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Romans may have destroyed Moray metal-working site
- jandrese 4y agoIt may have also been torched by the workers before they fled to prevent it from falling into Roman hands.
- ggm 4y agoIt's my belief, iron and ironstone being high value, they'd have taken what they could with them, the inputs. Charcoal aside, the remains otherwise are more marginal value, you can do Iron in a mud brick hearth, there wouldn't have been a lot of immovable fixed infrastructure to take really. The charcoal is a pain to make, time consuming. Maybe they burned that to avoid the romans having access, but I tend to think the Romans did this, to deny re-use when the inevitable re-occupation came. They'd have lifted what they could, and destroyed the rest. Not an archeologist. The best way to get good input is to post bad input and wait to be corrected!
- Gys 4y agohttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
- diogenescynic 4y ago>Not an archeologist. The best way to get good input is to post bad input and wait to be corrected! This is so true. If you ask for help, people will ignore you. But... if you post the wrong answer--people will fall over themselves to correct you. It's like a hack for human behavior.
- ketralnis 4y agoAnd actively harmful in implementation. It spreads bad information, confidently posted for others to trust and duplicate. Bad information labelled with an appropriate confidence rating can be useful as a starting point to others. ("I'm not sure but this looks sort of like a rail spike nail, maybe start there?") But labelled as good, to others that can't label it themselves, it just degrades the average value of the other information and also the confidence in it too. HN loves this "hack" and often tells others to use it but then unironically complains about the quality of answers on Stack Overflow and the overconfidence of Dunning Kruger
- diogenescynic 4y agoI feel like your comment only further proves the point I was making.
- ggm 4y agoWell.. no archaeologist took the bait. The scots Roman ironfoundry mystery continues
- MichaelCollins 4y agoThis seems highly plausible. The Romans likely did similar things themselves, for instance burying and concealing several tons of iron nails and other goods before abandoning a fort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchtuthil#The_Inchtuthil_hoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchtuthil#The_Inchtuthil_hoar... > When it was excavated in the 1950s by Richmond, a large pit was found in the summer of 1960 containing 875,400 complete iron nails (Square shaft) ranging from 50–410 mm (2–16 in) plus another 28 (round shaft nails) weighing 7 tons, together with other iron objects, including cartwheel rims weighing a combined total weight of ten tonnes (Inchtuthil Nails by “Roddy Fraser”). The pit was elaborately concealed, and the nails and ironwork were almost certainly buried by the troops to deny them to the local tribes when they dismantled the fortress before they finally left.
- dboreham 4y agoThis is a good example of why archeologists shouldn't be believed. They've extrapolated the universe from a piece of fairy cake here. They found : burned buildings and a pot inside another pot. There are an infinite number of explanations for those two findings.
- 99_00 4y agoYou're saying that Romans destroying the mental works is just one possible explanation? So are the archaeologists. >Archaeologists suggest one possible explanation could be that it may have been the actions of Roman soldiers following their victory over Caledonians at the Battle of Mons Grapius around AD 83.
- salmo 4y agoI think you’re reading journalists, not the actual archeologists. They saw evidence and suggested a hypothesis, not a conclusion. I personally have never read an archeologist state a conclusion they didn’t directly observe. Sometimes they’ll note loose threads for further study. Scientific literature has gotten terrible about drawing conclusions from too few points and over reliance on flawed statistical analysis. But archeology doesn’t even pretend from what I’ve seen in the past few years.
- groffee 4y ago> I personally have never read an archeologist state a conclusion they didn’t directly observe. Ritual. It's literally a running joke, and it's every. single. paper. https://animalarchaeology.com/2018/10/09/what-is-old-is-new-again-a-primer-on-ritual-in-archaeology/ https://animalarchaeology.com/2018/10/09/what-is-old-is-new-...
- wahnfrieden 4y agoWengrow/Graeber speak to this at length in their recent book Dawn of Everything, from perspective of anthro/archaeology
- sandworm101 4y ago
- kaon123 4y agoWhat have the Romans ever done for us?
- toyg 4y agoApart from roads, sanitation...
- ThatGordo 4y agoAll right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
- colechristensen 4y agoBuilt the template for western and civilization which influenced most of the rest of the world. And spread it.
- kadoban 4y agoIt's a movie reference, to Life of Brian.
- arethuza 4y agoThe (almost certainly invented by Tacitus) speech by Calgacus at the Battle of Mons Graupius is rather stirring e.g.: "Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgacus Although I am originally from Moray I now live in Fife and the hill behind our house is where Agricola's army is said to have camped on the way North after having crossed the Firth of Forth.
- agiacalone 4y agoRomanes eunt domus