[HN Gopher] Ancient culture torched its own homes every 60 years
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Ancient culture torched its own homes every 60 years
Author : samizdis
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-08-24 12:15 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I remember reading something about how in Japan the home
| depreciates very quickly, has to do with liablity/insurance of an
| old home. Essentially it forces the prices to be about the lot,
| and not the home. And consequently homes are rebuilt more often.
| Which boosts their economy.
|
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| homeowner's insurance in Florida covers neither termites nor
| flood. So those are not causes
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Those things are generally not covered anywhere in the US (at
| least the places I've lived), unless you have special
| additional coverage.
| akasakahakada wrote:
| There are more than "preserving sunlight law". In some places
| you need to get permission from local community council in
| order to build anything. The height, shape, colour, all
| restricted, for landscape reasons. But just rare places do
| this. Usually around sight-seeing spot or rich people's areas.
|
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| My understanding is that Florida's insurance problems come from
| fraud eg. https://news.fiu.edu/2022/the-big-reason-florida-
| insurance-c...
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| There is also the Torah and Old Testament concept of Jubilee
| which was a 49 year cycle and involved the reset of the whole
| economy amongst other socio religious things so all Debts were
| erased for example and property rights were renegotiated. It
| would come as no surprise if the practice of Jubilee was related
| through the ages to this "burned house horizon" story.
| googlryas wrote:
| It sounds like a system where it would just be really hard to
| get a loan for 5 years every 50 years.
| baq wrote:
| maybe that's the point? maybe becoming slaves to banks and
| mortgage firms isn't a good thing in the grand scheme of
| things?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Mortgages weren't even really a thing, until 70 years ago,
| at least in Canada. Even then, most people saved, bought
| land, and slowly built their house.
|
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| This is obviously a random coincidence - but there are ancient
| structures here in Scotland that were processed using fire - so
| called "vitrified forts" - where large quantities of rock were
| partially melted - how or why being a complete mystery.
|
| 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!
| L_226 wrote:
| Dragons, obviously
| googlryas wrote:
| I've wondered about these for a while and I feel like it has to
| be the result of war. "Oh, you want to hide behind your big
| wall? Okay, we'll just light a huge fire near it and smoke you
| out"
|
| 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.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Para 4 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort
| answers your question.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I've made similar connections in my travels
|
| Allot of times a local mystery hasn't involved making the
| connections that a seasoned traveler might simply notice
| jacquesm wrote:
| Learn a new thing every day :) Thank you for that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort
| soligern wrote:
| I have to say, the pictures on that article and others online
| aren't particularly convincing.
|
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| You can. We just had a wildfire here and in a few spots,
| where the rocks formed a natural chimney filled with
| flammable material, the rocks have vitrified and deformed.
| You just need intense heat for a prolonged period - if they
| could do it with mounds of gorse, it can still be done.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not completely fused together, more like loose
| aggregate held together by fused bits. It appears to be
| very brittle rather than stronger than the original wall.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _while the smoke would have fumigated the living space._
|
| 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.
| stared wrote:
| Many cultures have a ritual of cleansing a place with smoke;
| see smudging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudging).
|
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| It's unlikely that smoke has anti-fungal properties, short of
| treatment with creosote.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| People have been preserving food with smoke, likely since
| before agriculture. More recently phenols in wood smoke
| have been shown to have antimicrobial and antifungal
| properties. Eg: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37152755/
|
| Stands to reason that any culture which smokes food to
| preserve it might try fumigating with it
| xattt wrote:
| Treatment of food by smoke is done before a pathogen has
| a chance to proliferate.
|
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I bet burning the wood to ash would do it. After all
| that's the subject of article
| thunkle wrote:
| Seems to have been part of life as an ancient jew:
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+14%3A...
| grog454 wrote:
| I had the same thought. 60-80 years is probably longer than the
| average lifespan 5,000 years ago, so a surprising period for a
| "tradition".
| Filligree wrote:
| Average lifespans were pulled sharply downward by early
| deaths. The elders in any given community would have gotten
| almost as old as now, there's just weren't nearly as many of
| them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > there's just weren't nearly as many of them.
|
| 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.
| runnerup wrote:
| Women often died during childbirth. In medieval times
| some estimates put it at 30% of women died during one of
| their childbirths (but I can't find rates on a per
| pregnancy basis and don't know how many children they
| were having in average). Estimates are that up to 1-in-50
| pregnancies killed the mother in antiquity.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I definitely wasn't thinking about that, good point.
| Fewer old women.
| drums8787 wrote:
| Not sure exactly what you mean but you can have lower average
| life expectancy and still see lots of people reaching old age
| (60-80).
|
| Longer average contemporary lifespan in the west has a lot to
| do with infant/child mortality.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, vampires, it's pretty obvious really.
|
| Or, more seriously, any other infectious and/or parasitic problem
| that you want to get rid of.
| foreigner wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous, this was clearly dragons.
| irrational wrote:
| > they would have needed over 130 trees' worth of firewood for
| each one-story building, and 250 trees for two-story buildings. A
| settlement of 100 houses would thus have required an astounding
| 3.8 square miles of forest.
|
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| Anecdotal.
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Surely it's very unusual to do such work (in the past) by
| oneself. One hears of individuals making small dwellings (log
| cabins, over a period of 6+ months), but communities would
| get together to make barns.
|
| Not wanting to be insensitive, but was your grandfather an
| outcast; no relatives or friends that would help?
| api wrote:
| He probably knew a lot of tricks for doing this kind of work
| fast and efficiently and was also probably ripped. People
| doing a lot of manual labor back then would have been in far
| better shape than most people today except athletes and
| people very into working out.
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| People used to do a lot of work as part of the normal course of
| their day.
|
| 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.
| distortionfield wrote:
| Just wait until you hear about how much wood a single carbon
| steel sword needs to be fired and forged properly. It's truly
| absurd how effective pre-industrial humans really were.
|
| Source: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-
| they-...
| scandum wrote:
| Seems like speculation on top of speculation on top of
| speculation.
|
| I wonder what the archeological data looks like, 6 burned down
| houses and a very active imagination?
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Why don't you look at the size of the area they're talking
| about where these have been observed. And then, perhaps, try
| the process we like to refer to as "thought".
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| In estimating the needed fuel they seem to ignore the firestorm
| effect when many houses burn together. Firestorms result in much
| higher temperatures.
| defrost wrote:
| What firestorm? 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.
|
| The structures have thick _kiln like_ clay walls .. large
| amounts of additional fuels was required to burn the wooden
| walls, roof and thatching out and still the burn was contained
| by thick two storey high clay walls.
|
| 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.
| irrational wrote:
| Yeah, but cutting down 250 trees and making them into
| firewood, without chainsaws or other modern tools seems like
| a lot of work (actually an insane amount of work bordering on
| unbelievable) just for maintenance. Even with a chainsaw,
| doing it to one tree is very labor intensive. That is time
| they are not planting/harvesting/hunting. Instead they would
| be burning massive amounts of calories over a very extended
| period of time. Though, I suppose I'm making assumption about
| how big the trees were. I'm assuming these are old growth
| forests with tall and wide trees.
| martindbp wrote:
| A striking resemblance to Nightfall by Asimov!
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Probably unrelated, when old helvet clans went on some ancient
| war rampage, they burned down their entire villages so they had
| more resolve to fight and not quickly run away back to their
| homes to easy life. Some motivation...
|
| 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.
| harimau777 wrote:
| My understanding is that in Japanese culture buildings where
| traditionally torn down and rebuilt periodically (it sticks in my
| mind something like every 10 or 20 years, but don't quote me on
| that). Interestingly enough, that apparently includes culturally
| and/or historically significant buildings and the Japanese don't
| consider these to be new buildings from a "continuity"
| standpoint. That is to say, the Japanese would still consider a
| temple to be hundreds of years old even if it had been torn down
| and rebuilt multiple times; with all the sense of connection to
| antiquity that a Westerner might feel when visiting the Sistine
| Chapel.
|
| 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.
| akasakahakada wrote:
| I click into this post just to say the same thing. It is Ise
| Grsnd Shrine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
|
| But not all Japanese buildings are like this.
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| The old techniques didn't fall out because building stopped.
| New materials and tools are why. The techniques used for some
| intricate carving were sure to be lost when electric tools and
| computer aided machine tech came into existence. The average
| rough carpenter is probably lousy with a hammer compared to 150
| years ago but they can frame a house out just fine using a nail
| gun.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The techniques used for some intricate carving were sure to
| be lost when electric tools and computer aided machine tech
| came into existence.
|
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The Amish, sure. But no serious culture has abandon
| technology.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I don't know about that. In my North American city, the old
| public schools, buildings, bridges, and earthworks from pre-
| WW2 are embellished with intricate patterns and decorative
| detailing, even when they are made from reinforced concrete.
| Buildings made after the war are, almost without exception,
| made plain and featureless, even when they are also made from
| reinforced concrete. Modern tools, computers, and electricity
| don't make it any _harder_ to add detailing (and it 's also
| hard to believe such features become harder to afford as
| society became wealthier in general).
| nemo44x wrote:
| Materials from the postwar period are completely different.
| Within a decade we had 100 years of tech develop.
|
| 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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Society became more fixated on efficiency also.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I wonder of some of the markings were wards. A practice
| that would eventually cease, with a loss of wide spread
| belief in mysticism.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Except in square footage.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, I agree. Postwar buildings are much more likely to be
| featureless compared to 19th or early 20th century
| buildings, even regular houses. I think the economic boom
| and demand for new houses and buildings contributed to
| skipping the sort of traditional detail and ornate
| finishing work for the sake of moving on to the next
| project.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Why would we continue to create the same thing? We had
| access to steel and glass in a way we never did before.
| He'll you couldn't create a decent larger sheet of glass
| until the 1940s. Nails cost more than wood when
| blacksmiths made them.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| What I'm talking about is for example, a nearby school
| has a concrete embankment because it's built on a hill.
| Being built around 1910, the concrete surface is
| intricately and unnecessarily decorated with little
| arches and buttresses to make it visually appealing. If
| that same embankment were built today, it would not be
| made of glass, but rather bare concrete, with the only
| surface decoration being the formwork grid of tie marks
| left over from construction, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Tadao_Ando#/media/File:Galleri...
| trilbyglens wrote:
| Also a function of modernistic ideas about architecture,
| if you can even apply such a label to most american
| building work.
|
| Most of it is just really utilitarian and miserable.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I think there's a bit of broken telephone here. A few specific
| buildings, like the Ise Grand Shrine, are rebuilt every couple
| decades as a cultural practice (or imperial edict) specific to
| those sites. It definitely does help maintain active practice
| of traditional construction techniques.
|
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| It's also a way to kill parasites, which might take up roost
| in the home, and start anew.
|
| Since the buildings are simple to build, it's plausable.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Like Yurts too
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Perhaps explaining why the world's oldest company (est. 578)
| builds Japanese temples. And maybe also why it was recently
| acquired (2006) - no more rebuilding?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi
| l72 wrote:
| There is an interesting short sci-fi story called "Exile's End"
| by Carolyn Ives Gilman based around similar cultural ideals. The
| author is a historian that focuses on Native American history.
| almostnormal wrote:
| It's the earliest recorded case of insurance fraud.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Please don't do this here. Not only are jokes low-value
| comments on HN, but I imagine a number of readers are already
| aware that the earliest recorded insurance fraud was connected
| with bottomry in the ancient Mediterranean.
| irrational wrote:
| Wait, was that last part a joke? Is this like a meta joke?
| You chastise someone else for making a joke and then make one
| yourself?
| Xymist wrote:
| Nope, not a joke. Some twit in ancient Greece insured a
| ship, claimed it sank, claimed on the insurance, and went
| to keep/sell the cargo.
| distortionfield wrote:
| This was a great TIL
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottomry
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| user6723 wrote:
| [dead]
| karaterobot wrote:
| > On top of that, why would anybody destroy their own property on
| purpose?
|
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| Especially in the US, but also in Europe, neighborhoods are
| fashionable / modern / developing for 30 years, then they are
| left to rot by developers until they are a bit rundown, then
| the city (=the developers with connections at the town hall)
| decide to refurbish the neighborhood, at which point they are
| bought wholesale and rebuilt.
|
| Aren't we rebuilding most houses every 60 years in Europe and
| USA?
| beebeepka wrote:
| Never heard of this. Then again, "Europe" can mean a 1000
| completely different things depending on who you ask.
|
| At least around here in Bulgaria, there is no such thing as
| developers building entire neighborhoods as seen in the US
| movies.
| smoyer wrote:
| My house here in the US is over 100 years old. We just put a
| new roof on it which will give it another 50 years. Except
| for water ingress a wood structure will last a surprisingly
| long time.
| emsign wrote:
| Might have been their only way of hardening the clay walls. We do
| it still to this day, except we burn the bricks before building
| the walls. Lacking modern building techniques like that and like
| mortar, burning the walls in situ was probably pretty neat back
| then and gave them such an advantage that cutting down hundreds
| of trees seemed worth it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Might have been their only way of hardening the clay walls.
| We do it still to this day, except we burn the bricks before
| building the walls.
|
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _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._
|
| Clay walls of cities and forts, where invaders are trying to
| break them, and rip them down?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You mean like Jericho, for example?
|
| Or Rayen, in Iran: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c
| ommons/1/10/Rayen_Ca...
| bbarnett wrote:
| Excellent, thanks.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Might have been their only way of hardening the clay walls.
| We do it still to this day, except we burn the bricks before
| building the walls. Lacking modern building techniques like
| that
|
| 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.)
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| You burn bricks _before_ they are assembled into a building,
| not after. In the American Southwest you do encounter
| prestige buildings from the end of the 19th century proudly
| proclaiming they were built in brick when the rest of the
| village was built from adobe.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The firing is energetically expensive, and doesn't really
| end up creating a notably longer lived result. Things last
| in the southwest because of the low moisture levels,
| whether they are fired or not. The "prestige" of brick in
| the southwest was all about having the money to pay for
| fired bricks, not really their superiority as a building
| material.
| mjhay wrote:
| There is the modern counterexample of ceramic houses:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_house
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevski, a Russian archaeologist, took a
| more pragmatic approach. He suggested the prehistoric peoples
| of Eastern Europe weren't destroying their structures so much
| as they were reinforcing them. According to him, the heat of
| the flames would have hardened the clay walls into a ceramic
| surface [https://daily.jstor.org/three-technologies-ceramics/],
| while the smoke would have fumigated the living space.
|
| https://daily.jstor.org/burned-house-mystery-why-did-this-an...
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