[HN Gopher] Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet
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Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-01-18 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heritagedaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heritagedaily.com)
| stonewhite wrote:
| I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can
| withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a
| software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.
|
| Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE
| satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here,
| yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old
| tea shops in Japan.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| Isn't this article interesting because it is an outlier (an old
| preserved gauntlet)? If we want to compare outliers like this
| to what we build today, it seems impossible to do, since we
| would need to wait another 700 years to see if any of the
| things we currently craft last that long.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| See you in 2724
| stonewhite wrote:
| I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets
| being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our
| current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the
| means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite
| can't tell also.
|
| Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we
| stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the
| things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of
| technology in WH40K.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| How many gauntlets were not preserved? You are comparing a
| failure of NASA to the what you are calling the pinnacle of
| human achievement of the 14th century. Would it then not be
| fair to compare it to the pinnacle of human achieve of this
| century, rather than its failures? Also, what have we lost
| by not being able to recreate multi-century lasting
| gauntlets? Why is something lasting hundreds of years
| longer than necessary a quality worth preserving, rather
| than, something fit for purpose?
| anon25783 wrote:
| You know what's funny? Those tungsten cubes that were a
| fad recently will be among the most enduring relics of
| our time, because tungsten is extremely hard and
| corrosion-resistant. I imagine some archaeologist digging
| one of those up in a thousand years' time, thinking,
| "What the hell did they make this thing for?"
| dekhn wrote:
| Prior art:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron At least
| 129 extant, made from bronze, some in excellent
| condition. Unclear what their specific purpose is.
| stonewhite wrote:
| In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the
| future archaeologists pondering the relation of the
| Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about
| pyramids.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_d
| eri...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| See also: "2001: A Space Odyssey"
| stonewhite wrote:
| NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not
| a failing of them also. It was the nature of the
| business, decommissioning the C&C of their old
| satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned
| obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish
| contact luckily, but that is beside the point.
|
| But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media
| storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of
| knowledge and means even with the help of archiving
| groups.
|
| I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such
| knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp
| collecting or something more foundational. All I have to
| compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of
| Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have
| at least a bit more of it.
|
| I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to
| assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a
| reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the
| permanence of marks we leave on this world.
| its_ethan wrote:
| Satellites will be up in space, able to be found by "space
| archeologists" for literally tens of thousands of years.
| Sure we maybe won't be able to communicate with them
| anymore, but that's basically the same as how this gauntlet
| was dug up out of the ground - the knights who might've
| used it likely weren't able to "communicate" (find) the
| gauntlet because it was buried underground.
| aksss wrote:
| The pinnacle of human achievement in our time is harnessing
| fossil fuels to replace biomass and whale oil as primary
| energy sources, enabling massive fertilizer synthesis
| (cheaper and more plentiful food), cheap concrete and steel
| production, and plastics. I'm pretty sure those plastics,
| and maybe even a PowerGlove, will still be around in
| landfills to be dug up in centuries to come.
|
| I hate that I have to put the disclaimer here that there
| are obviously costs to the planet and us for this
| achievement, but it is undoubtedly what characterizes the
| age we live in (late-19th century forward) in a way that is
| arguably (if not self-evidently) heretofore unseen in all
| of human history.
| dekhn wrote:
| There is a science of accelerated aging for testing products,
| which speeds up the process a bit at the expense of accuracy.
| lazystar wrote:
| How many generations of humans improved the glove crafting
| process, prior to the generation that created this glove?
| Thousands?
|
| How many generations of humans have been writing software?
| Three?
|
| We're at the early stage of software engineering; brittle code
| is not surprising.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| With the oncoming tsunami of AI we may be in the twilight of
| human software engineering.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Posssible, but unlikely. It is rather likely, that AI will
| become a increasing useful tool for human engineering. But
| replacing would require something fundamentally better.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| What if AI creates/invents what comes after software?
| Just as software didn't exist until machines came along
| that could interact with it.
| jl6 wrote:
| One thought that we should not neglect to provoke is that we
| manufacture things "badly" by choice, in order to reduce cost,
| in order to make products accessible to more people. Sometimes
| that sucks and costs more in the long run, but sometimes it's a
| rational choice not to overbuild something.
|
| We absolutely could still make a fancy gauntlet that stood a
| good chance of lasting 700 years, but it would cost enough that
| only today's wealthy knights would want to buy it.
| vkou wrote:
| And sometimes we manufacture things badly by design, in order
| to create planned obsolescence, and more revenue in the long
| term.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >in order to create planned obsolescence, a
|
| Planned Obsolescence is an urban myth - there may be some
| examples, and if there are that's a tiny slice of the
| market. The reality is what OP said, price and quality are
| tradeoffs. Manufacturing things that can last 100+ years of
| wear and tear means those things would be costly, with very
| limited use cases.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Well I for one, bet my ass that, if we are still using
| mainframes in 700 years, those will still be running legacy
| COBOL, they will still publish the mandatory, by-annual "COBOL
| developer shortage" article iteration on HN.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Software is like plants in a garden. Maybe the garden lasts,
| but the plants are born, live and die, and have to be tended to
| regularly to survive. It won't be the same garden eventually.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| this is kind of survivorship bias, it's a uniquely preserved
| specimen... the only known of its kind
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Part of the reason for the long lasting aspect is the over
| engineering of the products back then. See also Roman
| aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably
| contributed to this.
|
| Today we have much tighter engineering tolerances for cost
| reasons.
| vkou wrote:
| > See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons
| also probably contributed to this.
|
| Surviving Roman infrastructure didn't just sit around for two
| thousand years, it has actively been maintained in that time.
|
| You'll find that you can keep a lot of grandfather's axes
| around for as long as you want, as long as you keep them
| clean, and replace the handle and the blade regularly.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| This may be survivorship bias. If you look back say to 1970.
| Pick any car of that era would you drive it today? Not much.
| It is not nearly as good or even that well built. But _some_
| of the cars of that era are very well preserved and taken
| care of and maybe even in better shape than when they left
| the factory floor.
|
| Sometimes things are built well or kept around for whatever
| reason. But most of the time people slap it together and call
| it good enough. Then when they are done with that item it is
| discarded.
|
| You can say 'look at all the stuff from the roman era that
| survived'. You can also say what about all the stuff that
| didnt? Probably most of it. But you do not see it because it
| is no longer there.
| josefresco wrote:
| > Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE
| satellite after 18 years.
|
| There's also Voyager, 46/7(?) years and counting.
| berkes wrote:
| We have been "making" nuclear waste that will "last" for eons,
| though.
|
| Hopefully the constructions (both technical and social) where
| we store it, in the hope of a future generation that can rid of
| it, will last centuries too.
|
| I'm convinced everything surrounding nuclear waste is where
| humans are putting the most effort in thinking and planning for
| ages. Or, I hope it is.
|
| That said, someone once told me that e.g. castles "back then"
| where built for centuries, not decades. People thought much
| more in family-lines, generations and long lasting tribes, than
| individual, or families' lives.
|
| And there too, nuclear waste is where current society had to
| think of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, rather than
| 'before I die'.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| It is something I have also thought about. Most of the work I
| have done probably won't even outlast my retirement, let alone
| last 7 centuries.
|
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/24/ephemeral/
| Isamu wrote:
| In this case there is an example with articulated finger
| protection and a partial of the other hand
|
| >not to be confused with bracers, which cover the wrists and
| forearms but not the hands; bracers are common in medieval and
| fantasy cosplay.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_(glove)
| dekhn wrote:
| I used to belong to a medieval recreation society and made an
| articulated vambrace (covers forearm, elbow, and connects to the
| gauntlet). We had modern steel, modern tools (scissors, modern
| ball peen hammer) but still pounded out all the shapes and cut
| holes for rivets and pounded the rivets it.
|
| It was tremendously satisfying (I'm a Maker, although I don't
| think I realized it at the time). Actually much more interesting
| than swordmaking to me, or even running around hitting people on
| the (simulated) field of battle or attending the festival meals
| and talking like a viking.
|
| It also helped me appreciate that blacksmiths and shoe cobblers
| were absolutely critical in a growing town.
| mentos wrote:
| As a game developer I'm curious to know if there are any games
| with crafting you've played that you enjoyed? (For example,
| blacksmithing in Ultima Online is pretty simple but was fun
| because of the MMO/community aspect. I wonder if there are any
| games with more involved steps you appreciate?)
| dekhn wrote:
| No, I don't get any satisfaction crafting things in games
| (and that goes back to Ultima III which I was playing around
| the same time I started making armor).
|
| For example right now I'm playing Diablo IV wandering around
| finding stuff to make more powerful weapons, and it does
| nothing for me. It's entirely about the physical details of
| making a thing with my hands.
|
| Which is funny because I hated to play D&D with people "by
| hand" while I loved when the computer was the DM.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Chiming in to say that "crafting" in games is really _just_
| a game mechanic for me, and gives me zero satisfaction. I
| also dabble in game dev on the side, and whilst some of my
| favourite games do include crafting aspects, I see it for
| what it is, which is a way to artificially extend the
| length of the gameplay experience as necessary.
|
| The older I get, the more substance I want from my games.
| If it's short and sweet, just a few hours long? Great.
| Better than padding it for sixty hours rinse-and-repeating
| busywork. I can take the hours I would have spent on the
| busywork and instead put it into something productive, or
| other games.
|
| I love making things, always have done, and it's not
| something that you can really capture in a game.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| For articulated armor, is it made-to-measure? I'd assume it
| would have to be?
|
| Expect there's enough person-to-person variance in measurements
| to make one-size-fits-most unlikely with metal.
| dekhn wrote:
| yes, I measured my arm (we also did clothesmaking so we had
| all the ingredients) although when I left the SCA I gave it
| to somebody similar sized. Note that the vambrace is lined
| with fur and leather, which allows for some adjustment for
| forearm thickness. It has adjustable leather straps (like a
| belt). You can also disassemble the piece by removing rivets,
| and making new rivet holes if you need to change the
| length/size of pieces. The rivets actually act as bearing
| rods to allow the elbow to articulate, it's really an
| impressive piece of work.
|
| Herre's the closest example I can find,
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/313682162596 only $123!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| If you were rich it was made to measure. If you were a poor
| foot soldier, then much less so.
|
| In the Royal Navy they used to joke that the ratings'
| uniforms only came in 2 sizes, too big and too small.
|
| See also:
|
| "Before he crunched his numbers, the consensus among his
| fellow air force researchers was that the vast majority of
| pilots would be within the average range on most dimensions.
| After all, these pilots had already been pre-selected because
| they appeared to be average sized. (If you were, say, six
| foot seven, you would never have been recruited in the first
| place.) The scientists also expected that a sizable number of
| pilots would be within the average range on all 10
| dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated
| the actual number.
|
| Zero." https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-
| force-disc...
| spacecadet wrote:
| Im with you! My brother and I grew up around a blacksmith
| father and made a few very very crude pieces of plate and
| reinforced hide haha, good times.
| yyyfb wrote:
| > The intact gauntlet is a four-fold finger glove worn on the
| right hand, which has individual iron plates stacked like scales
| and linked together through side rivets.
|
| How did this not rust over so many centuries?!
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It did rust. But apparently it was preserved under good
| conditions (without much oxygen) so it is still in quite good
| condition.
| dekhn wrote:
| I have not been able to find the original publication with
| details on the preservation. My guess is that it would have
| been somehow stored in a place that was completely lacking
| moisture and oxygen, like maybe a tightly sealed box buried
| deep in teh ground?
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| When I saw the picture of the gauntlet, I immediately thought of
| the ressurection gauntlet from Torchwood. [0]
|
| [0] https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Resurrection_gauntlet
| sdsaga12 wrote:
| What are "bullet points" as named in this article? It's difficult
| to find anything on Google _not_ referring to the typographical
| symbol of the same name.
|
| Context: "Archaeologists also found a hammer, tweezers, pliers,
| keys, knives, bullet points, and a completely preserved 14th
| century gauntlet, in addition to fragments of its counterpart
| worn on the other hand."
| evtothedev wrote:
| It could very well be referring to bullets in the "pew! pew!
| pew!" sense.
|
| I'd recommend The Military Revolution by Geoffrey Parker[1] if
| you're curious to know more about the transition from knights
| to guns and all the strategic ramifications.
|
| [1]https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-military-revolution-
| geoffre...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/roman...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| If you are interested in medieval armour, then I strongly
| recommend a visit to Leeds Armoury (in Leeds) or The Wallace
| Collection (in London) in the UK. They both have amazing
| collections.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Its always amazing to me to think that we used to just dress up
| in metal armor (if we were lucky) and then just charge into each
| other and hack someone to pieces in the mud. All because some
| dude born to another dude with a crown told us to. With zero anti
| biotics. Some dirt poor guy just trying to grow carrots to feed
| his family gets forced conscripted and sent off to die for
| something he has nothing to do with.
|
| Incredible that today besides having antibiotics we are
| essentially still doing the same thing.
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