darn … i gave it up a few years ago as I had a seriously busy job and no time to follow several busy lists. Let me scrounge around and see if there is still anythiong going on.
LOL, all the mentioned professions are seriously smelly. Actually, bog of unendurable stench quality.
Woad is a plant, that is rotted in stale urine.
Linen is the strings [sort of like from a stalk of celery] that you plunk the stalks of flax into water to rot [rhet] and then it is pounded to separate out the fibers [isnt it in the more recent vanity fair that there is a rhetting scene in the workhouse? all the people pounding plants on the pillars]
murex dye is made by soaking the little shellfish in salt water.
Tanning was done with various yucky liquids, including stale urine.
Glue could be made from rendered animal hides and hoves or fish skin and bones,
An abbatoire is a slaughter house. Piss, shit and blood. Yummy.
Frequently these professions were restricted to outside town limits to keep the stench away from the place.
I was thinking more that, often such places are all on the outskirts of urban areas - but often segregated by how the various raw materials got to the city. While flax, and other dry goods could be shipped by water, esp. riverine transport, often they would come overland, from the agricultural areas - economically, it was often cheaper to purchase processed fibers and transport those, than to actually ship the raw goods. And anything involving livestock byproducts, like tanning, or glue works, it’s always easier to get the livestock to bring themselves to the slaughtering/processing facility - again, land transport often.
So, you’d have the tanning type works on one side of the city. Usually convenient for land transit, esp. livestock. And not necessarily near the port areas of the city.
Then the stinky fish-related stuff in it’s own separate little bog of eternal stench. And while the fish drying racks aren’t too bad - to process fish for that, you have to gut them… which was just as stinky as the abbatoir.
I am sure that there were many historical cities with the tanning works, flax processing, and fish processing facilities all in one hellish smelling area - but I suspect that there would actually be, for many places, two such bogs of eternal stench. So, since the murex and chilazon dye production are also water-related, I’d have guessed they’d be nearer to the fishy bog, than the landward bog.
Another example of Ancient Roman Engineering Kicking Modern Ass is the construction of the Pantheon. The dome is built with unreinforced concrete – there’s no metal frame to the concrete, it’s all concrete. No modern concrete mixture would keep that shape for 19 years, much less nearly 1900 years. As the Wikipedia article puts it, The exact composition of the Roman concrete used in the dome remains a mystery. An unreinforced dome in these proportions made of modern concrete would hardly stand the load of its own weight, since concrete has very low tensile strength, yet the Pantheon has stood for centuries.
The Clovis Point has been replicated by Archaeologists, and it pretty much represents the peak of the art, flintknapping wise.
Tris
Not so much.
Here’s the definitive site:
http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/spillway/spillway.htm
“Explaining the placement of ancient concrete solved the second part of the riddle. Unwittingly, research by the Bureau of Reclamation played a key role here. Chemistry alone will not make good concrete. People make good concrete, and the Bureau of Reclamation has claimed the fame of this expertise. Although a new concrete product called roller compacted concrete had been crudely developed, Reclamation’s refinements made it an economical candidate for dam construction. In 1987, the Bureau of Reclamation’s astute engineering force built the large Upper Stillwater Dam made of roller compacted concrete in eastern Utah. This concrete consisted of a mixture of 40 percent Portland cement and 60 percent fly ash, a byproduct of electric power plants. By coincidence, the fly ash contained the same amorphous silica compounds as the ash from explosive volcanoes. And the hydrated Portland cement released the calcium component recognized in the lime part of the ancient concrete formula.”
The WWW is wonderful. There’s a nut for every bolt, and there are Roman Concrete nuts.
http://www.romanconcrete.com/romanconcrete.htm
In other words, it’s not such a mystery, it was likely a lucky happenstance, and we can duplicate it. But still, the study was worthwhile, anyway.
Is it known how the largest of the Egyptian obelisks were placed using only resources available in that era? - I’ve seen reconstructions, but they all dealt with very much smaller pieces of rock, and even then, it seemed like they were grazing their design limits.
An interesting new discovery related to the OP. Ancient Russian civilization discovered.
(emphasis mine)
The Journal of Metalurgy seems to have discovered the technique:It’s all in the trace elements. Apparently, you have to have certain trace elements like vanadium and the process is to heat the steel to a certain temperature range to allow the strength-giving molecular structures to form. Too cool and the elements won’t migrate into place. Too hot and it all just dissolves. They speculate that the reason the secret died was that the particular steel needed for the process came from India. The source was cut off by warfare and the secret process didn’t work with steel from other areas. So they stopped using it.
As for not duplicating techniques, sometimes people can’t duplicate them because they won’t try to. I saw one show where an archeologist in the Andes decided to go to a known prehistoric quarry and try to make a building block. He grabbed some raw stone and a primitive stone tool and set to work. after a couple hours work ahe was able to make a pretty good flat surface and corner on the block and start a flat surface on another block to fit against it. He discovered certain helpful hints on his own, like leaving the debris of his grinding and chipping on the flat surface would highlight uneven areas when he test fitted it against the other flat surface. And this was one guy with a few hours of untutored help. Imagine how well a couple dozen workers might be after a few years of labor.
So whenever I hear someone say, “We can’t duplicate their technique.” I tend to wonder if they’ve even tried to.
I think one good example is the proofs of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Supposedly Fermat’s proof would have fit in the margin of a notebook page. The modern proof is dozens (if not hundreds, I forget) pages long. The theorem has been proved but Fermat’s technique has yet to be duplicated.
Nitpick: The reason Fermat gave for not writing it down was because it wouldn’t fit in the margin of the book he was reading.
Not so nitpick: No one knows for sure, but most experts believe, for various good reasons, that the “proof” Fermat thought he had wasn’t really valid. It remains true that the modern proof is not something Fermat himself could have come up with, and that mathematicians would loooove to get a look at Fermat’s own proof if it were valid.
It might if all the details of the structure were duplicated. Concrete has great strength in compression, almost none in tension. Modern practice adds steel reinforcement to take tension loads. The exterior of the Pantheon dome is marked by stepped rings. These are not mere decoration. They serve as ballast weight to maintain all the parts of the dome in compression. Such ballasting also appears on the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals.
A while back, Isaw a show about an ancient technique of making gold jewelry. It was done by fusing little gold balls together, to form a larger design. Supposedly, the technique is lost-modern goldsmiths cannot duplicate the technique.
That sounds like granulation: