Frequently when watching shows on The History Channel the narrator mentions something along the lines of ‘Even today we cannot duplicate their techniques.’ What does that mean? That they can’t make a molecule-for-molecule reproduction? Or they have no idea how a particular thing was made at all? Or is it just one of those phrases that the Oh-So-Careful-About-Fact-Checking :dubious: History Channel sticks in to indicate that we Moderns aren’t ‘all that’?
Probably since their “technique” most likely involved thousands and thousands of slaves. Slaves are almost impossible to come by nowadays. Especially in those numbers. So it’s not innaccurate to suggest we can’t duplicate their techniques.
I’ve always understood that to mean “We aren’t completely sure how they did it”, not “We can’t do it today”.
You mean like Greek Fire or Damascus Steel? It’s just because we don’t know exactly how they were made, not that there was some magical technique that ancient peoples could do but we cannot.
Some skills aren’t exactly “impossible,” but given the social & economic dynamics, are not very likely to be duplicated.
Carpentry like you’d see in those old robber-baron mansions was one field like that. Look at some of the craftsmanship that was done up to the Great Depression by people who’d been trained for years by other people who themselves had years of experience. That pretty much died out until computer-assisted design and fabrication made it possible again.
I remeber a few years back how a recreation of a medieval English village required a Japanese work crew to travel half-way around the world because they were the only ones who still knew how to thach a roof.
A similar example would be the glass flowers created by Leopold and Rudolph Blashcka a hundred-odd years ago, which are now on display at the Natural History Museum at Harvard. It’s absolutely unbelievable how life-like they are, and nobody has been able to duplicate their work since.
That’s how I’d understand it as well. So, if we tried to recreate some ancient feat of craftsmanship or engineering (like, for example, building the pyramids or Stonehenge), using only what would have been available to the original creators back then, we wouldn’t know how to go about it.
I think it usually means “no one has been bothered enough to figure out just how they did it, because really, who cares?”
I’ve often heard the expression used to describe the stained glass found in medieval cathedrals and I’ve wondered if it was true.
Another factor might be that the way they did it involved application of some craft that took a long time to learn, and which nobody can do today, at least at the required level of expertise and using the tools available in the ancient society. The craft died out because later developments obviated the need for it, and nobody was going to spend years of their life learning it anymore.
Was this in the UK or America? There’s hundreds of thatchers in the UK, and thousands of thatched houses.
… or they could have just asked people who still thatch roofs today. Thatched cottages have never disappeared and need re-thatching every now and again so a small number of craftsmen still exist. Probably English thatchers they would be a better authority on English thatching than Japanese ones. Maybe the Japanese were cheaper?
Indeed, we hear that one was PM.
Right. I have friends who live in one, and I don’t believe they need to import Japanese experts when their roof needs attention.
I think it’s one of those phrases that means whatever the director/writer of that particular show wants it to mean. Several different examples have been given, and in any one usage, it could mean any of them. It’s used to imply, “Heck, we’re not so smart” … rather short-sighted, frankly, when you consider how many things WE take for granted that those same ancients couldn’t even conceive let alone reproduce.
Indeed - as an experiment, yell.com returns nearly four hundred UK entries under “Thatching Services”.
The thing is, we would know how to go about it - or at least, we’d figure out a way without difficulty. But we have know way of knowing whether the way we’d adopt is the way the ancients actually did it.
If we’re talking about moving around big blocks of stone, etc, we know far more than the ancients about the physics of the situation, and far more about how to exploit various simple machines to magnify physical force. What we don’t have is nearly as much actual practice in doing it, but that would only take a bit of time to correct. Good luck finding someone to pay a couple thousand labourers to pull blocks of stone around with ropes and rollers, though.
On the other hand if we’re talking about something like Damascus steel, we can actually make better steel for cutting implements today. What we haven’t figured out is exactly how the Damascus smiths made as good steel as they did with the ores and technology available to them.
A classic example of this, IMNSHO, is the construction of the Pyramids. There are a number of techniques that have been shown to have been possible for use with what the Egyptians knew at the time, but no one is completely sure which of several competing techniques were used. It’s certainly possible that several of the methods shown to have been practical were used in conjunction, but there is no exact record of what was used.
The mix for some of the colors in medieval stained glass windows, as Shamozzle mentioned. AIUI it was only a few shades that were proprietary secrets that were lost with the ages. (IIRC the royal blue such as found in the Sainte-Chapellel’s windows , is an example of such a shade.) I went through Sainte-Chapelle while it was being renovated/restored in the early 80s, and ISTR that the tour guide mentioned that the blue could not be matched, exactly, with modern glasses. The assumption was that it was a variation of cobalt blue, but no one was willing to do the destructive assay that would have been needed at the time to verify the ratios.
This sounds reasonable.
Another one I heard this of once upon a time was open fire cooking. Apparently it took some anthropology department 2 years working with a historical recreation village to figure out how high the cooking skin should go over what kind of wood burning at what color of ash in order to cook effectively without destroying the tools. Not that it couldn’t be duplicated, but that there were a dozen nuances to the thing which no one ever thought to write down, so they had to figure it all out essentially from scratch. It’s not just a matter of “turn the fire to medium-low and simmer, covered, for two hours,” but it was once so basic that detailed instructions weren’t required.