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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 bru
by kvz 6y ago
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 6y agoIt 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 6y agoThey 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]
- rossdavidh 6y agoI 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 6y agoThe article lists: “pests, disease, insects, and/or witches”. So I think they’ve considered that already.
- Chris2048 6y ago> 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?
- runarberg 6y agoNot 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 6y agoThis is just a scorched earth policy.
- hguant 6y agoNo, 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 6y agoBtw, 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.
- aasasd 6y ago(Also others just didn't think it right to burn a nice house. The house did nothing wrong.)