Quickly run through the booby jokes and let’s get to the real question.
We’ve all seen the Indian Jones movies and remember the great traps that Indy had to contend with: floor tiles that would trigger statues to shoot poison darts, collapsing floors, collapsing ceilings with sharp spikes and so on. Through luck or ingenuity he is able to survive the traps and find the treasure. Same kinds of scenarios can be found in other books and movies.
I want to know if there is any validity to these traps. I remember reading about a supposed “pirate treasure” ditch that had lots of traps (collapsing boards and flooding chambers) and I believe that some Egyptian tombs had traps that would drop heavy stones on grave robbers. But were there any ancient traps that could reset themselves, the way that the ones Indy faced would? The collapsing ceiling in Temple of Doom or the decapitating blades in Last Crusade are good examples of what I mean.
Any truth to them or are they all just Hollywood fabrications?
Well, for one, it’d take an astonishing degree of mechanical ingenuity. Not to say it’s impossible; but a self-resetting trap would take some serious engineering to work with pre-industrial technology. And how would you keep the organic bits (e.g. ropes, planks of wood) from decomposing in the jungle?
Can’t see how “self re-setting traps” would avoid violating the laws of physics, though, assuming that they used energy to trap people.
I remember reading that, according to literary sources, the Tomb of the First Emperor of China - Shih Huang Ti - was alleged to be filled with traps (such as hairtrigger crossbows), along with other assorted wonders - a coffin afloat on a lake of mercury, and a life-sized pottery army buried to guard the place.
The Tomb itself still hasn’t been excavated, but as everyone knows, the “life sized army” is quite real, and apparently tests on the mound have found very high levels of mercury. Maybe the traps are true as well … though they would long be scrap now.
We’ve had several discussions on this before. The consensus is that it’s Hollywood serial fabrication (Nyoka the Jungle Girl and various Egyptian movies for inspiration) aided and abetted by the Scrooge Mcduck comics that I claim was a big influence on Lucas, who was a fan of Carl Barks (see my Teemings article, Onlt the Penitent Duck Will Passhttp://www.straightdope.com/teemings/issue05/penitent.html )
The power to reset them could conceivably come from the flow of water from a convenient spring, or a limited number of resets could be possible just by storing energy in an elevated weight.
In practice, it would almost certainly fail after a fairly short time as organic materials rot, metals corrode, deform or cold weld, dust and sediment binds everything up, etc.
Heh, as long as there is something adding energy, like a waterwheel, I suppose it would be theoretically possible. But yes, unlikely to last for long.
I suspect that the most reliable sort of tomb-trap would be the most simple - some sort of deadfall. Strictly one-use. The beauty of it would be that, when it failed, it would probably just collapse, sealing the tomb (but not of course killing future robbers).
I serious doubt it. Over time it would all decompose. Not to mention the necessary redundancy required for it to be effective. Poison? I believe this could be used but cross bows i serious doubt
How’s about creating an ecosystem of predators and prey, sealed up so they can’t escape and in such numbers that they can maintain themselves over the year and nibble on intruders?
What would be the ultimate energy source for the ecosystem?
Unless you had a land equivalent of those chemosynthesis-based ecosystems around vents on the ocean floor, you’d need light for photosynthesis. I suppose the base organisms could use radiosynthesis, but I don’t know whether any that do that have actually been found.
Besides a deadfall, I forget the name of these types of stone chambers (anyone?), but it’s essentially a small hole at the top, just big enough to fall through, then traps the victim inside, with walls that taper up toward the hole. If you didn’t have any tools on you when you fell in, and no one was within earshot, you’d be SOL.
I can imagine such a chamber installed in some dark, damp, overgrown jungle, but it wouldn’t be 100% reliable. Maybe if dozens of them were placed cleverly (sluices) along the route, it would increase the risk and practicality of such booby-traps.
Also, I just re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark a few days ago. How in the world did those clever, ancient, native south-americans devise a light-sensitve trap?! Despite all the other suspension of disbelief we audience-goers have to perform in this movie, that one always made me go,“HUNH?!”
I got the impression that the trap was weight-sensitive. Indy tried to get around that by replacing the idol with a bag of sand, but he had to guess how much sand to use and he wasn’t quite correct, so the trap was triggered.
With primitive, hand-forged silicon, of course.
Bothered me, too, from the time I first saw it.
Not that ponderous boulder-sized rock structures balanced to ounces and masive crock constructions able to move freely in their ways without any lubrication after god knows how many years, in a humid jungle where crud grows everywhere!
And how about in Temple of Doom? What was keeping all those insects down in that cellar?
[Mad Magazine Satire] They’re Hiding from the Chef![/Mad Magazine Satire]
sounds as reasonable as anything else.
A large dent in the Earth’s crust, filled with dangerous animals like, say, hippos for example. They would breed and thrive in an area that they can’t escape from and the bonus is that you could have vegetation and terrain that itself would be difficult to traverse.
No, not that one. Before the weight trap, they come upon a patch of sunlight in the tunnel. Indy sticks something into the light and it’s promptly shot with an arrow or something. It’s really silly.
