7 ms·

Archaeologists Unearth 3k-Year-Old Wishing Well in Germany

94 points by diodorus 4y ago

zetazzed 4y ago
Ancient Celtic culture was really into the practice of casting valuable objects into bodies of water - apparently this was a central religious practice for them. So what did the Romans do when they conquered Celtic territory?They would auction off the rights to dredge a captured lake and keep its treasure, Storage Wars style. Truly a pioneering capitalist civilization!
- yareally 4y ago
  Wow, I never heard anything about this before and I love reading about Roman history. Humans don't really change much, do they? Any additional reading you might recommend?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Read SPQR The Romans are really… familiar. They invented the blueprint for western civilization and there are lots of things about the people that feel very modern. With a few tweaks and lucky chances, the Industrial Revolution could have happened more than 1000 years earlier. To get a sense of this go look up translations of Roman graffiti, especially at Pompeii.
    - hvs 4y ago
      The idea that the Roman Empire was on the verge of an Industrial Revolution on par with the 19th and 20th centuries is a bit overblow: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
      - beambot 4y ago
        Fascinating article... But when you consider that the driving initial application was pumping water (out of coal mines), you have to acknowledge that pumping water would've also been a major concern for the Romans too -- i.e. hydrology and aquaducts
        boomboomsubban 4y ago
        Yes, but transporting coal is harder than pumping water, at least until you get a relatively efficient engine.
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        Not sure I buy the article's explanation. It seems to hinge on the Industrial Revolution being dependent on coal, which was dependent on a use case for coal, which was powering Spinning Jennies at scale... but it was always my understanding that the invention of the Spinning Jenny was "the" start of the Industrial Revolution, and in any case the article just punts the question: what stopped the Romans from inventing the Spinning Jenny or something comparable? Surely the Roman textile market would've warranted it, no?
    - tsol 4y ago
      When you think about it, that's not so surprising. I imagine that set up would be the optimal one for a good of unknown but probable high value. It'll always be more work than it's worth for the army, and yet by auctioning off the unknown treasure they could capitalize on it. I wonder if this was employed anywhere else in the ancient world, if others came to the same conclusion in similar situations.
      - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        A friend once said, in the future they'll be mining out dumps for the mix of already refined metals and minerals.
    - GalenErso 4y ago
      > They invented the blueprint for western civilization Ahem. The debate between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson convinced me it was the Greeks.
      - contravariant 4y ago
        Nah can't be, they were too busy arguing with each othe-- Actually, you may be on to something there.
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        There’s a very old YouTube video of a drunken Boris Johnson reciting Homer in the original Greek.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      The Roman attitude toward work was the exact opposite of the capitalist attitude. Romans saw work as servile and debasing. One reason they had slaves was so they could be insulated from it. It’s hard to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        Capitalists also see work as servile and debasing. The reason they have employees is so they can be insulated from it. It's easy to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
        sacrosancty 4y ago
        [dead]
        pyuser583 4y ago
        If I remember my Marxism classes in college, the capitalists worked longer hours than many workers, and used that as a moral argument in their favor. The Marxist response was that capitalists weren’t estranged from their labor in the same way. A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business. The former CEO of Yahoo took two weeks maternity leave and promised to work 9-5 for all of it. Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children. I was in downtown San Francisco not long ago. There’s a Classical style statue in praise of the workers who built downtown. You won’t find anything like that in a pre-capitalist society. Edit: in many capitalist countries, left wing party is called Labour. I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
        yellowapple 4y ago
        > A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business. More like 90 hours "supervising" the people actually building all parts of the business (or, more commonly, supervising one or more intermediate layers of supervisors who then supervise the people actually building all parts of the business). And that's taking the implication of 90 hour CEO workweeks being even common (let alone representative of most CEOs) at face value. More importantly, the Marxist response didn't/doesn't revolve around the nature of the work; rather, it revolves around the ownership of the profits from that work. Specifically, the Marxist argument is that the workers are the ones actually creating the vast majority of the company's value, yet do not typically receive commensurate compensation (i.e. wages + benefits + ownership stake). Ownership stake in particular is the main point of contention: the difference between "value created by this worker" minus "compensation paid to this worker" (which is necessarily a number greater than zero if executives/managers are getting salaries) would in any honest accounting be an investment - yet rarely do workers receive shares of the companies they build, and when they do it's typically a small fraction of what they "paid in". Likewise, employees rarely have any control over who their executives and supervisors even are; if their CEO spends 90 hours a week "working" on golf courses and in fancy restaurants with CEOs of other companies, employees rarely have any ability to fire that deadbeat and hire a replacement who actually provides value to their company. That, if you remember from your Marxism classes, is the estrangement of workers from their labor. They work, but are denied commensurate ownership/control over the results of that work. This is what cooperatives and unions seek to resolve "within" a capitalist system - whether by creating companies which do give workers commensurate ownership or by pressuring existing companies to address their employees' needs/wants. > Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children. History in general is filled with New Money's descendants becoming Old Money. New Money complaining about said descendants becoming Old Money ain't exactly unique to capitalism. > I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party. Nor can I imagine one called the Racism Party, yet my country manages to have multiple parties for whom such a name would be quite apt.
  - turndown 4y ago
    This exact anecdote appears in The History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan, if you are into podcasts.
- mc32 4y ago
  I mean, yeah on the one hand it's showing disregard for another culture, but on the other hand, it would be a waste of good and valuable resources not to recover the objects.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  It might all be chance, but Ive visited a few Roman religious sites that appear to be built on top of earlier sacred sites and it makes me think that the Romans just slapped their temples down on top of other religious places and carried on with the rituals.
  - csomar 4y ago
    That pretty much describes almost every civilization I read about. Sometimes, they are even lazier. They'd just re-purpose the church as a mosque or vice-versa. Heck, we had a recent instance of that (hagia sofia)
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Unless you kill all the locals chances are they also would like to carry on with their rituals. So a strategy is to mix your own religion with the local rituals and thus absorb the population into your own culture.
    - timeon 4y ago
      Most famous example is Christmas. From winter solstice to black friday.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  I wonder if the Arthurian legend of Excalibur being thrown back to the Lady of the Lake as an offering is some distant echo of that (far older) Celtic tradition.
Amrabat 4y ago
[flagged]
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  I wish you well.
totetsu 4y ago
How were those long clothing pins used?
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  fastening fabric at the (right) shoulder? cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibula_(brooch)#Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibula_(brooch)#Use for a page on their successors.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Assuming they were thick enough to not bend or break, I guess pretty long. Enough to pass through fabric more than one or two times? The longest look like they could temporarily sew a cloak shut like zipper.
carabiner 4y ago
Don't ask me I'll never tell ~
imoverclocked 4y ago
I immediately wonder if someone wished to be remembered… thus unearthing this 3k years later grants their wish. Does anyone know how delicately these sites are dug up? Ie: would we know if they had thrown straw or other degradable materials in and it had been covered up? Seems like a well being deeper than usual has the opportunity to have multiple ages of use and artifacts.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  [0] is a good example of the standard, expected quality of practice on a site. I've seen better and I've seen a lot worse. As for what you can tell from excavations, it depends. I excavated a bronze age burial in the UK where you could see the soil impression left by a bag holding remains in excavation, even though the bag itself had long since rotted away. In other cases you may recover the actual organic material, especially if it's been burned. Even in cases where you're not that lucky it still may be possible to tell through phytoliths or other analytical methods. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcT1vGyJzyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcT1vGyJzyg
ftyers 4y ago
I always wonder what they mean by "ritual", it always seems to be a throwaway word for modern or ancient cultures that just have different beliefs or traditions. But it's rarely used when talking about the author's (or anthropologist's) own culture.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  The Nacirema have a deep and complex ritualistic culture.
  - msla 4y ago
    > The Nacirema have a deep and complex ritualistic culture. In case anyone doesn't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema I like this because it's a double-reflection at this point: It's someone trying to Other what they considered to be Normative American Culture, by attempting to see it as if they were an anthropologist observing a "tribe" somewhere... but it was written in 1956, so it focuses exclusively on White America in the late 1950s, which is pretty significantly Other to a lot of people these days due to shifts in culture and technology. Like, "vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress" is... what, exactly? I assume most of us here are Sufficiently Ancient to get that right off, but it isn't lampooning an extant group of people. Similarly, the Listener is no longer as prominent as he was back in the Age Of Anxiety, because the whole of mental health practice has moved on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Anxiety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Anxiety https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2888013/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2888013/
- mseepgood 4y ago
  It just means "we have no idea what they were thinking".
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    [dead]
- 4y ago
Ralfp 4y ago
My favorite archeologic discovery when it comes to ancient central Europe is the Tollense Valley Battle. Around 3300 years ago in central Europe two groups, estimated 4000 men total, have clashed on and around a 120 meters long stone bridge crossing the river and valley of Tollense. By the time those men engaged, this bridge was some 500 years old already, which means it was build 3800 years ago. This battle tells us that there were organized forces in central Europe thousands of years ago, and that there was important road going through the region that required construction and maintenance of such structure for this many years. But we currently have no idea who were those people or even what points of interests was this road supposed to connect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield
- ddejohn 4y ago
  What a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing. I can't help but think of Motel of the Mysteries whenever reading about archaeology.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a recent book that really opened my eyes to how much the usual interpretation of prehistory is subject to myths of inevitable progress from small egalitarian organizations to kings and cities. The societies of past were probably much richer in form and more consciously designed that we have assumed.
  - Aardwolf 4y ago
    "archeologists discovered a porcelain chair on which one can sit like a throne, with a hole in the center and an elaborate mechanism for flushing water, used for ritual purposes"
    - pelasaco 4y ago
      the daily ritual, probably

94 points by diodorus 4y ago

Ancient Celtic culture was really into the practice of casting valuable objects into bodies of water - apparently this was a central religious practice for them. So what did the Romans do when they conquered Celtic territory?They would auction off the rights to dredge a captured lake and keep its treasure, Storage Wars style. Truly a pioneering capitalist civilization!

yareally 4y ago
Wow, I never heard anything about this before and I love reading about Roman history. Humans don't really change much, do they? Any additional reading you might recommend?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Read SPQR The Romans are really… familiar. They invented the blueprint for western civilization and there are lots of things about the people that feel very modern. With a few tweaks and lucky chances, the Industrial Revolution could have happened more than 1000 years earlier. To get a sense of this go look up translations of Roman graffiti, especially at Pompeii.
  - hvs 4y ago
    The idea that the Roman Empire was on the verge of an Industrial Revolution on par with the 19th and 20th centuries is a bit overblow: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
    - beambot 4y ago
      Fascinating article... But when you consider that the driving initial application was pumping water (out of coal mines), you have to acknowledge that pumping water would've also been a major concern for the Romans too -- i.e. hydrology and aquaducts
      - boomboomsubban 4y ago
        Yes, but transporting coal is harder than pumping water, at least until you get a relatively efficient engine.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      Not sure I buy the article's explanation. It seems to hinge on the Industrial Revolution being dependent on coal, which was dependent on a use case for coal, which was powering Spinning Jennies at scale... but it was always my understanding that the invention of the Spinning Jenny was "the" start of the Industrial Revolution, and in any case the article just punts the question: what stopped the Romans from inventing the Spinning Jenny or something comparable? Surely the Roman textile market would've warranted it, no?
  - tsol 4y ago
    When you think about it, that's not so surprising. I imagine that set up would be the optimal one for a good of unknown but probable high value. It'll always be more work than it's worth for the army, and yet by auctioning off the unknown treasure they could capitalize on it. I wonder if this was employed anywhere else in the ancient world, if others came to the same conclusion in similar situations.
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      A friend once said, in the future they'll be mining out dumps for the mix of already refined metals and minerals.
  - GalenErso 4y ago
    > They invented the blueprint for western civilization Ahem. The debate between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson convinced me it was the Greeks.
    - contravariant 4y ago
      Nah can't be, they were too busy arguing with each othe-- Actually, you may be on to something there.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      There’s a very old YouTube video of a drunken Boris Johnson reciting Homer in the original Greek.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    The Roman attitude toward work was the exact opposite of the capitalist attitude. Romans saw work as servile and debasing. One reason they had slaves was so they could be insulated from it. It’s hard to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      Capitalists also see work as servile and debasing. The reason they have employees is so they can be insulated from it. It's easy to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
      - sacrosancty 4y ago
        [dead]
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        If I remember my Marxism classes in college, the capitalists worked longer hours than many workers, and used that as a moral argument in their favor. The Marxist response was that capitalists weren’t estranged from their labor in the same way. A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business. The former CEO of Yahoo took two weeks maternity leave and promised to work 9-5 for all of it. Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children. I was in downtown San Francisco not long ago. There’s a Classical style statue in praise of the workers who built downtown. You won’t find anything like that in a pre-capitalist society. Edit: in many capitalist countries, left wing party is called Labour. I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
        yellowapple 4y ago
        > A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business. More like 90 hours "supervising" the people actually building all parts of the business (or, more commonly, supervising one or more intermediate layers of supervisors who then supervise the people actually building all parts of the business). And that's taking the implication of 90 hour CEO workweeks being even common (let alone representative of most CEOs) at face value. More importantly, the Marxist response didn't/doesn't revolve around the nature of the work; rather, it revolves around the ownership of the profits from that work. Specifically, the Marxist argument is that the workers are the ones actually creating the vast majority of the company's value, yet do not typically receive commensurate compensation (i.e. wages + benefits + ownership stake). Ownership stake in particular is the main point of contention: the difference between "value created by this worker" minus "compensation paid to this worker" (which is necessarily a number greater than zero if executives/managers are getting salaries) would in any honest accounting be an investment - yet rarely do workers receive shares of the companies they build, and when they do it's typically a small fraction of what they "paid in". Likewise, employees rarely have any control over who their executives and supervisors even are; if their CEO spends 90 hours a week "working" on golf courses and in fancy restaurants with CEOs of other companies, employees rarely have any ability to fire that deadbeat and hire a replacement who actually provides value to their company. That, if you remember from your Marxism classes, is the estrangement of workers from their labor. They work, but are denied commensurate ownership/control over the results of that work. This is what cooperatives and unions seek to resolve "within" a capitalist system - whether by creating companies which do give workers commensurate ownership or by pressuring existing companies to address their employees' needs/wants. > Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children. History in general is filled with New Money's descendants becoming Old Money. New Money complaining about said descendants becoming Old Money ain't exactly unique to capitalism. > I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party. Nor can I imagine one called the Racism Party, yet my country manages to have multiple parties for whom such a name would be quite apt.
- turndown 4y ago
  This exact anecdote appears in The History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan, if you are into podcasts.
mc32 4y ago
I mean, yeah on the one hand it's showing disregard for another culture, but on the other hand, it would be a waste of good and valuable resources not to recover the objects.
lostlogin 4y ago
It might all be chance, but Ive visited a few Roman religious sites that appear to be built on top of earlier sacred sites and it makes me think that the Romans just slapped their temples down on top of other religious places and carried on with the rituals.
- csomar 4y ago
  That pretty much describes almost every civilization I read about. Sometimes, they are even lazier. They'd just re-purpose the church as a mosque or vice-versa. Heck, we had a recent instance of that (hagia sofia)
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Unless you kill all the locals chances are they also would like to carry on with their rituals. So a strategy is to mix your own religion with the local rituals and thus absorb the population into your own culture.
  - timeon 4y ago
    Most famous example is Christmas. From winter solstice to black friday.
LarryMullins 4y ago
I wonder if the Arthurian legend of Excalibur being thrown back to the Lady of the Lake as an offering is some distant echo of that (far older) Celtic tradition.

Amrabat 4y ago

[flagged]

actionfromafar 4y ago
I wish you well.

totetsu 4y ago

How were those long clothing pins used?

082349872349872 4y ago
fastening fabric at the (right) shoulder? cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibula_(brooch)#Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibula_(brooch)#Use for a page on their successors.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Assuming they were thick enough to not bend or break, I guess pretty long. Enough to pass through fabric more than one or two times? The longest look like they could temporarily sew a cloak shut like zipper.

carabiner 4y ago

Don't ask me I'll never tell ~

imoverclocked 4y ago

I immediately wonder if someone wished to be remembered… thus unearthing this 3k years later grants their wish. Does anyone know how delicately these sites are dug up? Ie: would we know if they had thrown straw or other degradable materials in and it had been covered up? Seems like a well being deeper than usual has the opportunity to have multiple ages of use and artifacts.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
[0] is a good example of the standard, expected quality of practice on a site. I've seen better and I've seen a lot worse. As for what you can tell from excavations, it depends. I excavated a bronze age burial in the UK where you could see the soil impression left by a bag holding remains in excavation, even though the bag itself had long since rotted away. In other cases you may recover the actual organic material, especially if it's been burned. Even in cases where you're not that lucky it still may be possible to tell through phytoliths or other analytical methods. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcT1vGyJzyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcT1vGyJzyg

ftyers 4y ago

I always wonder what they mean by "ritual", it always seems to be a throwaway word for modern or ancient cultures that just have different beliefs or traditions. But it's rarely used when talking about the author's (or anthropologist's) own culture.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
The Nacirema have a deep and complex ritualistic culture.
- msla 4y ago
  > The Nacirema have a deep and complex ritualistic culture. In case anyone doesn't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema I like this because it's a double-reflection at this point: It's someone trying to Other what they considered to be Normative American Culture, by attempting to see it as if they were an anthropologist observing a "tribe" somewhere... but it was written in 1956, so it focuses exclusively on White America in the late 1950s, which is pretty significantly Other to a lot of people these days due to shifts in culture and technology. Like, "vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress" is... what, exactly? I assume most of us here are Sufficiently Ancient to get that right off, but it isn't lampooning an extant group of people. Similarly, the Listener is no longer as prominent as he was back in the Age Of Anxiety, because the whole of mental health practice has moved on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Anxiety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Anxiety https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2888013/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2888013/
mseepgood 4y ago
It just means "we have no idea what they were thinking".
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  [dead]
4y ago

Ralfp 4y ago

My favorite archeologic discovery when it comes to ancient central Europe is the Tollense Valley Battle. Around 3300 years ago in central Europe two groups, estimated 4000 men total, have clashed on and around a 120 meters long stone bridge crossing the river and valley of Tollense. By the time those men engaged, this bridge was some 500 years old already, which means it was build 3800 years ago. This battle tells us that there were organized forces in central Europe thousands of years ago, and that there was important road going through the region that required construction and maintenance of such structure for this many years. But we currently have no idea who were those people or even what points of interests was this road supposed to connect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield

ddejohn 4y ago
What a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing. I can't help but think of Motel of the Mysteries whenever reading about archaeology.
- pavlov 4y ago
  “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a recent book that really opened my eyes to how much the usual interpretation of prehistory is subject to myths of inevitable progress from small egalitarian organizations to kings and cities. The societies of past were probably much richer in form and more consciously designed that we have assumed.
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  "archeologists discovered a porcelain chair on which one can sit like a throne, with a hole in the center and an elaborate mechanism for flushing water, used for ritual purposes"
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    the daily ritual, probably