[HN Gopher] 'Britain's Pompeii' reveals Bronze Age village froze...
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'Britain's Pompeii' reveals Bronze Age village frozen in time
Author : peutetre
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-03-20 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Full text, open access:
|
| Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 1. Landscape,
| architecture and occupation:
| https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/400b29d5-2e22-4321-87...
|
| Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 2. Specialist reports:
| https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7bc599e9-d8be-4a49-8d...
| coldcode wrote:
| Whenever I read a story like this, I wonder what people thousands
| of years from now (if there are any) will think of us.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > "If we are remembered at all, it will be as the
| contemporaries of Herodotus and Mark Twain." -- Gene Wolfe
|
| My favorite idea on the subject. This assumes that people in
| the future are more or less like us, which is anybody's guess.
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm reading Stanislaw Lem's _Fiasco_ at the moment
| (recommended to me from here) which is a sci-fi set sometime
| in the far future, probably at least 2500.
|
| I'm enjoying it, but characters are _constantly_ saying
| things like "imagine if people from 1950, or even 1990, saw
| our ships descend from the sky..." Dude, 500 years from now
| you think people are going to have a good idea of 1950 vs
| 1990?? And this is on top of other things, like every work of
| literature that characters reference is from the 20th c.
| _xerces_ wrote:
| Reminds me of reading Asimov's books set in the distant
| future and they still use tapes and other things from the
| 1950's. Maybe if pressed he could argue that the technology
| in the future was vastly different, but wanted to use the
| name of a storage media his readers were familiar with and
| avoid having to make up a new word.
| scoot wrote:
| Which is why Star Wars is set "A long time ago in a
| galaxy far, far away..."; things look dated now? Well of
| course, it was a long time ago!
| notahacker wrote:
| Not familiar with that particular story, but doesn't it
| just reflect the popular mid-late twentieth century scifi
| conceit that interstellar travel would start at the end of
| the twentieth century and be the _most important thing
| ever_? In which case the 1950 /90 distinction probably
| would be a consideration for someone with a half decent
| knowledge of history, a bit like someone today saying
| "imagine telling someone in 1450 or even 1492 what the
| Americas would be like today..."
|
| Minus points for thinking the literature would stand the
| test of time though :)
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > like every work of literature that characters reference
| is from the 20th c
|
| A lot of literature today refers to bronze age religious
| texts(2700 years ago), Shakespeare(400 years ago), the
| Ramayana(2600-3kya), Romance of the Three Kingdoms(600ya),
| and so on. There are threads of Porto-Indoeuropean
| mythology preserved in the Vedas, Roman Mythology, and the
| Scandinavian Sagas.
|
| I don't know much about Australian Aboriginal mythology,
| but there's strong evidence that their stories contain
| accurate details of extinct species and geographic features
| from thousands of years ago.
|
| So it seems entirely possible that enough cultural material
| from the mid 20th century will survive until the 2500s for
| people at that time to have a good understanding of the
| 1950s in at least some places.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| You would probably find "motel of the mysteries" a fun read :-)
| UberFly wrote:
| That axe-head looks really well-crafted. Was definitely
| somebody's prized possession.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| That's what's interesting to me. Even after a fire, wouldn't
| someone want to go scrape through the remains to find stuff
| like that?
|
| To me that seems like that might lean towards a deliberate fire
| / untimely fate for the inhabitants from an enemy, who might
| not know where that axe would have been stored.
| tokai wrote:
| Or maybe the fire was understood divine punishment for
| something arbitrary and digging through the site would anger
| the gods even more. With out clear evidence its hard to say
| anything about the cause.
| Milner08 wrote:
| I assumed it fell into the bog and so it was basically
| impossible to get to?
| SamBam wrote:
| Good NYT article as well
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/science/archaeology-brita...
|
| https://archive.is/R2nA5
|
| A tidbit I found interesting:
|
| > Interest in Must Farm was first aroused in 1999 when a
| Cambridge University archaeologist spied a series of oak posts
| poking out of the beds of clay at the quarry. Dendrochronology
| dated the poles to prehistory,
|
| I love that dendrochronology is now at a level that we can
| quickly look at some tree rings from a fragment of wood and
| fairly accurately date it. From my understanding, though the
| field has been around for a while, it's only been in the past
| decade or so that we're able to do that kind of thing.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Archaeologists also unearthed a woman's skull, smooth from
| touch, possibly a keepsake of a lost loved one.
|
| Everything else - the kitchen tools, the animal domestication -
| seems relatable. And then we get to the skull smoothing...
| soperj wrote:
| Someone's going to look back at people with urns of ashes, and
| think the same thing.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Keeping a loved-one's skull around seems downright tame
| compared to how some people treat their dead in modern times.
| How about the Indonesian tribe that digs up their dead every
| year [0]?
|
| [0]:
| https://htschool.hindustantimes.com/editorsdesk/knowledge-
| vi...
| defrost wrote:
| How about the European tribes who dig up and clean human
| bones to make massive art installations with chandeliers,
| frescos, alters and the like in grand ossuaries?
|
| Sedlec Ossuary being the prime example, with many others on
| a smaller scale.
| Aromasin wrote:
| The weave on that flax linen is fantastic. It's very tight-knit
| for something that would be hand-woven. A great amount of time
| would have gone into that.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| you'd be amazed at the fineness of the work you can get with a
| drop spindle. Most machines can't come close.
| superkuh wrote:
| In the 200MB (lite!) pdf book they suggest the finest woven
| objects (and most of the metal-work) were from regional trade
| not produced locally. And many of the items of the site came
| from Ireland and some as far away as Iran.
| lm411 wrote:
| Very interesting. I'd never heard of this before.
|
| More discovered items and info here:
| https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/discoveries/
| tetris11 wrote:
| > skeletal remains of the lambs kept by one household showed the
| animals, typically born in spring, were three months to six
| months old
|
| I wonder when human birth cycles detached from the seasons. I say
| this because I once plotted the dates of celebrities birthdays on
| wikipedia and saw nothing but a random distribution.
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