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Patter Song posted:On the one hand, he gets to be known as "The Grand Historian" for all time. Does castration come with tenure?
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Mar 20, 2017 03:28
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So I'm actually on vacation in Rome right now, which has been all sorts of fun. Today I did the Forum, and I have a (possibly dumb) question: how exactly does a part of a city just get buried? Especially a region that was once so central. I mean that both practically - where does all the stuff to bury it come from - and theoretically - how does a continuously occupied region just sort of fade away under a few dozen feet of dirt?
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Mar 20, 2017 18:27
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Due to people being dicks, basically. In the early middle ages most of the structures were dismantled and reshuffled to build castles, and in the late middle ages these were torn down and the placed used as a dumping ground. The combination of debris and garbage are probably what caused the rising ground levels.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:00
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I'm not sure about Rome but in cities in the Middle-East, that happened because they were actively occupied for a long time. Buildings are pulled down or collapse, and people rebuild right on top of the rubble. Do that for a couple thousand years and you've got a tell. And I think a sizable part of ancient Rome was in the Tiber's flood plain. Probably the part of the city were the lower class insulae were? But also definitely the Forum since it used to be marshland. When the city's population shrank, the remaining inhabitants would have lived on higher ground. Floods would have helped bury the Forum once it was abandoned.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:05
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Lord Hydronium posted:So I'm actually on vacation in Rome right now, which has been all sorts of fun. Today I did the Forum, and I have a (possibly dumb) question: how exactly does a part of a city just get buried? Especially a region that was once so central. I mean that both practically - where does all the stuff to bury it come from - and theoretically - how does a continuously occupied region just sort of fade away under a few dozen feet of dirt? Before trash collection, people dumped whatever wherever, and you build whatever on top of whatever was there before, whether it was a building or a trash heap. For example, if you build a house where a different house used to be, you fill in with other debris until it's level, rather than removing what's there, and voila: you have buried a ruin under your house. Repeat over a couple thousand years and you have many layers of city.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:10
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I recall Herodotus writing something about Finns living in holes in the ground and being the lowest form of human life.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:19
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Even relatively modern cities end up built that way. Especially when you have cities built where there were originally lots of hills and valleys, it's not uncommon in the least to lop off the tops of hills and dump it into the valleys, often over existing buildings that have been partially stripped for materials and bam - nice level land to build your new stuff on. Or you have stuff like Seattle or Chicago where the "land" level of the downtown was intentionally raised with fill, turning floors that used to be ground level into a new basement in buildings that stayed standing, and burying the foundations and low floors of other buildings entirely, which later had new buildings built on top. In Seattle in particular, the new ground level was as high as 30 feet above the old, meaning old low lying buildings were often just abandoned during the process - particularly since the idea to raise the ground level came in the aftermath of a large fire in the city that had already ruined tons of the buildings in question.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:24
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It's easy to believe the world is a static place which stays the same year in and year out give her enough time however and the earth inevitably relieves us of such assumptions. It doesn't just take a disaster. I visited an abandoned house by a small creek recently, probably vacated in the late seventies or eighties. We had pictures of a family out grilling on a big brick barbecue which was at least four or five feet tall taken probably in the sixties or seventies, today it stuck just a foot or so out of the floodplain.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:28
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JaucheCharly posted:I recall Herodotus writing something about Finns living in holes in the ground and being the lowest form of human life. So his stories really were based on fact?
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Mar 20, 2017 19:30
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fishmech posted:Even relatively modern cities end up built that way. Especially when you have cities built where there were originally lots of hills and valleys, it's not uncommon in the least to lop off the tops of hills and dump it into the valleys, often over existing buildings that have been partially stripped for materials and bam - nice level land to build your new stuff on. And you can go on a kickass tour of the old Seattle sitting beneath the current one
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Mar 20, 2017 19:30
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Reykjavík has a museum built around the ruins of a 9th century longhouse which is a few meters below street level. Part of the museum is a cross section of the layers of earth to highlight the so called settlement layer, a layer which all of the oldest archaeological remains in Iceland are either slightly above or below. The layer is heavy in ash due to a volcanic erruption and since we know that erruption occured in the late 9th century it is used to date the settlement of Iceland. Which is to say 867 AD give or take 2 years.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:40
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Lord Hydronium posted:So I'm actually on vacation in Rome right now, which has been all sorts of fun. Today I did the Forum, and I have a (possibly dumb) question: how exactly does a part of a city just get buried? Especially a region that was once so central. I mean that both practically - where does all the stuff to bury it come from - and theoretically - how does a continuously occupied region just sort of fade away under a few dozen feet of dirt? When I was there last month, the National Roman Museum (right up the hill!) had a good primer on just how it happened in the Archaeology and Me exhibit (if it's still there). Highly recommend stopping by if you have the time, really cool restoration of a roman villa up on the top floor. http://archeoroma.beniculturali.it/en/museums/national-roman-museum-palazzo-massimo-alle-terme edit: it's not just overbuild either, Mussolini demolished some big rear end hills to get at the bulk of the Forum sites, I think part of the issue with the abandonment of the forums was because of some sewage-based flooding that occurred during the 12th century, but I forgot the specifics. Immanentized fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Mar 20, 2017 |
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Mar 20, 2017 19:44
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Immanentized posted:When I was there last month, the National Roman Museum (right up the hill!) had a good primer on just how it happened in the Archaeology and Me exhibit (if it's still there). Highly recommend stopping by if you have the time, really cool restoration of a roman villa up on the top floor. Much of Rome suffered frequent floods throughout history, and floods inevitably put down huge quantities of mud and sewage. For example one flood of Florence in 1966 left behind more than 600,000 tons of debris, in places up to a meter thick. Cleaning that kind of mess up by hand is no easy task. Here's a painting of one Roman flood from the 19th century. 
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Mar 20, 2017 20:07
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Belgrade gets razed on average once every 50 years or so, and has been doing so since around 3rd century BC. You can say that the city was built on top of rich Belgrade deposits. 
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Mar 20, 2017 20:17
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Ein Sexmonster posted:So his stories really were based on fact? Hey, only some Finns ever lived in holes. Most spent the night submerged in bogs.
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Mar 20, 2017 20:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Hey, only some Finns ever lived in holes. Most spent the night submerged in bogs. The rent on those holes is outrageous
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Mar 20, 2017 20:40
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Hey, only some Finns ever lived in holes. Most spent the night submerged in bogs. These subtleties always get lost in transmission.
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Mar 20, 2017 20:41
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JaucheCharly posted:I recall Herodotus writing something about Finns living in holes in the ground and being the lowest form of human life. That might have been Tacitus. quote:"In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither resort the young. Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defense of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished."
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Mar 20, 2017 21:17
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Venice has a problem now that it's sinking, and it's had that problem for centuries, even before rising sea levels, because it's built on mud. Previous generations just kept building up as the city went down.
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Mar 20, 2017 22:07
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Lord Hydronium posted:So I'm actually on vacation in Rome right now, which has been all sorts of fun. Today I did the Forum, and I have a (possibly dumb) question: how exactly does a part of a city just get buried? Especially a region that was once so central. I mean that both practically - where does all the stuff to bury it come from - and theoretically - how does a continuously occupied region just sort of fade away under a few dozen feet of dirt? Since you're in Rome, do yourself a favor and visit the Crypta Balbi museum, which is literally about exactly that. It takes you through the history of part of a block, from the 1st century theater of Balbus, through the Middle Ages, and to the present day. It's amazing, and massively undervisited.
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Mar 21, 2017 01:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:Venice has a problem now that it's sinking, and it's had that problem for centuries, even before rising sea levels, because it's built on mud. Previous generations just kept building up as the city went down. It's super weird to watch water seep up from the ground in st marks square
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Mar 21, 2017 02:09
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The Venetians of days gone by wouldn't have let things get so bad, they would have figured out a solution and then sailed off and stolen it from a neighbor.
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Mar 21, 2017 04:23
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mythomanic posted:It's super weird to watch water seep up from the ground in st marks square HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 05:01
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Grevling posted:That might have been Tacitus.
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Mar 21, 2017 05:10
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HEY GAIL posted:hold on, in that they have fully mastered Stoicism, they seem like the highest form of human life Stoicism looks a lot more noble when you have slaves to ignore. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:The Venetians of days gone by wouldn't have let things get so bad, they would have figured out a solution and then sailed off and stolen it from a neighbor. I laughed
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Mar 21, 2017 07:52
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HEY GAIL posted:according to some article i read, if you jump rope in the lowest neighborhoods in new orleans, you can feel the waterlogged earth tremble like a drumskin you just punched You have the link? I'm pretty skeptical.
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Mar 21, 2017 15:47
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio There's always the "build a mountain of trash" option.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:14
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Thanks for all the explanations! It's still slightly hard to picture, but I think part of that is wrapping my head around the timescales involved - the timespan from the height of the city to even the early Middle Ages is many times longer than the entire history of my country ( ). The fact that people were moving away from the Forum area as the population shrank helps explain a lot too.Today was my last day (I'm in Venice now), so unfortunately despite the suggestions I wasn't able to check out all the places mentioned. I was leaving from Termini and had some time to kill, though, so I was able to pop into the National Museum across the street and look at all the statues and frescoes, which was pretty neat. Art history isn't normally my thing, but the evolution of artistic styles from the early Imperial era to late antiquity was quite interesting to see.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:48
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ulmont posted:You have the link? I'm pretty skeptical. it's rad that that's down there, imagine if venice were also the ruhr and that's southern Louisiana. i mean, you can't expect people not to put that poo poo at the mouth of the biggest river we have... edit: here it is, "The Control of Nature," 1987. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya quote:Torrential rains fall on New Orleans—enough to cause flash floods inside the municipal walls. The water has nowhere to go. Left on its own, it would form a lake, rising inexorably from one level of the economy to the next. So it has to be pumped out. Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the city’s subsidence. Where marshes have been drained to create tracts for new housing, ground will shrink, too. People buy landfill to keep up with the Joneses. In the words of Bob Fairless, of the New Orleans District engineers, “It’s almost an annual spring ritual to get a load of dirt and fill in the low spots on your lawn.” A child jumping up and down on such a lawn can cause the earth to move under another child, on the far side of the lawn. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 21:46
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HEY GAIL posted:i've been trying to find it, it's in a New Yorker article on a really important levee system they have protecting an industrial center in southern Louisiana but i forgot the title This phenomena is called soil liquefaction. To see an example of it occurring as described in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd6W2aP2dkA When you have a kind of soil called quick clay it can appear solid and stable for years or decades. Until a seemingly insignificant trigger like a pile of construction debris slumping into a lake induces a phase change, and suddenly thousands of tons of mud are rushing downhill in an unstoppable flood Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTzn2IGRVhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KluJQEppoFw (There's an extended version of this explaining the physics and extent of the disaster which you can find in the related videos)
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Mar 21, 2017 23:39
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the foolish man built his house upon sand, and then venice and new orleans built their houses upon pudding
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Mar 22, 2017 00:21
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HEY GAIL posted:i've been trying to find it, it's in a New Yorker article on a really important levee system they have protecting an industrial center in southern Louisiana but i forgot the title Ahh, ok. So during the really rainy season. I'll buy that.
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Mar 22, 2017 01:41
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FAUXTON posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio Naples already did that.
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Mar 22, 2017 02:12
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HEY GAIL posted:the foolish man built his house upon sand, and then venice and new orleans built their houses upon pudding New Orleans then pumped the oil out from underneath itself so it would sink even more.
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Mar 22, 2017 02:26
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FAUXTON posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio
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Mar 22, 2017 02:51
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Deteriorata posted:New Orleans then pumped the oil out from underneath itself so it would sink even more.
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Mar 22, 2017 05:02
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HEY GAIL posted:imagine if venice had oil 
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Mar 22, 2017 05:21
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HEY GAIL posted:
This is a great article and everyone should read it even it its like a small book.
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Mar 22, 2017 06:21
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GoutPatrol posted:This is a great article and everyone should read it even it its like a small book. Goddamn yeah. Best read I've had in a while. And lol adios New Orleans 
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Mar 22, 2017 20:47
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Gout Patrol, i think by your avatar that you are Australian--New Yorker is an American magazine that's full of great articles like that, and about half of them are available on the internet without a subscription it's hard to pick a favorite part of that article but i'd have to say imagining the accents of the people involved
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Mar 22, 2017 21:06
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