So, every now and again I run into something online that points out jus thow little historical depth the US has.
Here is a blog posting about a bridge that is still used built at least 600 years ago [referenced in a medieval document at that time] but may be bronze age :eek:
Look at the Tarr Steps, now look at CT’s Mianus River Bridge, Now look at the Tarr Steps, and back to the modern piece of crap that was taken down by a road crew blocking the drainage some 10 years previously with a layer of asphalt. Now look at the Tarr Steps that took the force of the highest water flow in the river in hundreds of years. An unmortared stack of rocks takes foot and vehicle traffic with very little maintenance for hundreds of years [granted I doubt it gets very high traffic, but still].
Humbling isn’t it. They schlepped slabs and hunks of rock weighing over a ton in some instances, angled the supports on the upstream side, made the pavement layers more or less line up flat enough to probably drive wagons across. Just wow.
I’d never even heard of the Tarr Steps before but they’re quite beautiful. They got the functionality and serenity just right. And you’re right, Mianus is no fun to look at.
I once heard that the difference between America and England is that in America a hundred years is considered a long time and in England a hundred miles is considered a long distance.
‘Very little maintenance’ appears to include being basically rebuilt several times in living memory, that’s a bit of a stretch.
But then, I did have a school friend who lived in a farmhouse over 500 years old, and the local church was originally built over 800 years ago, not to mention the roman ruins, and stone circles round the place, so maybe I’m just jaded.
Not remotely humbling. The Mianus River bridge likely carries more total tonnage in a single day than that bridge has seen in its entire lifetime. It probably spans 30 or 40 times the distance and is probably 30 or 40 times higher. (Apparently, the Tarr Steps aren’t even high enough above the water to allow kayakers to traverse the river.) And your blog entry is detailing how floods carried away most of the Tarr Steps (so they’ll have to be rebuilt yet again.)
Really, the only moral of the story is that any engineered structure needs good design and constant maintenance if it’s going to last the centuries.
I spent a few days in a village in the Austrian Alps. (Meyerhoffen im Zillertal) I was invited to dinner one evening at the house of the man that owned the hardware store. He had recently built it. It was magnificent, and he had spared nothing in the construction. It was timber-framed with whatever the metric version of 6x6’s are. Insulated with cork. I was talking with some other people in town who were making fun of the house: Everyone knew that if you built a house out of wood, it wouldn’t last more than 4-500 years, tops, and that only with regular maintenance.
There is old stuff in the U.S. too. Check out the Taos Pueblo for example. It is a housing complex that has been continuously inhabited for over 1000 years. There are some really old and mysterious stone structures all over New England too that can’t always be dated but predate European colonization by hundreds of years or more.
The Tarr Steps have been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times, most notably in 1952 and is being re-built again after the flood in December 2012. Beyond that it has had silt build up around it and is often under water and unusable. Even at its peak it was in no way comparable to the I-95 bridge which supported six lanes of modern highway traffic ~560 feet in the air.
There was a professor I had who said things like this. My university had what they called capstone courses, which were required of Juniors/Seniors which were interdisciplinary. This professor was a musician, specifically a composer, but teaching a capstone course which blended the disciplines of Architecture, Music, and Philosophy. The comparison was to Roman-era roads in the middle east versus a interstate highway in east Texas. The Roman roads are still there and somewhat usable whereas the interstate ends up resurfaced every 3-5 years.
As one of the few engineering students in the class I found this unsettling. It’s really comparing apples to oranges. Everything about those roads is different from the manpower, time, and resources needed to construct them, the weather they’ve had to endure, not to mention the multi-ton behemoths which barrel down the modern roads at 70+ miles per hour. Any Roman era road transplanted to this place and used for this purpose would just flat out disintegrate under the typical use the interstate sees. Heck, it would disintegrate just from the weather patterns in this part of the world.
I love to see those ancient footbridges, they strike me as testaments to our ancient ancestor’s cleverness. However, I don’t use them as a data point to belittle modern engineering, because it’s fallacious to do so. It’s like complaining that modern guns rust or need constant oiling when prehistoric arrowheads and flint knives are still as sharp as they were ages ago. Those relics are curiosities, not practicalities. No one would choose to use them if their modern equivalent were available. If the engineering of those days were as good or better than what we do today, why do people choose not to use those roads/bridges/knives/arrowheads?
Well said. The Tarr Steps and other ancient feats of engineering are fantastic reminders that ancient /= stupid. These people were every bit as intelligent as we are and found some great ways of making their environment work for them. They also rarely traveled far from where they were born, had extremely limited social mobility, and died of smallpox.
These things demonstrate beauty, careful craftsmanship, and unity with nature, which we tend to ascribe to virtues of ancient people that are missing from our culture. I suspect it’s more likely that this was forced on them by circumstances than by any inherent sense of priorities. They had only natural materials to work with, which tend to be very eco-friendly (duh) and often quite beautiful. It required much more work and expense to obtain raw materials than it does today and their lives were far more likely to depend on the quality of their tools, so they took more time and care in the making of them. Only the cleverest and most carefully made stuff has survived the passage of time, and the more attractive a structure the more likely it’s gotten maintenance that helped it survive. (There are lots of cathedrals, including Westminster, that would be flat on the ground if there weren’t ongoing work to shore them up. It’s a fascinating engineering challenge, actually.) The moralizing that we draw from it really says more about us than about them. Interesting things, but things about us none the less.
I wonder if anyone thought to number the bricks at Mianus.
I mean, I hear what y’all are saying, which is that it’s not nearly the same nor is it without maintenance. But there’s something extra special about a bridge that you can number and put back together like a child’s set of blocks. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Damn he is a trainwreck … though funny to watch at 3 in the morning!
beautiful, I love the red sandstone they used. We have sandstone that looks like that here in CT and a fair number of churches and homes are built from it [well, built in the late 1700s and through the 1800s]
ROFLMAO
The New England stuff is not in constant use - they tend to be ruins. There is a nice set adjacent to sub base housing in Groton I went to see about 15 years ago.
I like the simplicity of the bridge. And you are right, it is a fun feature!
Definitely! It’s extremely well suited to its purpose. The fact that it can be easily rebuilt (with even less skill required than the original construction did) is probably a huge part of why it’s still around.
The ancient construction that blows me away is the megalithic temple at Gobeckli Tepi in southern Turkey. It was built 12,000 years ago, by hunter gatherers, before the advent of agriculture, before cities, before the wheel or pottery, before anything we recognize as civilization. Yet they were able to work and move stones that weighed up to 22 tons with no metal tools. Simply stunning to consider.
