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!
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.
This also seems like significantly more work than using mud as mortar. Just providing fuel for the fires to sustain this heat feels like it would be too costly to make this a routine procedure.
>The expert consensus explains vitrified forts as the product of deliberate destruction either following the capture of the site by an enemy force or by the occupants at the end of its active life as an act of ritual closure.[6] The process has no chronological significance and is found during both Iron Age and early medieval forts in Scotland.
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.
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.
Places like the Tap o' Noth look like the the ruins of any mysterious hill top fortress that we have quite a lot of in Scotland - its only when you look closer do you realise that the rubble is actually all stuck together by melted rock. The fort (or inner bastion as there was a large outer settlement) is 100m by 30m and the walls roughly 5m by 8m - which is a lot of rock!
Actually as a Tolkien obsessed teenager growing up in the area I was convinced that the Tap o' Noth was Tolkien's Weathertop:
"Away in the distance eastward they could now see a line of hills. The highest of them was at the right of the line and a little separated from the others. It had a conical top, slightly flattened at the summit."
Of course, the geography doesn't line up what with Rivendell being in Switzerland ;-)
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.
Not really, digging through the sources show it is really just a single random person interested in local Scottish history posting their opinion on a forum 14 years ago
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.
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.
IIRC the pre WWII era Japanese wooden school buildings were at least originally meant to be torched every 2-3 decades and rebuild for hygienical reasons. Not sure if it was ever practiced in the end.
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.
> 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.
There's records of it, Graeber details some instances in The Dawn of Everything. As to your definition of culture, I would say it's lacking in sophistication. And when not abandoning it, in many cases it can be foisted upon people.
Imagine a scenario where some people's hand farm, but their traditional trade partners elected to buy into the globalist system: there's simply no way for them to compete against industries of scale. So they're disintegrated from their neighbors and can't rely upon them for trade. And if you look at the record, there is evidence of widespread trade networks from people's dwelling in South/Central America to the North American East. If we take Diamond's word for it, that's a considerable disruption due to the sort of intrinsic constraints he proposed (poor progenitor species for agriculture/beasts of burden) that may present if extremely strict conservativism is abided.
Using math I’d say probably western liberal culture is more likely to survive. Amish culture requires western liberal culture since they can’t defend themselves. If western liberal culture has a successor there’s a lower probability that the Amish are allowed to exist.
and yet square nails have almost been entirely supplanted by cheaper to mass produce round nails. a house built with square nails is going to be vastly superior in structural integrity and longevity all else equal. but they are harder to mass produce and don't fit into a nailgun.
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).
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.
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.
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...
Possibly. We need to be careful of selection bias when comparing old construction to new. There was a lot of crap built long ago that wasn’t detailed, etc and it’s gone by now. This happens with houses a lot.
And I’m a person that lives old buildings and their methods!
But there’s also lots of great modern architecture that will survive the test of time. The Calatrava train station in NYC for example. Most public transit stations are unremarkable but that one is amazing.
We still build great things. And crap too. But we always have.
But yeah you’re probably right that in the early 20th century you saw a bit more craftsmanship in vernacular architecture. We had a lot of guys over from the old world with those skills that worked for cheap.
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.
When I went to Osaka Castle, the tour info tells you that the building itself is basically a replica of a castle that was sacked and then rebuilt, multiple times over the centuries. The inner and outer baileys -- the stone fortifications -- are original, but the castle itself, which was originally made of wood, is brand new in relative terms.
The Japanese don't remain attached to their buildings, usually because their buildings have been historically likely to be destroyed by earthquake, typhoon, fire, or invasion. In more recent years, yeah -- houses a few decades old will be knocked down to make way for new developments and no one bats an eyelash, but it's because Japanese culture sort of respects the ephemerality of all things, especially manmade things -- one way or another, any given building is going to fall on a timespan of 30-60 years.
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?
> 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.
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.
For smudging to have antiseptic properties, I think you'd need a great deal more smoke than you'd get from burning some herbs. The repellent properties are probably a bit easier to achieve. But I think a lot of the effectiveness of smudging comes down to aromatherapy.
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
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.
Interesting. Finland has a practice called "savusauna" (smoke sauna) where you fill the space with smoke and then give it some time before bathing. I wonder if this has antifungal properties or somehow helps preserve structural wood.
Or the concept of chimney was not yet properly invented.
Also I doubt antifungal properties are needed if temperatures in use can hit 60-80+ C. The spores might survive but even in weekly cycle there is unlikely to be persistent growth that survive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's hard to imagine that such a strong cultural financial norm wasn't popular just 70 years ago. I have a relative who was in his late 20s that long ago so I'm going to ask him about his early experiences with home ownership next time I see him. Do you have any relevant reading you can recommend?
> saved, bought land, and slowly built their house.
That's what I'm trying to do now. It seems like there is opposition of some kind every step of the way. For example, it isn't uncommon to have a time limit on your building permit. So you can't just slowly build. And you can easily end up buying land that you're not allowed to build on at all. And I'm not just talking about zoning.
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some Latin countries practice burning of certain home contents once a year. This "Noche de Diablos" (Night of the Devil) where straw and fabrics are burned help rid the community of pests, but is troublesome for cities. Guatemala's government asks people not to burn things in the street as it stresses the asphalt. But there are small bonfires all across the city on December 6th. And used toilet papers are regularly burned on the pavement once a week. Such is life in an agrarian culgure.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!