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This is obviously a random coincidence - but there are ancient structures here in Scotland that were processed using fire - so called "vitrified forts" - where large quantities of rock were partially melted - how or why being a complete mystery.
So what's that got to do with Scotland? Well, Scots myths claim an origin in Scythia of all places which is pretty much in the area covered by the map in this article!
Learn a new thing every day :) Thank you for that.
I have to say, the pictures on that article and others online aren’t particularly convincing.
I wonder if you could pull this off in the modern world. It would be amazing to see sheer walls of granite, completely fused together as one solid mass.
Dragons, obviously
I've wondered about these for a while and I feel like it has to be the result of war. "Oh, you want to hide behind your big wall? Okay, we'll just light a huge fire near it and smoke you out"
I'd be curious if any of the partially vitrified stones are more commonly present on the windward side of the fort, if there are prevailing winds.
I’ve made similar connections in my travels
Allot of times a local mystery hasn’t involved making the connections that a seasoned traveler might simply notice
My understanding is that in Japanese culture buildings where traditionally torn down and rebuilt periodically (it sticks in my mind something like every 10 or 20 years, but don't quote me on that). Interestingly enough, that apparently includes culturally and/or historically significant buildings and the Japanese don't consider these to be new buildings from a "continuity" standpoint. That is to say, the Japanese would still consider a temple to be hundreds of years old even if it had been torn down and rebuilt multiple times; with all the sense of connection to antiquity that a Westerner might feel when visiting the Sistine Chapel.
An advantage of this approach is that the craftsmanship necessary to build these structures is preserved. Unlike the stories you hear about in Western culture where preservationists have to reconstruct long forgotten techniques.
I think there's a bit of broken telephone here. A few specific buildings, like the Ise Grand Shrine, are rebuilt every couple decades as a cultural practice (or imperial edict) specific to those sites. It definitely does help maintain active practice of traditional construction techniques.
Others, like the Nara Todaiji temple, are very old structures and preserved as best as possible, being repaired and rebuilt only when necessary eg. due to fire or structural damage.
The practice of frequently renovating or rebuilding residential houses is quite unrelated, and more of a postwar trend.
I click into this post just to say the same thing. It is Ise Grsnd Shrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
But not all Japanese buildings are like this.
The old techniques didn’t fall out because building stopped. New materials and tools are why. The techniques used for some intricate carving were sure to be lost when electric tools and computer aided machine tech came into existence. The average rough carpenter is probably lousy with a hammer compared to 150 years ago but they can frame a house out just fine using a nail gun.
When I went to Osaka Castle, the tour info tells you that the building itself is basically a replica of a castle that was sacked and then rebuilt, multiple times over the centuries. The inner and outer baileys -- the stone fortifications -- are original, but the castle itself, which was originally made of wood, is brand new in relative terms.
The Japanese don't remain attached to their buildings, usually because their buildings have been historically likely to be destroyed by earthquake, typhoon, fire, or invasion. In more recent years, yeah -- houses a few decades old will be knocked down to make way for new developments and no one bats an eyelash, but it's because Japanese culture sort of respects the ephemerality of all things, especially manmade things -- one way or another, any given building is going to fall on a timespan of 30-60 years.
Perhaps explaining why the world's oldest company (est. 578) builds Japanese temples. And maybe also why it was recently acquired (2006) - no more rebuilding?
Like Yurts too
> while the smoke would have fumigated the living space.
I feel that this is the likely reason. There might have been a common sort of bug or mold or other slow-acting form of infestation which they routinely got rid of by “resetting” the building by burning and rebuilding.
Many cultures have a ritual of cleansing a place with smoke; see smudging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudging).
It is believed to ward off evil spirits. Is some sense, it is true, as the smoke has antiseptic and repellant properties - especially from plants such as woodworm.
Seems to have been part of life as an ancient jew: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+14%3A...
Interesting. Finland has a practice called "savusauna" (smoke sauna) where you fill the space with smoke and then give it some time before bathing. I wonder if this has antifungal properties or somehow helps preserve structural wood.
I had the same thought. 60-80 years is probably longer than the average lifespan 5,000 years ago, so a surprising period for a "tradition".
There is also the Torah and Old Testament concept of Jubilee which was a 49 year cycle and involved the reset of the whole economy amongst other socio religious things so all Debts were erased for example and property rights were renegotiated. It would come as no surprise if the practice of Jubilee was related through the ages to this “burned house horizon" story.
It sounds like a system where it would just be really hard to get a loan for 5 years every 50 years.
Might have been their only way of hardening the clay walls. We do it still to this day, except we burn the bricks before building the walls. Lacking modern building techniques like that and like mortar, burning the walls in situ was probably pretty neat back then and gave them such an advantage that cutting down hundreds of trees seemed worth it.
> Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevski, a Russian archaeologist, took a more pragmatic approach. He suggested the prehistoric peoples of Eastern Europe weren’t destroying their structures so much as they were reinforcing them. According to him, the heat of the flames would have hardened the clay walls into a ceramic surface [https://daily.jstor.org/three-technologies-ceramics/], while the smoke would have fumigated the living space.
https://daily.jstor.org/burned-house-mystery-why-did-this-an...
> Might have been their only way of hardening the clay walls. We do it still to this day, except we burn the bricks before building the walls. Lacking modern building techniques like that
That's not exactly a modern building technique. Ancient Mesopotamian wall inscriptions sometimes brag about how the bricks in the wall have been baked. (Making for a higher-quality wall; presumably sun-dried clay was still in use for non-prestige projects.)
> Might have been their only way of hardening the clay walls. We do it still to this day, except we burn the bricks before building the walls.
Adobe techniques, found in many different parts of the world, get along just fine without baking the clay walls, and the results can last for hundreds of years.
That said, I had an interesting conversation a couple of years ago with the head of a local (Santa Fe) company that specializes in historic adobe repair and restoration. They were called in to look at a monastery (either in the Arabic world or somewhere in S. America - I don't recall) which had just been "burned to the ground" in a fire. The walls were still standing even if the wooden roof beams, doors and windows were all done. The monks were worried about the structural integrity of the walls, but this guy assured them, given the now-obviously high-fired nature of the surface of the walls, that if anything the building was likely now stronger than ever.
> they would have needed over 130 trees’ worth of firewood for each one-story building, and 250 trees for two-story buildings. A settlement of 100 houses would thus have required an astounding 3.8 square miles of forest.
Even if they did this for ritual reasons, how would this practice even get started? I can’t imagine cutting down 250 trees worth of firewood for my 2 story home, even with modern equipment. That is an enormous amount of work and they were doing it without chainsaws.
Anecdotal.
To build the barn on our property, my great grandfather fell trees, cut planks, and assembled it without power or gas tools. One tree made up the entire floor, loft, and feed bunk walls (~8000 sq.ft.) of 2"x12" lumber. He moved that tree roughly 3 miles by himself (with mules). There are tens of thousands of board feet of lumber making up this barn.
What I'm getting at is that this amount of work is just unbelievable. I would never even think of trying it, and he did it in two months. By himself.
So. Take the fact that they had no choice, and it was all they knew, it doesn't seem surprising. Modern life really is much, much easier than it used to be.
Just wait until you hear about how much wood a single carbon steel sword needs to be fired and forged properly. It’s truly absurd how effective pre-industrial humans really were.
Source: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
People used to do a lot of work as part of the normal course of their day.
It’s still possible to see it, just not as common. A lot of folks in the west go hydraulic all the way. Once you do, even picking up a shovel feels like you screwed up somewhere hah.
Seems like speculation on top of speculation on top of speculation.
I wonder what the archeological data looks like, 6 burned down houses and a very active imagination?
Why don't you look at the size of the area they're talking about where these have been observed. And then, perhaps, try the process we like to refer to as "thought".
In estimating the needed fuel they seem to ignore the firestorm effect when many houses burn together. Firestorms result in much higher temperatures.
What firestorm?
Bankoff and Winter are not the only researchers who committed arson in the name of science. In 2018, a team of Ukrainian and British archeologists burned down not one but two historically accurate structures.
Still, the results were nearly identical. The walls of both buildings were left intact, as were various clay pots and figurines the researchers had placed inside them. What’s more, neither fire managed to spread, indicating that the practice was safe and controllable.
There's no real suggestion that all the houses were all burned all at the same time, just that all the houses were regularly burnt out, with suggested reasons:
* burning houses of dead people,
* burning to strengthen clay walls
I looked for and didn't see "burning to clear out bugs and nasties in thatchwork | organic woven walls, etc".
Once a generation "maintainance" isn't a bad theory - drop the roof, replaster the walls with wet clay pushed into cracks and washout sections, new walls for new rooms, etc. and then torch to cleanse and 'fire' the clay.
I remember reading something about how in Japan the home depreciates very quickly, has to do with liablity/insurance of an old home. Essentially it forces the prices to be about the lot, and not the home. And consequently homes are rebuilt more often. Which boosts their economy.
They also have strict construction laws about blocking your neighbour's sunlight.
Apparently in Florida it's very hard/expensive to get home insurance too, because of frequent termite, tornado, flood, humidity damage. So Nature might be doing the same there.
There are more than "preserving sunlight law". In some places you need to get permission from local community council in order to build anything. The height, shape, colour, all restricted, for landscape reasons. But just rare places do this. Usually around sight-seeing spot or rich people's areas.
There are still sparse farm lands everywhere but a lot of those turning into apartments and car parks recent years. Abandoned houses are converting too.
My understanding is that Florida's insurance problems come from fraud eg. https://news.fiu.edu/2022/the-big-reason-florida-insurance-c...
homeowner's insurance in Florida covers neither termites nor flood. So those are not causes
A striking resemblance to Nightfall by Asimov!
Probably unrelated, when old helvet clans went on some ancient war rampage, they burned down their entire villages so they had more resolve to fight and not quickly run away back to their homes to easy life. Some motivation...
This was from story where young Julius Caesar defeated such war party, and instead of massacring all of them spared them and IIRC made them their vassals. I mean 4th official Swiss language is still raeto-romansch, with origins in Roman empire just south of them and whole current Suisse was a Roman colony back then if that's the right term.
Some Latin countries practice burning of certain home contents once a year. This "Noche de Diablos" (Night of the Devil) where straw and fabrics are burned help rid the community of pests, but is troublesome for cities. Guatemala's government asks people not to burn things in the street as it stresses the asphalt. But there are small bonfires all across the city on December 6th. And used toilet papers are regularly burned on the pavement once a week. Such is life in an agrarian culgure.
This is uncannily reminiscent of Asimov’s Nightfall – a real gem if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading this short story before!
http://www.whitehole.net/storyPages/files/misc/Nightfall.pdf
> On top of that, why would anybody destroy their own property on purpose?
As a home owner, I have a number of theories about why someone would burn down their own property. Obviously the archaeological record would not provide evidence of the Cucuteni-Trypillia standing a short distance away, cackling with wild glee as the flames danced in their eyes.
Especially in the US, but also in Europe, neighborhoods are fashionable / modern / developing for 30 years, then they are left to rot by developers until they are a bit rundown, then the city (=the developers with connections at the town hall) decide to refurbish the neighborhood, at which point they are bought wholesale and rebuilt.
Aren’t we rebuilding most houses every 60 years in Europe and USA?
There is an interesting short sci-fi story called “Exile’s End” by Carolyn Ives Gilman based around similar cultural ideals. The author is a historian that focuses on Native American history.
Well, vampires, it's pretty obvious really.
Or, more seriously, any other infectious and/or parasitic problem that you want to get rid of.
Don't be ridiculous, this was clearly dragons.
It's the earliest recorded case of insurance fraud.
Please don’t do this here. Not only are jokes low-value comments on HN, but I imagine a number of readers are already aware that the earliest recorded insurance fraud was connected with bottomry in the ancient Mediterranean.