[HN Gopher] Burned House Horizon
___________________________________________________________________
Burned House Horizon
Author : diodorus
Score : 313 points
Date : 2021-03-06 01:06 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| w0mbat wrote:
| Clearly this is the Nightfall phenomenon predicted by Isaac
| Asimov. The burnings must line up with total solar eclipses.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| This archaeological horizon is especially interesting as it is
| connected to the first occurrence of proto-writing (Vinca
| script), Advanced Metallurgy (first daggers, Varna gold burial)
| and the later corded ware horizon which is now almost established
| to be the homeland of speakers of Proto Indo European (The
| linguistic descendants of which are 70% of all living people
| today, 46% natively.)
| Townley wrote:
| Tangential to this article, but can I just say that this is HN at
| its best. Random, curious, snippets of learning on topics that I
| can't imagine hearing about anywhere else. It's a pure love of
| knowledge that leads thousands of people to spend Friday night
| reading a largely useless Wikipedia entry on house burning just
| because it's mystery
| evmar wrote:
| If you'd like more, the Wikipedia community on Reddit regularly
| shares neat articles like this one.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I read the whole thing. I love learning new things like this.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > Tangential to this article, but can I just say that this is
| HN at its best. Random, curious, snippets of learning on topics
| that I can't imagine hearing about anywhere else.
|
| The submission, I agree is the best of HN; the comments,
| however, are the worst.
|
| Tons of 'bikeshedding' comments offering flippant uninformed
| analyses that belittle established and well-researched
| theories. By offering 'back of a cocktail napkin' comments like
| 'I think such and such theory doesn't get enough attention
| because of my random opinion', or 'I think such and such likely
| happened, based on me just ruminating about this for a few
| minutes, versus doing years of research on'; the comments are
| tacitly disrespecting the work researchers whose specialty this
| is put into formulating theories.
|
| We HN users need to learn to just say 'we don't know', instead
| of playing internet experts in every single discipline a given
| submission is about.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _the comments are tacitly disrespecting the work
| researchers whose specialty this is put into formulating
| theories._
|
| So? Besides flippant comments (who don't matter anyway), this
| can also produce valuable new developments.
|
| People who establish new theories and findings about X aren't
| often the same people who have well examined and respect the
| old theories on X.
|
| To quote Max Planck (and similar to Kuhn's idea of the same
| process): "a new scientific truth does not triumph by
| convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
| rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new
| generation grows up that is familiar with it."
| GavinMcG wrote:
| They _do_ matter because they decrease signal:noise, lower
| the quality of conversation, and reinforce a troubling
| assumption that expertise brings nothing to the table.
| scribu wrote:
| I don't see any "belittling" comments here, except perhaps
| yours.
|
| People enjoy talking about the stuff they read. Discussion is
| part of how one learns.
|
| If you don't find value in reading non-expert commentary,
| then don't read it.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| > The real reason must be...
|
| > When something makes little sense it's probably based in
| religion.
|
| > Maybe nobody thought of it so far.
|
| Plus a good handful of comments that don't acknowledge the
| countervailing evidence _in the Wikipedia article_ much
| less evidencing any familiarity with the broader
| literature. Not gonna quibble about whether "belittling"
| is the right word, but there's certainly some casual hubris
| in some of these threads.
|
| Bigger picture: it isn't about _enjoying_ amateur
| commentary or not. There 's arguably been a rise, with the
| democratization of information access, of poorly-grounded
| self-confidence about understanding every topic one
| encounters. This attitude, for example, rejects mask-
| wearing on the grounds that the virus is too small to be
| caught by the mask (ignoring that the virus is carried in
| larger droplets/particles). An intelligent person armed
| with a factoid sometimes needs a reminder like the comment
| you replied to.
| clairity wrote:
| > "...poorly-grounded self-confidence about understanding
| every topic one encounters. This attitude, for example,
| rejects mask-wearing on the grounds that the virus is too
| small to be caught by the mask..."
|
| deliciously ironic, considering your continued focus on
| exactly the wrong thing when it comes to mask
| effectiveness and policy. you're looking at the base of a
| tree and trying to draw conclusions about the forest by
| assuming frictionless cylindrical planes.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| I didn't say anything about mask-wearing itself - just
| offering an example of naive but faulty reasoning. You're
| looking for a fight that I'm not interested in having.
| clairity wrote:
| then there's plenty of ways to phrase what you said
| without insinuation and hubris. or perhaps use a less-
| fraught example.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| > _your continued focus on exactly the wrong thing when
| it comes to mask effectiveness and policy._
|
| What is the _right_ focus? Is this a running discussion
| between you two?
| clairity wrote:
| understanding that the issue, like most issues, is multi-
| faceted at the very least, but that certainly too much
| consideration and mindshare has been lost to them due to
| mediopolitical coercion playing on our fears and
| anxieties. masks have limited utility in most common
| situations, beyond the fluid mechanics/dynamics at play.
| they're primarily only useful when you can't (or won't)
| distance in close quarters, but they've become a totem
| for cargo-culting all sorts of inane rituals and
| behaviors _en masse_ , in the service of various forms of
| power (as a small but pertinent example, medical
| professionals' career advancements are based on how well
| they toe the official narrative). masks might snag a
| given virus particle in a controlled experiment, but
| they're not going to stop, or even meaningfully slow,
| this pandemic despite the mediopolitical rhetoric.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| Thanks for the reply.
|
| Cloth masks are spit shields, nothing more. As spit
| shields, there's good evidence for their effectiveness.
| I've seen no convincing evidence that they're good for
| anything else.
|
| > _they 've become a totem for cargo-culting all sorts of
| inane rituals and behaviors_
|
| I was just in the hospital for a week for an unrelated
| illness. Every person I encountered there said they had
| been vaccinated, yet they still insisted on masking
| everyone, even when it made communication difficult.
|
| I'm a little terrified that this madness won't ever end--
| that the bureaucratic fervor for masks, distancing, and
| various degrees of lockdowns will emerge again in
| response to bad flu seasons, for example.
| clairity wrote:
| i can actually see hospitals being a place where masks
| have more legitimacy, not specifically for corona, but
| for the confluence of many transmissible ailments
| accumulating there.
|
| but with corona, while it's not undeniably confirmed yet,
| it's quite likely that vaccines dramatically shorten the
| window of infectiousness, allowing most of the vaccinated
| to stop wearing masks after a short window (~couple days,
| iirc). yet, the general recommendation remains that they
| be worn by the vaccinated public indefinitely. the cdc
| apparently is now literally doubling-down by recommending
| _two_ masks be worn by everyone, completely ignoring the
| human social dynamics that overwhelm the assumed threat
| model implicit with masks.
|
| if masks--or lockdowns for that matter--were dramatically
| effective, we'd see it in all the data we've fervently
| collected and analyzed over the past year. at best, we've
| found weak correlations all around (i.e., marginal
| effects), that suffer from unspecificity, because it's
| hard to unambiguously isolate independent variables from
| confounding ones in real world epidemiological data.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| No; as far as I can tell, they're just trolling.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| I've developed an obsessive fascination with the social
| and political aspects of masks. I think very little of
| our masking behavior is related to actual scientific
| evidence, on either side of the debate. Many people feel
| like wearing a mask and cleaning surfaces obsessively is
| the obvious response to a disease of any sort, even
| though the evidence overwhelmingly says that COVID is not
| effectively spread on surfaces, or outside of confined
| spaces with people sharing breathing air for extended
| periods of time.
|
| On the other side there are people who associate masks
| with the political left, and would be so humiliated to
| appear cowed by "liberal" authority figures, that they'd
| refuse to wear a mask even if they were convinced of the
| medical risk.
|
| I think I'm coming to the conclusion that the majority of
| mask adherence and refusal isn't rational, but rather
| religious, in the sense that it's shaped by beliefs that
| are immune to evidence.
| chucky wrote:
| This seems like a more general problem with the Internet or
| even of people (and in particular men of a more technical and
| nerdy persuasion, in my own experience).
|
| The majority have nothing of value to say, so will post
| nothing. The only ones who can realistically offer comments
| on this article are experts and those who will offer "back of
| a cocktail napkin" comments (as you put it), and the latter
| group is so much larger than the former.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Agreed, I wasn't going to comment on this post because this
| is something I've never heard of before. There's no point
| for me to add a comment like "I don't know the reason
| behind this" because that adds no value to the discussion.
| Actually discussing ideas whether or not they are
| researched for years or not adds value to the discussion,
| because then you can actually discuss where those ideas are
| wrong or where they could be right.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The point is that any idea you could come up with in 5
| minutes has probably been done to death by researchers
| who actually focus on the topic so no, you're not
| contributing anything.
|
| But it's beside the point because HN isn't there to add
| anything to actual research, nor is it going to. It's for
| people to discuss random interesting Internet things,
| it's for entertainment. But there does seem to be a nerd
| contingent that can't accept that it's entertainment and
| have to believe its some kind of intellectual pursuit.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Exactly, I'm not claiming to be contributing anything to
| the research, but contributing to the discussion of the
| research.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| which is great, as long as you're not deluding yourself
| into thinking that researchers would benefit at all from
| reading HN discussions of their work. Some people seem to
| think that they would.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| egeozcan wrote:
| We are not here to do science though, and while completely
| unsubstantiated ideas are frowned upon, it's okay to do some
| mind exercise and share theories with others. It's fun to
| read, fun to write, and well above the populist karma-stunts.
| postit wrote:
| The real reason must be something so stupid that no one ever
| considered. Something like there was a comet in the sky every 75
| years and they burned the settlement to scare it away.
| drran wrote:
| IMHO, it used as protection against diseases transferred via
| bugs, rodents, which then converted to ritual.
|
| AFAIK, it still practiced:
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3613126/Travellers-...
| richardfey wrote:
| I think so too; great example by the way.
|
| It's either that or religion.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Programmer hypothesis: it's the neolithic equivalent of the Big
| Rewrite. But, as Joel Spolsky could have told them, it doesn't
| really work.
| vonwoodson wrote:
| I had an opportunity to tour Romania, and was very surprised at
| how unique it is there. Fore example: The houses have eyes, small
| false windows installed on their tin roofs, to watch their
| neighbors. Jealousy is rampant, and the charming Romanian folk-
| saying was "Let my neighbor's goat die." Romanians are very proud
| of their Roman heritage, and also their active Gypsy culture.
|
| This is an interesting Wikipedia article. I think this area of
| the world and is history is generally very interesting and
| unique. We're lucky today that is no longer behind The Iron
| Curtain and is worth a visit by and brave adventurers.
| aasasd wrote:
| _God finally answers the prayers of a dude but says to him: "I
| will grant you three wishes but will give your neighbor twice
| what you receive". "Alright", man says, "I want a big house".
| "Sure", God replies, "the neighbor will get a house twice as
| large". "I want five chests full of gold money". "Done, the
| neighbor gets ten of them". Man says, "Now, pluck out one of my
| eyes"._
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| This is an example of why one should not post claims about a
| country after merely "touring" it, because tourists visiting
| any country typically get only a vague and often mistaken sense
| of the local culture and history. First of all, Romanians are
| not "very proud of their active Gypsy culture": the Roma
| minority are largely despised by the rest of Romania's
| population. Secondly, Romanian pride in their Roman heritage is
| largely a consequence of 19th-century trends upon the
| rediscovery of the roots of the Romanian language, and the
| dacomania and francophilia that bloomed then; that pride is not
| something that was actually preserved down the last two
| millennia.
|
| And when it comes to traditional architecture in Romania, it
| should be noted that the homes that are among the most
| celebrated today for their traditional craftsmanship are those
| built by the Transylvanian Saxons, i.e. neither Romanians nor
| Roma. I only mention this because I have seen tourists visit
| places in Romania and talk about Romanian this and Romanian
| that, when Romania is a multiethnic country and what they saw
| many have actually been by one of the other ethnicities.
| scribu wrote:
| > Romanians are very proud of their [...] active Gypsy culture.
|
| As a Romanian, I regret to inform you that a lot of Romanians
| really don't like gipsies. This has always been the case,
| unfortunately.
| simion314 wrote:
| You should probably visit a museum that has lot of different
| houses from different places, trying to conclude something from
| some houses you seen from the street is probably impossible.
|
| Houses in my village and region do not use metal and don't have
| windows, and windows on the roof is a good idea because you get
| a lot of light in the attic, it is a lot of effort to go in the
| attic to spy on someone if you can do it from a window from a
| regular wall anyway.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Romanians are very proud of their Roman heritage, and also
| their active Gypsy culture.
|
| The Romanians I've known (personally) are always careful to
| draw a hard and firm distinction between Romanians and Romany
| (the so-called "gypsies"). Far from being proud of it, they are
| quite angry when they get confused.
| runarberg wrote:
| Youtuber Stefan Milo has an excellent video on the neolithic life
| in this region (with a mentions of the burning of houses):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pnv3jelAO4
|
| I can't recommend his channel enough. His narrative of how normal
| people lived in the ancient times is really interesting.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| There is a debate that so called Anasazi people of the American
| southwest either ritually burned and abandoned their Kivas
| (ceremonial building) or that the burning is evidence of warfare.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva
|
| https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/36/hh36c-2.h...
|
| https://spot.colorado.edu/~laursen/southwest/chaco/chacoMain...
| dhosek wrote:
| I don't remember if it was these people or some other Native
| American group that practiced burning of their buildings. I'm
| thinking it might be another group as my vague recollection of
| what I encountered (I cannot remember where) was that it was
| something that took place in the Mississippi River area.
| seibelj wrote:
| Those Kivas are really interesting. We visited one of the sites
| in New Mexico at Bandolier National Monument. Very cool how
| they carved all the houses into the cliffs.
|
| Most interesting fact that stuck with me was they ground all
| their grains using rocks that were too soft, so bits of rock
| would get in all their food, quickly removing all the enamel
| from their teeth and rotting them away. I can't imagine how
| painful that must have been. Surviving meant the children had
| to chew all the food for the adults and spit it out for them to
| eat.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| NZ Maori in the South Island, who relied more on aruhe[1] -
| the rhizome of the bracken fern - than the North Island
| population, also showed higher rates of dental wear from the
| fibrous rhizome. Ditto populations with a diet rich in
| shellfish - they often contain remnants of sand.
|
| (The N.I. Maori could grow kumara (sweet potato), but the
| growing area of kumara in South Island was limited to the
| east coast from Banks Peninsula northwards).
|
| [1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/20258/aruhe
| prawn wrote:
| If you enjoyed those cliff houses, you might like Cappadocia
| in Turkey which has a lot of similar dwellings, and even an
| underground town of sorts. A few of the areas you can explore
| more freely than at Bandolier.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=cappadocia&safe=off&source=l.
| ..
| aasasd wrote:
| There are also massive temples cut from rock.
|
| E.g., from a quick search:
|
| - Kailasa temple https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-
| places-asia/kailasa-... and
| http://www.indiagk.net/2014/06/kailash-temple-ellora-cave-
| te...
|
| - https://www.easemytrip.com/blog/rock-cut-temples-and-
| archite...
|
| - Masroor temples
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masrur_Temples
|
| - https://photoscaping.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/celestial-
| rock...
|
| My favorite is Petra city that has multiple large buildings
| carved right in the face of rock:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra
| prawn wrote:
| That's true, but what connects Bandolier and Cappadocia
| are that they are carved out of a softer material which
| was created as a thick layer of volcanic ash. Visiting
| both, you notice similarities.
|
| More for your list, that I visited back in the 1990s, are
| the Yungang Grottoes in Northern China:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungang_Grottoes
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The correct term today is ancestral puebloan. Anasazi basically
| means "ancestral/ancient enemies" in Navajo.
|
| Anyway, that debate (to the extent it existed as a general
| thing) has been resolved. It's both. Violence, including
| burnings, is archaeologically well attested at numerous sites.
| Likewise, ritual destruction is both archeologically and
| culturally well-supported. There's debate about many particular
| sites, but even many of the smaller debates like man-corn
| aren't subjects of serious disagreement anymore.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I think the article understates the case for fumigation.
|
| > Because the damage from the fire was almost total for the
| entire settlement, it would be illogical if fumigation was the
| only intent
|
| What? If you had pests that were bad enough to warrant burning
| food stores, why take a risk on the other buildings?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It could be both. At one point a pest had moved into a
| settlement that caused them to decide to burn it all down and
| start over. They then decided to periodically do this in order
| to prevent the pest from ever being able to come back. Over the
| years the need for this had gone away but the practice remained
| and took on a ritualistic meaning more so than a practical one.
| And as these things go, the original meaning was lost. To me,
| this seems like the intuitive explanation.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| And fumigation should really be broken into two separate
| categories: fumigation for pests, and fumigation for infectious
| disease. They are very different, as infectious diseases cannot
| be seen: in a world where no one knows about microbes and
| viruses, people will do peculiar things based on their theory
| of disease. History provides many examples of people doing odd
| things to prevent plagues and disease, many of which are far
| stranger (and less effective) than "cleanse the buildings with
| fire".
| gostsamo wrote:
| The period between burnings is cited as 75 years. Why would you
| clean from pests once in a century? It is better correlated
| with a lifespan of a human* which might suggest that they've
| considered a house to have the same lifespan.
|
| * the average lifespan was much shorter but it includes
| children mortality and once above the age of five a human had a
| good chance to reach retirement.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| I think the implied logic is that if you're worried about pests
| destroying your supplies, it's a pretty crazy move to decide
| the way to fix the destruction of your supplies by, well,
| burning the supplies of your entire settlement to the ground.
|
| Regardless, I agree the logic is incomplete as stated. It's
| entirely possible if there was an easy way to replenish
| supplies (e.g. conducting such a burning right before harvest
| time or ample hunting/gathering grounds nearby) that such an
| approach would make sense.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| If you had maggots living in your grain, would it be possible
| to save parts of the grain with primitive tech? Would it be
| possible to guarantee that the pest didn't move from one side
| of the village to the other.
|
| Maybe they thought the old houses were C and the new ones
| would be Rust and this was the migration path :)
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > Maybe they thought the old houses were C and the new ones
| would be Rust
|
| Or, maybe the old houses were JavaScript and the new ones
| would be JavaScript.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Do you mean EcmaScript?
|
| Also, if it was JS they wouldn't have houses. Everything
| would be stored in matchboxes.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Why is that crazy? Between eggs and pests "diffusing" into
| adjacent buildings only to "diffuse" back after a sweep, I
| can completely understand why a town would opt for the
| nuclear option after a few failed attempts to get rid of an
| infestation.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Because without a ready-at-hand large-scale method of
| restocking (which granted is a very real possibility that
| such a dismissal of the fumigation theory seems to
| overlook, see e.g. my comment about harvest time) this is
| tantamount to suicide.
|
| The difficulty required to sustain the caloric needs of a
| town and rebuild after complete destruction of food stores
| and shelter is immense, especially with only the help of
| pre-Bronze Age technology.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| So if you overlook the probable reason why it wasn't
| suicide, it was suicide? Come on, that's not convincing.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| Maybe it was structural for buildings - termites...
| richardfey wrote:
| One way to figure it out is to go live there in a hut for a few
| years. Maybe nobody thought of it so far.
| juskrey wrote:
| Ukrainians, descendants of that culture, have a proverb
| "Happiness is a neighbor's house burning". Which is not far away
| from everyday vibes and the way of life overall. So we may have
| way simpler explanation here.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Shame we don't have an analogous saying in Poland (or do we?)
| but we definitely share the sensibility.
| kzrdude wrote:
| What does that mean exactly?
| keiferski wrote:
| Essentially the same thing as Schadenfreude.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
| j-pb wrote:
| Shadenfreude is amusement at small misshaps though.
|
| Someone stubbing a toe, dropping something or not winning
| at a contest after bragging.
|
| I've never seen it used for something serious in germany.
| H8crilA wrote:
| So imagine your annoyingly successful neighbour suddenly
| loses everything in a stock market crash because he was
| margin leveraged to the eyeballs.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| The God once said to a Pole:
|
| - You can ask me anything you want. I will grant it to you
| but give your neighbour twice as much.
|
| to which the Pole answered:
|
| - Please, God, gouge one of my eyes.
| stainforth wrote:
| Would it be far-fetched to postulate that the sentiment and
| phrase could be traced to this practice, passed down
| continuously?
| juskrey wrote:
| Hey, we already have two bold dots here, so linear
| regression, you know
| jccooper wrote:
| See also: Vitrified forts:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort
| mullingitover wrote:
| Reminds me of the story of the Helvetii burning their own
| villages before they emigrated in what would eventually lead the
| Gallic Wars. Seems like this might've been a customary thing when
| a large group migrated out of an area to keep the group from
| being tempted to turn back.
| stainforth wrote:
| Quema tus barcos
| richardfey wrote:
| It could be a way to neutralise the smell of a settlement,
| imagine long toothed hyenas visiting periodically your huts by
| night...
|
| It is possible that a strong smell accrues over that time period
| and burning everything down is the only way they knew how to do
| this. Notice that the Jewish practice of putting lamb blood on
| your house door frame seems familiar here (albeit practically
| opposite).
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I think it is much simpler like diseases, or pests like flees,
| rodents or ants they could not eradicate in any other way?
| not_knuth wrote:
| The area around the black sea is super interesting for
| archaeology of early history (10000BCE - 2000BCE) imo, since it
| is quite understudied in comparison to the usual suspects in
| Mesopotamia and Egypt. Western Europeans also tend to forget
| about it. I have a feeling that there are many low-hanging fruit
| to be discovered which will fundamentally change the way we think
| about the significance of the area a lot.
|
| Take for example these (short) excerpts from an archaeological
| paper [0] from 2018 that discusses the farming strategy of large
| cities in the area from around 4000BCE. It seems to support the
| idea (again, my unscientific gut feel) that the spreading of
| agriculture from what we would today call the "Middle-East" to
| Europe happened by means of replacing people instead of people
| adopting new strategies (settling the so-called "pots or people"
| debate [1]).
|
| [0] https://indo-european.eu/2018/07/cereal-cultivation-and-
| proc...
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/JTY9K1Q_Sbg?t=290 (apart from the specific
| timestamp, it's a fantastic talk about the origin and genetic
| makeup of Europeans in general)
| aasasd wrote:
| Stanislav Drobyshevsky finally nicely explained for me how no
| one actually lived in caves but people lived and migrated on
| plains, from Central Europe all the way to Siberia:
| https://youtu.be/IihGveExaqU (English subtitles aren't great
| but they are there). They also took their hunting practices
| with them to where locals previously hunted different animals.
| trhway wrote:
| for example Vikings were burning their leaders and prominent
| warriors together with a boat, so one can imagine how the house
| may similarly serve as a funeral pyre for a family/village elder
| - they do mention human remains found in some cases. That would
| make especial sense if the building's lifetime was on the order
| of those 60-80 years, say due to the climate which was more wet
| in that area during that period. And fire would be a great way to
| demolish and disinfect the place as well as probably affect the
| ground in some advantageous ways (say deep dry the ground for
| foundation like purposes and kill off the bacteria/fungus/etc
| (and termites or whatever was in their place back then) up to
| some depth in the ground, and the resulting layer of ash and
| ceramic-ized clay serving as a kind of barrier) before building
| again - a settlement was found for example with 13 such layers.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| The article says that human remains are absent in most cases
| trhway wrote:
| if any remains left after such a big fire it'd be expected to
| be taken care in some way before rebuilding.
| rocqua wrote:
| This reads very non-wikipedia. It is argumentative. Stating
| positions, and for half of the positions flat out claiming "the
| evidence does not support this".
|
| Neutral language would be to list raised objections, but instead
| there are direct claims and arguments. It feels very much like it
| is written with an academic agenda. I feel wikipedia usually is a
| lot better at requiring a Neutral presentation.
| dkarp wrote:
| Edit it
| Mobleysoft wrote:
| What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It
| ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to
| generation, that the people remain well practiced in those
| skills, creates the conditions for the iterative improvement of
| those practices, and enforces a detachment from the results of
| the practice of building in favor of an attachment to the
| practice itself, the latter of which seems like a much more
| valuable asset to possess, considering the life-expectancy of
| these buildings. What does fire do on a symbolic level? It
| hardens, cleanses, purifies, and refines. Perhaps they did this
| every time the leadership changed, so the success or failure of
| the tribe or settlement under the new leader/chieftain could not
| be blamed on nor attributed to the previous one. A clean slate
| for each administration, so to speak.
|
| On another note, if these structures are essentially what the guy
| from the neolithic technology youtube channel gets up to, then
| maybe they just did it for fun. Guy looks like he's having the
| time of his life playing in the mud.
| bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote:
| Imagine if computer engineers have a religion of burning down
| and rebuilding the entire computer architecture every 20 years,
| hardware and software, from scratch. Everything will be
| cleaner, and the problem raised by Jonathan Blow [0] can be
| addressed too (it's basically: modern system has low
| understandably & maintainability, everything is extremely
| complex, and only a few people in the world can understand
| systems at each low-level component, it only takes a moderate
| social disruption for the entire digital civilization to
| collapse").
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317
| leto_ii wrote:
| > What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve?
| It ensures the skills of building are passed down from
| generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced
| in those skills
|
| This is unconvincing. In most cultures, most of the time,
| people manage to pass down building skills without destroying
| everything they've built before.
| LunaSea wrote:
| In Japan there was a tradition of rebuilding every 20 years
| for the exact reason of transmitting building methods to the
| next generation.
| mutatio wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find on
| Japanese 20-year re-building cadence is due to religion.
|
| I'm struggling to see any sense in the 20-year cadence
| cliff-edge for typical knowledge transfer.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Another comment here referenced the Ise Grand Shrine [0],
| so that is what I bet the OP is referring to. I pose
| this, religion isn't only about spiritual beliefs, it
| encompasses rituals, culture, and history. Knowledge
| transfer is a major part of continuing a religious
| culture, whether it be through studying of scripts or
| preaching. So, just because it is religious based doesn't
| exclude it from also being about transferring of
| knowledge.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
| mutatio wrote:
| The link provided shows that it is due to the religious
| belief of rebirth, the tradesmen themselves practice
| their skills continually, so the theory still doesn't map
| for me. Moreso if we apply Occam's razor: there's no
| evidence the Japanese practice is for skill transfer yet
| it's being used to promote that premise for something
| else.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Religion is just a specific way of encoding useful
| lessons into oral/written tradition. So it could well be
| that keeping the trade alive was the original reason but
| it became a religious doctrine so as not to be violated.
| mutatio wrote:
| I could see the opposite of that possibly arising, e.g.
| doing something irrational like creating a training event
| every 2 decades, due to belief - but the inverse makes no
| sense to me, what's the advantage to a society to
| renewing skills at 20 year cliff-edges vs. continual
| development? Makes less sense still in the context of
| Japanese kingdoms, the kingdom choosing to continually
| propagate skills would win.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Because skills aren't always generalisable. For the Ido
| shine, for example, there's a specific building skillset
| they use for building temples. New temples aren't built
| often enough to keep those skills sharp.
|
| > training
|
| Training doesn't impart skills unless the theoretical
| knowledge is actually used. What better way to use it
| than to build a temple?
| leto_ii wrote:
| This is a seemingly compelling explanation, but I see no
| reason why it would actually be true.
|
| It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the
| degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out
| that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along.
| As if back in the day people were only capable of
| understanding things if they were framed in a religious
| or supernatural way.
|
| I just don't think people a couple of thousand years ago
| were so cognitively different from us. Not to mention
| that there's still overwhelming evidence of knowledge
| being passed down for non-religious purposes throughout
| history.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the
| degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out
| that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along.
| As if back in the day people were only capable of
| understanding things if they were framed in a religious
| or supernatural way.
|
| I think this speaks to your own prejudice against
| religion based on how Christianity is treated in the US.
| Religion isn't predominantly about supernaturality, it's
| about what works. Supernatural explanations of _why_ it
| works almost don 't matter, if it works.
|
| Let me give an example. Christian morality seems to be to
| largely be about stabilising society. "Turn the other
| cheek" prevents cycles of revenge, for example. Does it
| matter if that's the case because you understand cycles
| of revenge and how they lead to more harm than the
| original offence, or because your priest told you that's
| the right thing to do? It would be ideal if everyone just
| understood these precepts from logic, but I don't see any
| structures for disseminating logical behaviour to the
| broad masses today either.
|
| People thousands of years ago are the same people as us.
| I see plenty of truth in religion and I see plenty of
| falsehood in modern, supposedly "rational" modalities. I
| don't think the balance of how clear-thinking we are has
| changed at all.
| leto_ii wrote:
| I actually didn't mean to be dismissive of religion. It's
| just that in general I don't think you need religious or
| any other indirect justifications for the pretty
| straight-forward idea that it's good to pass building
| techniques along.
|
| > Christian morality seems to be to largely be about
| stabilising society. "Turn the other cheek" prevents
| cycles of revenge, for example.
|
| Again, I think you might be mistaking the effect for the
| cause. While it may be true that applying the lessons of
| the Sermon on the Mount might lead to social stability, I
| don't think that's what Jesus intended exactly. I don't
| think he was doing social engineering, rather that he was
| really trying to convey his ideas of what a right and
| moral life would be. The fact that leading good lives as
| individuals leads to better societies is a fortunate
| corollary, not the main purpose.
|
| Incidentally, if you think about it honestly, it's quite
| clear that Christianity didn't actually lead to
| particularly nice societies, once it became the
| politically dominant religion.
|
| For the record I also need to mention I'm not American
| and was raised Christian (although I don't consider
| myself one anymore).
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Again, I think you might be mistaking the effect for
| the cause. While it may be true that applying the lessons
| of the Sermon on the Mount might lead to social
| stability, I don't think that's what Jesus intended
| exactly. I don't think he was doing social engineering,
| rather that he was really trying to convey his ideas of
| what a right and moral life would be. The fact that
| leading good lives as individuals leads to better
| societies is a fortunate corollary, not the main purpose.
|
| Then what is the purpose of leading a good life? In my
| mind, morality is precisely in order to stabilise
| society. I know we don't talk about it in those terms,
| but then we never really talk about the purpose behind
| good and evil. It's just "doing this is good, doing this
| is bad".
|
| > Incidentally, if you think about it honestly, it's
| quite clear that Christianity didn't actually lead to
| particularly nice societies, once it became the
| politically dominant religion.
|
| Compared to what? Today? Possibly not no (though I think
| we fail to acknowledge how much we lost in our transition
| to secularity), but compared to what came before
| Christianity was pretty great, as I understand. To be
| honest I lay a lot of the historical nastiness of
| Christianity at the feet of the Church rather than the
| teachings of Christ too, after all power does corrupt.
|
| > For the record I also need to mention I'm not American
| and was raised Christian (although I don't consider
| myself one anymore).
|
| I'm not either. But I do see nerd-culture (or tech-
| culture or whatever) as being broadly very dismissive of
| the value of religion, and generally having no
| understanding of it either. Funnily enough I was raised
| Atheist but am now a somewhat-practicing Buddhist.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > Then what is the purpose of leading a good life? In my
| mind, morality is precisely in order to stabilise
| society.
|
| The way I see it morality is an intrinsic human ability.
| This is not to say that all people are moral, but that
| all people, if they develop in a normal, stable
| environment, will naturally develop a certain morality
| that is actually not that different from one person to
| another. In this view morality doesn't really need to be
| taught and enforced by authority. Leading a good life is
| therefore the natural thing that people do.
|
| > we fail to acknowledge how much we lost in our
| transition to secularity
|
| I tend to agree, although for me what was lost with
| secularization is not so much morality, but important
| social institutions that fostered collaboration, charity,
| mutual understanding. Even when it's not lost, religion
| can be deeply perverted by the modern capitalist society
| - something like prosperity theology is an abomination to
| me.
|
| > compared to what came before Christianity was pretty
| great
|
| I recommend _The Darkening Age_ [1] for a sense of just
| how destructive early Christianity was.
|
| > I do see nerd-culture (or tech-culture or whatever) as
| being broadly very dismissive of the value of religion,
| and generally having no understanding of it either
|
| Here I also tend to agree, particularly when the
| dismissal of religion is tied in with scientism and
| perhaps even classism.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age
| refurb wrote:
| Wouldn't natural population growth and decay of current
| structures be enough demand to ensure building skills remain
| sharp?
| neogodless wrote:
| I believe that in the modern world, specialization is more
| common, where ancient skills might have been more
| generalized.
|
| So comparing to the modern world, I know of one relative in
| the industry of building homes, but even that person has
| never "built" their own home, and none of my relatives have
| bought a newly built home. In other words, in _our family_
| the skill of building home is very barely there. We 'd likely
| have to hire out. If, instead, when my parents bought the
| house I grew up in from my great grandparents, they'd torn it
| down and built a new one, then the skill would have only
| skipped one generation, but continue to be exercised within
| our family.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| One theory I didn't see listed but maybe I missed it is migration
| and scorched earth. If a settlement had exhausted Hunter gatherer
| resources in an area they would move to another. However leaving
| structures behind would offer easy options to would be invaders
| for shelter which is after all a human need. So possibly they
| would burn the settlement as it could not be transported.
| gostsamo wrote:
| The region was beyond the hunter-gatherer age for a few
| thousand years when the practice started. The Balkans are a few
| months lazy travel by foot from Zagros.
|
| Agriculture exhaust would've been viable theory if the houses
| weren't built immediately on the same place.
| gfaure wrote:
| Migration doesn't square with the fact that valuable objects
| were found entombed in the burnt houses.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| That's true.
| setr wrote:
| They would presumably do the same thing at the next area, as
| they move on, so you'd have multiple patches where this
| occurred, presumably with an offset-but-similar lifecycle at
| each location, as they rotated between viable lands
| colanderman wrote:
| The "demolition" argument notes that "the archeological record
| shows that houses were rebuilt directly on top of the pre-
| existing foundations of the destroyed buildings." Presumably
| this wouldn't be so if the inhabitants were migrating away from
| an area. (Though I guess a new tribe could have come in and
| built on the same foundations.)
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Yeah foundations maybe or as another poster said it was still
| viable and likely enviable.
| Valgrim wrote:
| The reason why a settlement was built in that place could
| still be valid a few years after the burn, such as proximity
| to water sources or useful materials.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It's not clear but it sounds like they didn't just build
| the settlements there but that each house would be rebuilt
| exactly where the old one was. If that's the case, it would
| be really strange if it was built by different people or at
| different times.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| I have that on vinyl.
| ed_balls wrote:
| There is one theory missing. What about a sacrifice? Child
| sacrifice was quite common in the area (Moloch) and it was
| repeated in a lot of cultures. Maybe people decided that a child
| is a bit too much, but they still wanted to please the gods, so
| the give the second most valuable thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This practice endured from 6500 to 2000 BC. We're closer to the
| last (known) such fire than the last fire was to the first.
| Amazing that this was happening for so long and we know so little
| about it.
| gillytech wrote:
| Can't help but wonder what else in human history has been lost
| to antiquity. And I wonder if in 4000 years much of this
| cultures written works would exist in a recoverable form to
| explain the artifacts left behind.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm almost certain this culture would have been illiterate.
| Writing was only just being invented in mesopotamia in the
| 4th millennium bce, and I'm pretty sure it only took root in
| larger administrative units while the Burned House Horizon
| region seems to be a relative backwater at the time.
| Moreover, it tended to be used for administration--how much
| grain do we have stored, how much have we given away and to
| whom, etc.
| iandinwoodie wrote:
| Where do you put 4000 years of data? Imagine indexing /
| searching that. If all data can't be kept, who will get to
| decide what is important? It's a really interesting topic
| throwawayboise wrote:
| This is what librarians (used to?) do. Decide what is
| important, and which works are the best ones to save. Then
| organize it all.
|
| The current mode of "save everything forever" collapses
| unless you have tools to find the needles in the haystacks.
| [deleted]
| cma wrote:
| Maybe it was bedbug remediation.
| kvz wrote:
| Wiki lists Agression as a theory, but what about defense? In the
| town I live in some houses were mandatory to be built in just
| wood so they could be easily brunt down when they where under
| siege. It's now heritage and there's a street full of wooden
| houses here that tourists love (and actually so do I). It gave
| the aggressor no place to hide and shelter while the cannons from
| the city made light work of removing the threat. It's called
| "vuurlinie huisjes", or: line of fire houses. I guess it may have
| a double meaning: a line where all houses had to be burned as
| nothing could not be in the line of fire of the canons, under
| siege.
|
| I guess if it was done as early as 6000 BC then canons are out of
| the question, but it could still be a quick way to deny an
| aggressor shelter? That would explain why there are no corpses
| found in the houses.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It would be compatible with the food, etc. still found in the
| houses, if it was a "scorched earth" type defense then you want
| to leave the aggressor nothing that they could use, so anything
| you cannot carry would get burned. That would require rather
| large-scale warfare to be common, though, and it doesn't sound
| like they think that was the case yet.
|
| Of course, another possibility was disease. They didn't know
| why the disease was happening, so they burned everything except
| the people. It may even have worked sometimes, depending on the
| disease. I'm probably only thinking of this because I'm reading
| it in the middle of a pandemic, though.
| runarberg wrote:
| They mention the theory of disease in the Wikipedia article
| but dismiss it on grounds that the fires were so destructive
| it seems illogical they were used as a cure.
|
| > Fumigation: Another theory posits that the fires were used
| for sanitary reasons to smoke or fumigate a building, in
| order to get rid of pests, disease, insects, and/or witches.
| However, the evidence does not support this viewpoint. All of
| the structures within these settlements were completely
| burned and destroyed. Because the damage from the fire was
| almost total for the entire settlement, it would be illogical
| if fumigation was the only intent.[2][3]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > All of the structures within these settlements were
| completely burned and destroyed
|
| This is only a paradox is the burning was meant to rid the
| structures of something while remaining usable - something
| specific to fumigation.
|
| Maybe the structures, and some of their contents, _needed_
| to be destroyed due to some unknown contaminating negative
| (black magic /spirits, insects/pests, disease) - maybe even
| the whole settlement?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think of fumigation as meaning "get rid of pests", as
| opposed to getting rid of a disease (although obviously the
| two could be related). But given the fact that they
| probably didn't have a great understanding of how disease
| happened, I wouldn't bet too much on our intuition
| regarding their intuition, in any case.
| runarberg wrote:
| The article lists: _"pests, disease, insects, and /or
| witches"_. So I think they've considered that already.
| runarberg wrote:
| Not exactly "defense", but we saw something similar happening
| in the resent Armenia-Azerbaijan war. After they finally
| reached a ceasefire and many ethnic Armenians were forced to
| abandon their homes in the Nagorno-Karabakh region as a part of
| the peace deal. Many former residents burned their houses
| before they left. The reason they gave in interviews was they
| would rather see their house burned then to fathom the idea
| that their "enemies" would move into them.
| notwedtm wrote:
| This is just a scorched earth policy.
| hguant wrote:
| No, scorched earth policy is top down, systematic
| destruction of the strategic assets in an area to deny
| their use to an enemy, either to make the logistics of
| invasion more difficult (Russia during Napolean's winter
| expedy), to punish the inhabitants (Sherman's March during
| the US Civil War) or destroy the assets that made invasion
| worth it (burning oil fields, or Taiwan's bombs under
| TSMC).
|
| This is just angry folks not want their family homes
| occupied by a national enemy. If we were seeing scorched
| earth, there'd be widespread destruction of roads, the
| power grid, any industrial facilities, and probably
| chemical posioning of any agricultural land
| aasasd wrote:
| Btw, a journalist who spoke to locals said some of the
| Armenians left the houses intact because they remembered
| moving into houses left from Azerbaijanis the last time
| around.
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| >In their experiment, Bankoff and Winter constructed a model of a
| partially dilapidated Neolithic house, and then set it on fire in
| a way that would replicate how an accidental fire would have
| perhaps started from an untended cooking-hearth fire.
|
| Just a thought from an armchair-anthropologist here.
|
| Perhaps a chemical reaction transpired over the course of the
| typical duration of a Neolithic house before it burned?
|
| Unless they built it and waited a few decades before burning it
| down... it's not the same thing.
|
| Another idea is that perhaps more dung was used than we imagine?
|
| In which case if the building was mostly made of fuel and less
| clay I could see it building up enough heat to vitrify the clay.
| mleonhard wrote:
| This is the first time I've heard the idea of using dung as a
| building material. Do you have a link to some information about
| it?
|
| Mud walls often contain grass or other fibrous plants. Dung
| decomposes and crumbles. I expect that dung in walls will rot
| the plant fibers.
| cedex12 wrote:
| start here maybe? https://hal.archives-
| ouvertes.fr/hal-01876848/document
| mleonhard wrote:
| Excellent. Thank you.
| ck2 wrote:
| When something makes little sense it's probably based in
| religion.
|
| Some kind of ritual to ward off something.
|
| Good crop year, bad crop year, etc.
| foreigner wrote:
| Missing the obvious answer: dragons.
| egrefen wrote:
| I don't know why more people aren't talking about this. It's
| the clearest explanation.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Perhaps it was all of the above: Accidents, war, etc...
| [deleted]
| peter_retief wrote:
| My first thought was that people burnt the house to clean out
| parasites and bad smells. Second thought was firing the mud
| bricks. Third thought was some sort of aggression.
| keiferski wrote:
| The "domicide" theory reminds me of how Japan historically
| treated architecture. Because of frequent tsunamis, earthquakes
| and other natural disasters, plus the influence of Shinto and Zen
| Buddhism, a preference for impermanence developed. Hence even
| many "historic" buildings are actually rebuilt from scratch every
| so often. The essence of the building is not seen to be in its
| pure material form, but rather its overall concept. An
| interesting response to the Theseus Paradox, for sure.
|
| The Ise Shrine is a good example:
|
| _The shrine buildings at Naiku and Geku, as well as the Uji
| Bridge, are rebuilt every 20 years as a part of the Shinto belief
| of the death and renewal of nature and the impermanence of all
| things and as a way of passing building techniques from one
| generation to the next. The twenty-year renewal process is called
| the Shikinen Sengu. Although the goal of Sengu is to get the
| shrine built within the 20-year period, there have been some
| instances, especially because of war, where the shrine building
| process is postponed or delayed.[16] The original physical
| purpose of the Sengu process is unknown. However, it is believed
| that it serves to maintain the longevity of the shrine, or
| possibly as a gesture to the deity enclosed within the shrine.
| Historically, this cyclical reconstruction has been practiced for
| many years in various shrines throughout Japan, meaning that it
| is not a process exclusive to Ise. The entire reconstruction
| process takes more or less 17 years, with the initial years
| focusing on project organization and general planning, and the
| last 8 years focusing on the physical construction of the
| shrine._
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
|
| I can't find any links on the concept in general but here is a
| somewhat related one:
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/how-japan-makes-houses...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Much of Eastern religion/philosophy is based in metaphysical
| idealism compared to western materialism which is why the
| specific arrangement of materials of a building is not treated
| as being important compared to the conceptual existence of the
| building. The ship of theseus is whatever he uses to cross the
| water; the planks it's made of are of no relevance. "ship" is
| just a designation of use.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Been there, essentially they have two shrine sites side-by-
| side, with one being in-use while the other is being rebuilt.
| This was in 2006, so there's a good chance that if I never
| visit again, I'll be looking at the "new" building rather than
| the "old". However, the "new" building will have been the
| newest incarnation of the one that was there before I was born.
|
| On another note, it's funny that this comes up a day after the
| Wandavision finale.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Green-blue deployments of buildings
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| The got tired of making 20 trips to Home Depot to repair a leaky
| sink.
|
| But seriously, I think it's primarily fumigation, war, and
| probably expanding families. Without large lodges, smaller
| structures were probably rebuilt or remodeled as families grew.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You don't burn down your village because the jones' first son
| just married a girl. You help the jones family to build an
| extra room.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| It could be that as locations aged, better sites (for any number
| of practical reasons ... crops, grazing, water, disease) were
| found. Once moved away from, the old site might seem welcoming to
| unwanted neighbors.
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