeologists who had spent their whole careers digging above it, mapped the ancient Dacian capital of what is now Romania, and—using hyperspectral camera data—aided in the ongoing search for prehistoric hominid fossils in eroded Kenyan lake beds.
It's just spectacular.
The maps these techniques produce are so accurate that I think they're reluctant to publish them for fear of aiding looters. She has mapped looting this way, too:
The highest resolution satellite imagery we have right now is 0.3 metres. In the next five to 10 years, I’m expecting that to get down to about 0.1 metres.
I do hope that this sort of work will at some point be applied to Roman Britain, because I think we're in for a few surprises there.
Still, sometimes things are revealed by just a dry spell:
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2013/08/03/site-of-roman-house-revealed-in-shropshire-hot-spell/
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Here's a well-illustrated article on Roman fortresses in general:
https://eaglesanddragonspublishing.com/cities-for-the-legions-a-brief-look-at-the-roman-fortress/
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How being an archaeologist can be risky at times:
I think I'd heard of this before, but not that it had got this bad. Poor dog. We've had other incidents of archaeological remains being destroyed in South America before.
Of course, destruction of remains has been going on since forever; new incomers don't tend to care very much about other people's posterity. They just use building stone for their own purposes, which historically often used to occur quite far away because old sites were believed to be haunted (usually only at night) or at least felt ominous to people who believed in ghosts, or because the previous residents had exhausted the land. (I think a major aspect of human history is engaging in unsustainable practices that then contributed to making places uninhabitable so that they had to move on. This was most often related to a lack of water, i.e. humans contributing to desertification by accelerating natural cycles.) As we're now seeing again, although with better medical capabilities than people in former times, there will also have been numerous pandemics throughout history that would have brought large population sizes down again.
That's one reason why you find so many 'lost civilisations', impressively-built up areas that evidently supported large populations but which were then seemingly abandoned completely as the usual resource wars swept over people, causing many to flee and seek a new life elsewhere.
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no mention of larks’ tongues, otters’ noses nor ocelot spleens at the Pompeii snack bar, I am disappoint..
Fortunately, none of these would be found at a vegan café opened by @edmundro, whether Pompeii-themed or not. :)
ha, must be with the people's front of judea, who clearly don’t enjoy those rich imperialist titbits...
..splitters!!
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Only now I got your reference, darn it! Really need to rewatch these classics.
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A lovely find here:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/13/worlds-oldest-known-cave-painting-found-in-indonesia
The best finds tend to be in sealed caves, but this looks really good.
What always gets me in these cave paintings are the hand outlines. Hand shapes of people who lived 45,000 years ago ...
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I meant to post this earlier but forgot:
Taken altogether, the hoard hints at hitherto unknown connections between people across Europe and beyond
What I always find interesting is that there is often an underlying assumption we have about the past is that, just because people weren't hypermobile, they didn't travel. It's a bit like archaeologists in a hyper-hypermobile age, say, 1,000 years' from now, excavating a Polski Sklep in London and concluding that it hints at unknown links between the UK and Poland. The sensible assumption is that even when travel took longer and was quite perilous, it occurred all the time--fewer people travelled more slowly and more rarely, but there was still a lot of travelling, especially by merchants, but also pilgrimages, army expeditions, and the like, so the presence of traded luxuries shouldn't be surprising. It's pretty clear by now that most large cities were as inter'national' then as they are today, for instance.
I do wonder what fruit this research grant will bear. It seems like a lot, but I don't know how expensive such research usually is.
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This hypothesis I find extremely implausible:
I can well imagine that in order to get through the winter some people may have adopted the strategy of not leaving their caves at all, and instead to rely on (presumably inadequate) provisions, but I doubt very much that humans are/were capable of hibernating. Happy to be proven wrong.
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I agree, this seems like a hell of a jump in thinking to me. What's most frustrating is that the person asked to comment, who undoubtedly knows more than I (and ever possibly could know), isn't asked to expand when he states "there are other explanations for the variations seen in the bones found in Sima and these have to be addressed fully" - surely they could have asked him to give a brief summary of those explanations in layman's terms?
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There is contrasting evidence.
One of the original causes of the Catholic crusades to reclaim the Holy Lands was to make it once again safe for pilgrims to venture to Jerusalem. I've no idea when such pilgrimage became popular, but clearly for anyone in Europe such a journey would have been at least a multi-month expedition, if travelling on foot. How anyone outside the wealthy aristocracy could have have funded such a trip is beyond my understanding, unless dependent upon picking up casual work on successive harvests.Reading about the array of kervansarays in southern Anatolia that comprised one of the Silk Routes during Ottoman times, Marco Polo's journey was notable for the fact that someone travelled the entire distance. Local traders tended to oscillate between their local kervansaray, spaced at around 15 miles, or the distance a caravan of pack animals could comfortably achieve in a day.
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More on the rise of metal detectoring (pre-pandemic--I expect the 2020 figures will beat the ones for 2019):
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Some info on the first bit of archaeology that has been done near Stonehenge in preparation for the motorway tunnel:
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Quite interesting what they find when they rummage through archives sometimes and look at objects more closely:
Remarkably, a skilled horn player enlisted by the multi-disciplinary team of French scientists was able to produce three clear notes of C, D and C sharp from the artefact, offering a tantalising hint of how it sounded to its original owners.
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I woke up to someone playing that on BBC news.
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This has been going on for a while, and they are now clearly confident enough to make the announcement:
It's without a doubt a very interesting find, but what would be even more interesting would be any evidence for the reason why. Perhaps the circle was taken as a kind of political trophy to shift a recognised centre of power to the area a victorious people lived in? Who knows. There will soon be further work on this, I'm sure, so that's something to look forward to.
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I wonder if Geoffrey of Monmouth's work will be reviewed in light of this?
Fascinating to think what else he might have accurately reported on...
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While I'm here, I didn't get around to commenting on the Doggerland-chat a couple of pages back.
I think there's a case to be made for it being the basis of the Atlantis story.
Such a sudden and catastrophic loss of these lands would doubtless have persisted in the folk-memory for many generations until Plato heard a diluted version of events.
That he dates the event to thousands of years prior to his time and occurring outside the Mediterranean, only adds weight to my argument.
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A rather vague report on a dig at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire--most such reports tend to focus on one or several attractive finds, but there doesn't seem to have been one of those here yet. It's still interesting how, despite a very limited site, a bit of Roman villa and a larger, much earlier settlement have been found. I suspect that they may not have much money to do further work, and perhaps are hoping to attract donations. A site like this is undoubtedly much richer than such a limited excavation can reveal. I'm always fascinated by how settlement patterns change over time, and how previously very powerful sites decline into total insignificance, to end up under a layer of soil that at first glance betrays no aspect of what used to be there. In the case of the Roman villa, the main reason why it is now under soil is because people came and removed building stone for use elsewhere, and perhaps people also took parts of the roundhouses with them for re-use elsewhere, but it's quite possible that those simply decayed over time until they were levelled.
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On another level, we'll always have Egypt, with more intriguing building remains:
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I wonder if Geoffrey of Monmouth's work will be reviewed in light of this?
Fascinating to think what else he might have accurately reported on...
Well, it's known that the Heinrich Schliemann approach, looking at old legends and trying to gain clues from them, is important, but only if the person doing the work isn't also a charlatan. :)
I'm not familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth's work so don't know what other stories may be useful for real-world archaeology, but I certainly don't think myth should be dismissed altogether, just treated with caution.
I mean, the Stonehenge connection does look interesting, but they'll need to do some more work yet before it's generally accepted, I would think.
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@Scilly.Suffolk I think the Atlantis story originates from Santorini in the Mediterranean.
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Well, I think of Atlantis as just another flood myth, albeit one that inspired more speculation than all the others taken together, and there are so many others. Not just based on the theories that have been advanced to explain the Atlantis myth, there are loads of candidates for what it may have been, if anything, or if any one thing. Flooding clearly occurred in many places where humans had built a lot of stuff, and there are many, many sites where there are clearly major remains undersea, like Alexandria. Here are some names of sunken cities in Greece, Pavlopetri being the most famous, I think:
http://www.visitgreece.gr/en/activities/water_sports/scuba_diving/submerged_greek_cities
There are major sites off the Indian coast, too, that may eventually prove spectacular. Obviously, closer to Dogger Bank, we have our very own Dunwich. Over the years, I've looked at web-sites about dozens more whose names I can't remember.
The main problem with interpreting the Atlantis story is that the Critias, the Platonic dialogue in which the main description is found, and the purported trilogy of dialogues (Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates) are unfinished, as the Hermocrates may never have been written. In view of the textual tradition in Plato, it is very unlikely that there will be a sensational discovery of this material. (Plato is the only ancient writer whose work is thought to have been transmitted completely, allowing for transcription errors and the like.) Plato's myths did serve a purpose, but because of the incompleteness of the apparently-intended setting, it's not clear what the purpose of the Atlantis story there may have been when envisaged. I mean, it's possible that he hit a dead end (there is a reasonable argument that around the time when the Timaeus and Critias were apparently composed, Plato experienced a sea-change in his philosophy, no pun intended), but it's just not known. There is a sort of 'announcement' in the Sophist and in the Politicus that there would be a third dialogue in that series, which he seemingly didn't end up writing (the 'Philosophos'), and there are various theories as to why. It's most likely that he didn't follow through with these grand conceptions, e.g. late in life he may have prioritised the Laws as a sort of political testament to the Philosophos. Again, it's only speculation, there is simply no conclusive evidence.
The Atlantis myth appears to have a relationship with Plato's political work and seems to have been intended to highlight possible disastrous consequences for hubristically-governed polities, perhaps following Plato's disappointment in Syracuse. However, there may well be elements taken from a much longer tradition by prior authors whose work may well have been known to Plato's audience, and it's also part of this strand in Plato's work of myths apparently obtained from Egypt, and thence possibly from further east. Elsewhere, Plato castigates myth-making severely, so it's all a bit puzzling how it fits, or not, into his work.
I can well imagine that the loss of what we now call Doggerland may have inspired myths, but again there are just so many candidates, and I also suspect that the major myths will have been inspired by catastrophic flood events rather than a gradual loss of land over (in human terms) quite a long time, and 'Doggerland' may have been lost in the latter fashion.
All that said, I'd obviously be fascinated if remains of major human activity were found there, but that's at least decades, more likely centuries, away.
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@Oliver Schick
@damskodonny no mention of larks’ tongues, otters’ noses nor ocelot spleens at the Pompeii snack bar, I am disappoint..