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The secret medieval tunnels that we still don't understand
- secretsatan 9mo agoReminds me of the film “The Borderlands”, won’t spoil anything but it’s a good bit of eldritch horror.
- pessimizer 9mo agoTunnels through which dogs could carry packages or messages no matter what the weather was like and without fear of getting lost or interfered with on the way? The chambers at the ends could have been where the dogs slept and were fed.
- crazygringo 9mo agoBased on just this article, it seems far most likely to me that it was a place to hide during an attack. > And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones. Though they could have provided refuge for a small family, why would they be accessed from such public spaces? I don't see why a whole bunch of people couldn't have hidden in them for several hours during an attack/raid? A hiding spot sufficiently known to a few, just big enough. And then it makes perfect sense the entrance would be in some central public place. > The lack of exits is a further strike against this theory—if enemies became aware of such a tunnel being used as shelter, it would quickly become a death trap for its inhabitants. Which would contribute to their extreme secrecy. And the loops and dead ends and narrow spots make it all the harder for attackers to pursue you even if they find it. > Besides, in either of these cases, one would expect at least some goods to have been left behind—remnants of food or clothing, cached or dropped valuables. Instead, there is nothing. If they were intended for hiding for just a few hours, since oxygen would run out anyways, it makes sense for nothing to be left in there. You rush in and come back out when the raiders have moved on. Clothing was valuable, you weren't going to leave your shawl behind.
- IAmBroom 9mo agoThere's zero reason to expect remnants of food, as well. It was not shelf(tunnel)-stable.
- bluGill 9mo agoThere would still be signs. The food rots - but it would leave traces.
- IAmBroom 9mo agoOnly if the tube was used for long enough to need food. If you are hiding your family from almost certain death, 24 hours with no food or water in a cool dark cave is a possibility.
- ycombinatrix 9mo agoThe proximity to churches + lack of ventilation makes this theory unlikely in my head. I also feel that some families would have grabbed some food or water before heading down there.
- IAmBroom 9mo agoWhy does proximity to churches matter?
- ycombinatrix 9mo agoHaving your family leave the home & run to the church during an attack seems ill-advised.
- crazygringo 9mo agoPresumably it's not meant for the entire town. Just the people who are already in town nearby who have enough advance warning. It makes sense to be in a church since that's in the center of town and you can lock the doors to give enough time for people to get into it and cover the entrance. If your family were at home in the nearby countryside they'd flee into the forest or something instead.
- fatbird 9mo agoAs people spent time in them, the oxygen would run out and be replaced with carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air and would sink to the bottom. With no exits and no airflow, wouldn't this become a straightforward deathtrap at some point? Or were there ways to force clean air to the bottom, somehow forcing out the CO2?
- pluc 9mo agoSeems to me that a secure hiding place that only works for up to N hours then becomes a death trap is a really bad concept
- crazygringo 9mo agoIf you only need it for less than N hours, though, it might be a really good concept
- _dain_ 9mo agoWeren't people much smaller in those days? Maybe adult men could have fit just fine.
- fock 9mo agoTIL hn will tell me about archeology just a bikeride from my office. very fun!
- jurschreuder 9mo agoMaybe it was like a safe. If people wanted to steel something it would take them a very long time and they would be very easy to stop from ever coming out alive.
- IAmBroom 9mo agoThat's what buried silver hoards are for, which have the additional advantage of being pretty much unfindable after the sod reintegrates overhead.
- cloudhead 9mo agoHyperion, anyone?
- IAmBroom 9mo agoFTFA: This clandestine treatment would have made sense had the erdstall been built as escape routes in case of invaders, but this can’t have been their purpose. They only ever have one entrance, usually located beneath the floor of a church or farmhouse, or simply under the flagstones of a town square. That SCREAMS "hidey hole in case of invaders", to me. Like the hole Saddam Hussein was discovered hiding in. If the countryside is overrun with invaders, there's literally no place for peasants to escape to. But if you can safely hide until dark, you have a chance. If you can wait out until the invaders pass through to their objective (strategic castle, opposing force...), you survive.
- drcode 9mo agoMaybe they needed a place to store the dodecahedrons? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron
- socalgal2 9mo agoprecursor to Shape-O-Toy?
- tim-tday 9mo agoThat’s it!!!
- vee-kay 9mo agoThe Roman Dodecahedrons were discussed on HN before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44565806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44565806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332244 Several theories on their purpose, most plausible (IMHO) is that that they were used for knitting. https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/17a17ju/roman_dodecahedron_solved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/17a17ju/roman_...
- pseudohadamard 9mo agoAnd they're all wrong. The real use was with a (now decayed-away) wooden ball inside them which, when shaken, displayed texts like "certum est" and "iterum postulo".
- d_silin 9mo agoMedieval children dug those for fun and games. Explains the size and lack of recorded attribution.
- kayo_20211030 9mo agoIs it possible they're the medieval equivalents of dry-wells? Why build something big-enough for people if all you want to do is accommodate run-off or sewage? What's the geology like; porous vs. no-porous? Porous enough for storm drainage, maybe? It seems a stretch to call them secret. Why document something as common as a drain?
- sharpshadow 9mo agoHeinrich Kusch did some excellent work on this. Here[0] are some video documentaries. Some of his findings will blow your mind. 0. https://www.unterwelt-kusch.com/dokumentation/film-und-audiodokumentation/ https://www.unterwelt-kusch.com/dokumentation/film-und-audio...
- readthenotes1 9mo ago"passages become seemingly impossibly narrow, as small as 16 inches (40 centimetres) in diameter. " Vs "and the minimum width between armrests is 39.37 cm (15.5 inches)." https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-us/articles/31352078107921-Seat-Information https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-us/articles/31352078107921-Se...
- areoform 9mo agoA lot of folks are latching on to the "hiding place" theory, and that could very well might have been one of the use cases. But as the article points out, the lack of a second exit makes that unlikely. I would like to offer a competing theory. These are thermally stable storage places for perishables. As heat transfer is directly proportional to surface area, the ideal vessel that maximizes the volume / surface area ratio would be a sphere (like some cryogenic tanks for rockets). But if you don't have the technology to make that or a cylinder, then the best you can do is observe that lowering surface area helps and make smaller, long rounded passages to try and optimize a ratio that you don't understand by feel. I think it's more likely that these are are ancient fridges / hot boxes than a way to spiritually experience rebirth. I think a thousand places to store hay for horses and cheese for your family is far more likely. Could these be boltholes? Yes, but how frequently were places getting invaded? War was mostly siege based and was fairly infrequent for a given city / place (i.e. even if the polity next door was under siege at the time. You weren't) Winter and summer - on the other hand - were and are yearly guarantees.
- wrenky 9mo agoThe problem there is why they have such tight bottlenecks periodically- Why not just have a traditional cellar?
- areoform 9mo agoGreat question! Perhaps. Perhaps that was one of the use cases, but the inconsistent diameter could also be the result of them being bad at digging tunnels. Digging tunnels by hand is hard (and - dare I say - scary).
- tzs 9mo agoI don't think being bad at digging tunnels can explain the bottlenecks. They are way smaller than what you'd expect from inconsistent diameter due to poor digging. Some inconsistency from poor digging can be ignored as a minor inconvenience. It is no big deal if in one section you have to duck a little. The bottlenecks on the other hand are so small that the noticeably impede progress, and some people probably could not get through them at all. If they are not there intentionally that would be too big of an inconsistency to ignore.
- sdbbp 9mo agoWas there a populist (home) mining fad? People got excited about digging for possible resources and dug crude exploratory tunnels?
- roody15 9mo agoThink these were made by animals / a long long time ago. They are burrows. https://youtu.be/7HLqleFVoDg?si=9UdJLMS-pD6G9G5G https://youtu.be/7HLqleFVoDg?si=9UdJLMS-pD6G9G5G
- 8bitsrule 9mo agoNot like the stealing of treasures was a problem ... back in those days.
- w0de0 9mo agoHow can this entire thing be written - including the observation that most entrances are “in or near” Christian churches - without even mentioning the extraordinarily obvious conclusion of forced or voluntary anchorites? There is a deep tradition of chthonic ascetic monasticism in Christianity. Many, many Churches from this same period have attached anchorite cells. It is easy to imagine similar cells/tunnels being used, unremarked, by choice or coercion.
- koct9i 9mo agoThey could be medieval ground source heat pump. Tunnel provides thermal exchange with ground mass.
- moi2388 9mo ago“ The erdstall surely could not have been built with storage in mind” “it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones.” What about hiding places for storage? As in, smuggling, illegal trade or evading taxes?
- Panzerschrek 9mo agoCould it be some sort of jail? It can explain, why these tunnels had only one entrance.
- dvh 9mo ago3 days ago something similar was found in my country: https://my.sme.sk/nitra/c/na-poli-sa-prepadla-poda-vyskum-odhalil-ze-podzemna-dutina-ma-umely-povod https://my.sme.sk/nitra/c/na-poli-sa-prepadla-poda-vyskum-od...