Let’s say I press the RANDOM button on my time travel machine and it takes me to some unknown time in the past.
Assume I end up near a village but I do not speak their language.
How hard would it be to figure out what time I was in?
Would there be calenders with years on them?
Even if I learned the language would the people in the village know what year it was? Would they say “Its the year 482” or would they have no idea of that concept?
Would I be able to ballpark the time from local architecture?
It depends.
If you drop into, say, a small town in Quebec circa 1800, not speaking French, you could certainly pick up enough to communicate and they would be familiar with the Gregorian calendar and could tell you the correct date.
If you dropped into an Mayan village before they came in contact with Europeans, and you spoke only English, you could probably pick up the language given enough time, but without reference points to link their calendar system with one you know would be difficult unless you learn the Mayan calendar system before departing. If you knew a lot about astronomy and had reference points (or could look them up), you could possibly use that to determine the year, for example by determining where in the precession of equinoxes you are.
Depends how much history and geography you know. The joke goes that non-Americans would be at a distinct advantage.
Seriously, you could guess latitude by the pole star, or the elevation of the southern constellations south of the equator. That would narrow down the choices significantly. Then, by ethnic appearance and costume, you could probably get a good guess as to which general area in which continent you were on. Geographical features would be an added clue… Am I in the middle-eastern desert or the Himalayas or Morroco?
Depending on what you find out about the name of the leader, and your memory of world history, you might get lucky and identify the ruler to get a rough guess as to year.
IIRC, many early societies marked years based on the year of the reign of the current monarch. (Japan still does). If the village (town?) is big enough to have some for of civil administration, then you may be in luck. If you were lucky enough to be near a monastery or similar Christian institution, you could get the AD number. Ditto for Jewish or Muslim calendars. If it was, say, Aztec or Inca village, good luck! On the Jersey Shore pre-Columbus - fuhggedaboudit!
Of course, this depends on you learning the local language toute suite…
Archaeologists use architecture, clothing, pottery and other constructed items to identify the age of a settlement. If you had either the right education or the right research tools, that would be better than language.
Local calendars varied widely. If you were lucky enough to be in one of the big kingdoms - Egypt, Babylon, Rome, for example - they would probably date things by the reign of the current monarch. Knowing that, you could convert dates to something useful. Some had proper calendars like we think of them, but conversion would also be necessary - our modern calendar doesn’t go back that far. However, in an age when most people were illiterate, it’s not like they’re going to have a giant calendar on the wall that matches up to something you’d know.
These system are not going to work well for all scenarios. Anything more than 5000 years ago would probably leave you out of luck. If you wind up anywhere in the Amazon or Australia prior to European conquest, you’re also screwed. You might need some other non-human system, like measuring precession in the stars.
And… I don’t know how much your “random” button covers in the Earth’s history, but villages are pretty recent in the grand scheme of mankind. For that matter, mankind is pretty recent in the grand scheme of the Earth.
If you went back more than 2011 years, don’t expect people to give you the date in years BC.
I would not worry much about communication unless you wanted a job or something like that. For every day dealing with people, buying food or a place to stay, it is not hard to communicate. Ive visited plenty of countries where I did not know 1 single word, and I was able to go about, buy whatever I wanted, taxi where ever I wanted, with no problem.
As far as knowing the year, I would think if nobody had a calendar not even the local government, and if you could not figure it out by the technology(copper/steel/wheel/steam engine/firearms/arrows/clothes/farm implements/houses/pots pans and dishware/etc then it really would not matter much what year it was. I really dont think for all practical purposes that it would matter if it was 500 BC or 600 BC.
Good point!
Good point. If you go back and get eaten by a T-Rex then you’ve gone back more than 65 million years. If you go back and see yourself doing what you were doing yesterday, then you’ve gone back one day.
Do you have just the clothes on your back and the knowledge in your head, or did you think to stock your time machine with a good computer and reference books (or e-books)? If the latter, you could pin it down pretty well (probably within a day, any time within the past few million years) with a few astronomical observations.
Yeah, bring a GPS. It will tell you time and location quite precisely. 
Indeed. I’m sure you will get both time and location very precisely.
Likely not very accurately, though. 
I gather we’re assuming the random move back through time will have a corresponding move through space, lest you arrive in the year 1346 only to find the Earth is nowhere in sight.
Anyway, if you want to know where you are, do what all tourists do: ask in your own language, and ask LOUDER AND SLOWER if the native seems not to understand.
If you were transported back to a random time and place in history, and didn’t know a word of the language, it is likely that you would have been the buyee, not the buyer.
Can you elaborate on this? I know about precession, but with nothing but a computer, i.e. no precise observing tools, how could you get it within a day?
As a female, absolutely. Male, it would depend on how fast you could either run away or kick some ass … that gurkha in the news recently would probably end up on the top of the heap in many eras and areas.
Precession could get you to within, say, a few hundred years, modulo the 33,000 year cycle (the easiest way to do this would be to see what star is closest to the rotational pole-- It isn’t always alpha Ursa Minoris). Then, you’d use observations of the various planets to find a time consistent with your precession measurement when all the planets are in the right locations: With low-precision equipment, this could get you to within a month or less. Finally, then, you use the phase of the moon to narrow that month down to a day. As a check, you can use observations of the directions of sunrise and sunset to tell you the time of year.
I would just like to advise against this, on the off-chance you land in the middle of the antarctic ocean during wintertime. Your machine will freeze, then likely sink (unless you’ve built it like a submarine).
Fascinating, and ingenious. Thank you.
The only thing that bothers me is the planets. I’ve never seen Mercury, even when knowing where and when to look for it over the ocean at greatest elongation, so I don’t think it would be very easy to find from scratch. So you really only have four planets to look at, even if you’re lucky enough to have them all in the night sky.
Are the permutations of four planets really determinative over a period of 33000 years?
Actually this should be a very valid question. Sci Fi teaches us that we can set our time machines to a specific (usually to the second) time in the past or future. It also says our time machines can travel back and forth, and have some sort of braking system as well. I am fairly certain, looking at other new inventions, early prototypes will very likely kill the first few hundred or so test subjects who are sent back in them. Probably they will all only be one way for the first few decades or so as well.
Imho, you need:
a. a carbon dating machine that runs on nuclear power and
b. a sextant and star charts.
I don’t think you’re determining when you are in the 33,000 year period by the planets. You look at the precession, and that gives you an estimate on when you are within a 33,000-year period that’s good to within a scale of, say, 500 years. The orbit of Saturn takes about 84 years, and it seems that the other planets will be enough to get this down to within a year at the most. Then you check to see if it’s snowing and so on to get to a day. At least, this is how I understood the method.