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I figure this is as good a place to ask this as any Have you read this book/do you think it's a good source? The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence The past was violent, just like the present is violent and the future will be violent. It just seems like stuff like Game of Thrones or Pinker's lovely book reinforce the idea everything in the past was misery, rape, injustice, and death. Flipping through the book for instance, I found this part really interesting: quote:Nearly 72 per cent of criminal perpetrators in medieval England fled, and because the English relied on communal policing – all males over the age of fourteen swore to police the community and each other – they were never tried.22 Thus, trial verdicts represent an insignificant share of the crimes perpetrated. Calculating rates is further complicated by the fact that medieval juries were notoriously reluctant to convict. Conviction rates for homicide ranged between 12.5 per cent and 21 per cent (compared to a rate of 97.1 per cent for American criminal cases in 2015).23 Leery of the death penalty, medieval juries typically saw indictment itself as a worthy punishment for most offenders because it meant time in prison awaiting trial, along with the discomfort and expense of a prison stay, as well as lost income and potentially irreparable damage to one’s reputation within the community.24 Knowing this, it makes sense that Given and Hanawalt preferred indictments rather than convictions for comparative analysis. Yet, this puts us in the difficult situation of comparing apples and oranges.
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Nov 1, 2021 19:26
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that helmet is so goddamed stupid
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Nov 1, 2021 19:43
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The works I've read that talk about the development of agriculture tended not to talk about agricultural societies as more advanced, but as having a competitive advantage. Agriculture just supports such a higher population density than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that, over the long run, if a society that wants to stay non-agricultural is living on land that is useful for agriculture, sooner or later it will be taken from them, just by sheer force of numbers. And thus agriculture spreads, either by adoption or displacement. There's a few exceptions, which do encompass rather large chunks of the world. Pastoralist armies can remain competitive with agricultural armies despite the lower population because horses are just that good. And there are some places in the world where the fishing is just so rich that the land is more valuable for that than for agriculture.
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Nov 1, 2021 20:10
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cheetah7071 posted:The works I've read that talk about the development of agriculture tended not to talk about agricultural societies as more advanced, but as having a competitive advantage. Agriculture just supports such a higher population density than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that, over the long run, if a society that wants to stay non-agricultural is living on land that is useful for agriculture, sooner or later it will be taken from them, just by sheer force of numbers. And thus agriculture spreads, either by adoption or displacement. I think also that agricultural societies get more advanced precisely because they are tied to that particular piece of land. Problems that arise can't be solved by simply moving somewhere else. Floods, droughts, etc. become collective problems to be solved with engineering canals, levees and so on, and those changes to the land become a part of the community. The attitude of changing their environment to fit what they want rather than moving to a new one imparts a more proactive mentality generally.
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Nov 1, 2021 20:17
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euphronius posted:That long quote says northern Mexico , not southwest USA . Same thing.
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Nov 1, 2021 20:28
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FreudianSlippers posted:Same thing. I'm at work (yay 80 hour work weeks) and can't really comment as much as I want to but it's complicated in anthropology and California is generally seen as a distinct region with some kinda blurry boundaries because theres a poo poo ton going on.
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Nov 1, 2021 20:40
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Deteriorata posted:I think also that agricultural societies get more advanced precisely because they are tied to that particular piece of land. Problems that arise can't be solved by simply moving somewhere else. Floods, droughts, etc. become collective problems to be solved with engineering canals, levees and so on, and those changes to the land become a part of the community. The attitude of changing their environment to fit what they want rather than moving to a new one imparts a more proactive mentality generally. I think there's a lot of truth in that, and it's basically the exact thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel: Environmental conditions require novel solutions which produce positive feedback loops. Your community hums along until one day you run into a problem that requires inventing the hammer, and then you start solving all your problems with a hammer that you can. And that hammer doesn't need to be technological - it can be political or social or cultural. A hunter gatherer society has a great hammer for a lot of problems - traveling somewhere else. They developed lots of area knowledge and contacts. That's a great solution to a lot of problems, but there's a very real limitation on how many people can do it without conflict. One of the fundamental points that Jared Diamond makes is that America's slow growth was because it was oriented north-south rather than east-west. There was less contiguous habitat for large animals, and many eventually died out. However a nomadic society is also a perfect solution for that environmental issue - you take advantage of the opportunity to travel to warmer or cooler regions, following the seasons and allowing the land to recover in your absence. It isn't surprising to me that much of North America in particular was filled with people who were dubious of intensive agriculture - weathering a blizzard rather than following the bison south would have seemed like a really unnecessary risk. And without animals to do much of the labor, intensive agriculture would have been a lot more work compared to harvesting acorn groves. The caveat, of course, is that there aren't infinite acorn groves and bison herds. North America had maybe four million inhabitants, whereas Central and South America had closer to 50 million. Even if Europeans had never colonized, the advent of horses in the Americas that could cross the deserts had already begun a mass population resettlement. Kaal fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Nov 1, 2021 |
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Nov 1, 2021 21:17
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NikkolasKing posted:I figure this is as good a place to ask this as any I'm unfamiliar with the book and far from an expert on medieval English justice but unless it goes into a great deal more detail the quote you posted seems to be painting with far too broad a brush. The medieval period in England lasted for around a millennium and saw some massive changes in legal systems and how they were enforced. The oath your quote is referring to seems to be the Frankpledge, which wikipedia suggests included males from 12 and up and only free men. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankpledge If you read the article it also makes clear that there were real implications for failing to uphold this oath. The part of your quote about juries really stands out to me as bad, juries as we think of them I'm pretty sure were a Norman innovation but even more egregious how the heck are we supposed to know why jurors came to the decisions they did? There might be the odd post trial interview but I would be amazed if there was anywhere near enough data for such a culturally diverse set of times and places to be drawing the conclusions so casually drawn. From your brief quote it seems like a Naomi Wolf level of research.
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Nov 1, 2021 21:23
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Bison in particular is a bit of a weird case, because pre European contact, it was merely one element of a more varied subsistence strategy on the great plains. Hunting bison without horses is hard (though doable) and you can't really base your entire lifestyle around it the way you can once you have horses This doesn't really contradict your point but it was a tidbit I learned and thought was interesting enough to share
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Nov 1, 2021 21:25
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One thing that should be noted about agricultural societies vs hunter gatherers is that the distinction between the two is not as clear as it may seem. Agriculture was independently invented something like 12 times throughout human history/prehistory and it can take forms that do not look like classic monocultural fields. In the Amazon and highland New Guinea people selectively planted mixed gardens and groves that looked like "natural" environments to outsiders but were actually heavily cultivated plots. In places where people couldn't rely on soil replenishment from floodplains they instead used slash and burn agriculture and/or moved from one set of fields to another, allowing the soil to replenish its nutrients in that fashion instead. Again, to outsiders these people may have appeared initially like hunter-gatherers but they were actually using pretty sophisticated agricultural technology. Also, the idea that semi-sedentary or non-sedentary people will inevitably be dominated by large agricultural societies i don't think is necessarily true. For instance, the Spanish conquistadors had much greater success against the highly organized states of the Inca, Maya and Mexica than they did against the less centralized peoples that occupied the rest of the continent(s). The Mapuche of south-central Chile resisted Inca, Spanish and post-colonial Chilean conquest until the 1890s!
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Nov 1, 2021 21:35
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cheetah7071 posted:Bison in particular is a bit of a weird case, because pre European contact, it was merely one element of a more varied subsistence strategy on the great plains. Hunting bison without horses is hard (though doable) and you can't really base your entire lifestyle around it the way you can once you have horses That's certainly a fair point, there were a ton of different economies being pursued by different groups throughout North America - from nomadic forest farming in the Northeast, to quasi-pastoralism on the Plains, to developing trade economies in the Southeast, to nigh-commercial fishing in the Northwest, to fairly settled agriculture in the Southwest along the Rio Grande.
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Nov 1, 2021 21:36
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FishFood posted:Also, the idea that semi-sedentary or non-sedentary people will inevitably be dominated by large agricultural societies i don't think is necessarily true. For instance, the Spanish conquistadors had much greater success against the highly organized states of the Inca, Maya and Mexica than they did against the less centralized peoples that occupied the rest of the continent(s). The Mapuche of south-central Chile resisted Inca, Spanish and post-colonial Chilean conquest until the 1890s! Whole Araucanian situation reminds me strongly of Roman expansion into Germany. Uppity agriculture loving imperialists show up in force and snag all the best farmland and eventually extend the frontier past the point where they can actually defend it. Here come the barbarians and smash up the exposed frontier and generally give the colonials a big scare which lets them get by for the next few centuries with only low level conflict, which does not however stop the centuries-later inheritors of agricultural empire from coming back over the frontier and squashing them once the political and economic situation has changed significantly enough to favor this.
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Nov 1, 2021 22:08
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That armor was probably a compromise with the actors contracts that said they had to have x number of screentime with their face present. Same reason Spiderman gets his mask ripped in the raimi films
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Nov 1, 2021 23:26
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Deteriorata posted:I think also that agricultural societies get more advanced precisely because they are tied to that particular piece of land. Problems that arise can't be solved by simply moving somewhere else. Floods, droughts, etc. become collective problems to be solved with engineering canals, levees and so on, and those changes to the land become a part of the community. The attitude of changing their environment to fit what they want rather than moving to a new one imparts a more proactive mentality generally.
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Nov 1, 2021 23:36
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Nessus posted:Hunter-gatherers can remain in one place for a long time too. I cannot find the article (it was on Atlas Obscura) but it was for a pretty complex civilization, I think somewhere in what is now Florida, who had very rich fish resources and built fish ponds in order to divert some of the stock and keep it fresh so they would have food year round, or nearer to it. They're rather perilous now but these are stone ruins, not just some pits; this was real development of the land. Yeah I think that article was posted in this thread, and your memory was right that it was in Florida. One of those civilizations that we get a brief glimpse of in the earliest Spanish explorers but is just completely gone by the time they return.
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Nov 1, 2021 23:40
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cheetah7071 posted:Yeah I think that article was posted in this thread, and your memory was right that it was in Florida. One of those civilizations that we get a brief glimpse of in the earliest Spanish explorers but is just completely gone by the time they return.
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Nov 1, 2021 23:43
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Nessus posted:Hunter-gatherers can remain in one place for a long time too. I cannot find the article (it was on Atlas Obscura) but it was for a pretty complex civilization, I think somewhere in what is now Florida, who had very rich fish resources and built fish ponds in order to divert some of the stock and keep it fresh so they would have food year round, or nearer to it. They're rather perilous now but these are stone ruins, not just some pits; this was real development of the land. Of course. Göbekli Tepe is another large urban center that developed around hunting and gathering. The fact that it is possible in a few select places doesn't negate the larger principle. The vast majority of H/G societies were not settled in a specific place and freely roamed to harvest what nature provided. They tended to maintain a regular circuit of places they were familiar with where they could find stuff reliably, but still weren't tied to any particular place.
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Nov 1, 2021 23:47
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Nessus posted:The Tlingit are/were kind of similar for similar reasons. I imagine there was a lot of that going on and I wouldn't be shocked if some of these hotspots got absorbed into growing agricultural polities, because they would have had many of the same advantages as agriculturalists. The pacific northwest is the classic example of "intensive foraging." The matrix I learned in anthro was that food strategies can basically be divided into foraging (picking stuff up), pastoralism (raising animals), and agriculture (raising plants*). And each of those can be divided into intensive vs extensive, so you get a 2x3 grid of major survival strategies. Extensive foraging - a group of people walking around picking fruits and hunting game and fishing, e.g. !Kung Extensive pastoralism - raising grazing animals while moving them around, e.g. Mongol Extensive agriculture - farming but moving fields pretty regularly , e.g. Yanamamo Intensive foraging - the few fair examples of a city built around an impressive fishing infrastructure e.g. Coastal Salish Intensive pastoralism - 21st century factory farming would be a good example but keeping animals penned in and feeding them fodder directly has been an actual gosh dang strategy that's been used without industrialization e.g. Sami Intensive agriculture - what you probably think of as farming e.g. Sumeria Anyway I think this is a cool categorization and I think its kind of useful for thinking through a little more about the texture of how the neolithic revolution proceeded and how food strategies and population interact. I also just think food strategies are super cool despite it never really featuring as a major factor in any of my research. *Sometimes I see horticulture split off from agriculture, sometimes not, I've never felt satisfied with dividing them
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Nov 2, 2021 00:13
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Tulip posted:
Anecdotally, the reindeer herds of the Sami roam all over the north for most of the year, and these days there are semi-regular incidents where they collide with cars. My dad hit one, in fact. Edit. Also, according to old Swedish sources, the Sami people started seriously herding reindeer somewhere around the 16th century, before that it was apparently rather uncommon. Warden fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Nov 3, 2021 |
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Nov 3, 2021 06:32
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Yeah the Sami isn't a good example. They don't use pens for keeping and feeding the animals, the reindeer finds food just fine mid-winter. But they use some big pens for managing the herd, lassoing individuals, marking them etc. Any other fixed location pastoralism fits just fine. You keep some animals, let them out in summer, feed them indoors in winter, maybe even in the same longhouse as you live in. But you'll struggle to find a pastoralist who doesn't also do some agriculture, which is why I think that grid is a bit too hung up on symmetrical structure instead of accurate representation.
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Nov 3, 2021 08:19
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Ola posted:Yeah the Sami isn't a good example. They don't use pens for keeping and feeding the animals, the reindeer finds food just fine mid-winter. But they use some big pens for managing the herd, lassoing individuals, marking them etc. Any other fixed location pastoralism fits just fine. You keep some animals, let them out in summer, feed them indoors in winter, maybe even in the same longhouse as you live in. But you'll struggle to find a pastoralist who doesn't also do some agriculture, which is why I think that grid is a bit too hung up on symmetrical structure instead of accurate representation. For sure. Blended strategies are obviously extremely common. If nothing else, foraging is just extremely hard to beat for labor efficiency. When you look at maps of idealized medieval cities it's pretty obvious that at least over a decent geographic space, basically every strategy is represented to some extent even if intensive agriculture dominates the calorie sources.
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Nov 3, 2021 13:49
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I think it’s kind of a miracle that (relatively speaking !!) It doesn’t take much labor or land to make poo poo tons of wine. An accident of history that has made everyone happier If I remember the Pompeii book right they figured a few small vineyards (which were in the city) could keep everyone supplied
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Nov 3, 2021 13:56
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Romans usually drank wine diluted in water, which also reduced the amount they needed to produce.
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Nov 3, 2021 14:02
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Weka posted:I'm unfamiliar with the book and far from an expert on medieval English justice but unless it goes into a great deal more detail the quote you posted seems to be painting with far too broad a brush. The medieval period in England lasted for around a millennium and saw some massive changes in legal systems and how they were enforced. The oath your quote is referring to seems to be the Frankpledge, which wikipedia suggests included males from 12 and up and only free men. Her sources for those bits appear to be: quote:22 Bernard William McLane, ‘Juror Attitudes toward Local Disorder: The Evidence of the 1328 Trailbaston Proceedings’, in James S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green (eds), Twelve Good Men and True (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 36–64, here 56. So she seems to be talking about late medieval England. Well here is the full context of what she's arguing quote:The medieval numbers And this is the lady who wrote this chapter https://history.osu.edu/people/butler.960
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Nov 3, 2021 14:29
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code:
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Nov 3, 2021 14:31
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Romans usually drank wine diluted in water, which also reduced the amount they needed to produce. Also the Roman trade networks were very much like our modern ones, people in a city like Pompeii weren't just drinking local stuff. There were all kinds of imports and specific vintages people were into and poo poo.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:47
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They even have pictures of the wine trucks !!!
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Nov 3, 2021 15:52
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I can’t believe papers that use criminal “statistics” get published. It’s the most bunk of all bunk.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:54
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euphronius posted:I think it’s kind of a miracle that (relatively speaking !!) It doesn’t take much labor or land to make poo poo tons of wine. An accident of history that has made everyone happier Yeah, I was going to say that this Grand Fromage posted:Also the Roman trade networks were very much like our modern ones, people in a city like Pompeii weren't just drinking local stuff. There were all kinds of imports and specific vintages people were into and poo poo. is a more likely explanation. IIRC the Romans had a big naval base right outside of Pompeii so it was definitely plugged into the trade networks.
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Nov 3, 2021 16:08
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The amphora in Pompeii were from all over the Mediterranean
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Nov 3, 2021 16:10
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Probably thinking of Misenum, which was the home port of the Classis Misenensis, the primary fleet. Not quite right next to Pompeii but not that far away, it's on the northwest tip of the Bay of Naples. It's where Pliny was stationed and wrote the eyewitness account of Vesuvius' eruption and where the ships came from that evacuated most of the population.
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Nov 3, 2021 16:12
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I've been reading Michael Hudson's "...and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year" and it's a really good read so far. His thesis seems to be the motive force of history is basically class struggle that arises when between that develop due to the concentration of wealth, and force the rest of the majority of the population into servitude/debt peons for the upper class. The book takes a look at debt and debt relief in the ancient world. Some excerpts: "The idea of annulling debts nowadays seems so unthinkable that most economists and many theologians doubt whether the Jubilee Year could have been applied in practice, and indeed on a regular basis [...] Instead of causing economic crises, these debt jubilees preserved stability in nearly all Near Eastern societies. Economic polarization, bondage and collapse occurred when such clean slates stopped being proclaimed." [...] "Debt jubilees occurred on a regular basis in the ancient Near East from 2500 BC in Sumer to 1600 BC in Babylonia and its neighbors, and then in Assyria in the first millennium BC. It was normal for new rulers to proclaim these edicts upon taking the throne, in the aftermath of war, or upon the building or renovating a temple. Judaism took the practice out of the hands of kings and placed it at the center of Mosaic Law." [...] "As interest-bearing credit became privatized throughout the Near Eastern economies, personal debts owed to local headmen, merchants and creditors also were cancelled. Failure to write down agrarian debts would have enabled officials and, in due course, private creditors, merchants or local headmen to keep debtors in bondage and their land’s crop surplus for themselves" [...] "This was not a utopian act, but was quite practical from the vantage point of restoring economic and military stability. Recognizing that a backlog of debts had accrued that could not be paid out of current production, rulers gave priority to preserving an economy in which citizens could provide for their basic needs on their own land while paying taxes, performing their corvée labor duties and serving in the army." [...] "Babylonian scribes were taught the basic mathematical principle of compound interest, whereby the volume of debt increases exponentially, much faster than the rural economy’s ability to pay.ii That is the basic dynamic of debt: to accrue and intrude increasingly into the economy, absorbing the surplus and transferring land and even the personal liberty of debtors to creditors" [...] "To insist that all debts must be paid, regardless of whether this may bankrupt debtors and strip away their land and means of livelihood, stands at odds with the many centuries of Near Eastern clean slates. Their success stands at odds with the assumption that creditor interests should take priority over those of the indebted economy at large." [...] "Throughout history a constant political dynamic has been maneuvering by creditors to overthrow royal power capable of enforcing debt amnesties and reversing foreclosures on homes and subsistence land. The creditors’ objective is to replace the customary right of citizens to self-support by its opposite principle: the right of creditors to foreclose on the property and means of livelihood pledged as collateral (or to buy it at distress prices), and to make these transfers irreversible. The smallholders’ security of property is replaced by the sanctity of debt instead of its periodic cancellation." [...] "Violence played a major political role, almost entirely by creditors. Having overthrown kings and populist tyrants, oligarchies accused advocates of debtor interests of being “tyrants” (in Greece) or seeking kingship (as the Gracchi brothers and Julius Caesar were accused of in Rome). Sparta’s kings Agis and Cleomenes were killed for trying to cancel debts and reversing the monopolization of land in the 3rd century BC. Neighboring oligarchies called on Rome to overthrow Sparta’s reformer-kings." [...] "The creditor-sponsored counter-revolution against democracy led to economic polarization, fiscal crisis, and ultimately to being conquered – first the Western Roman Empire and then Byzantium. Livy, Plutarch and other Roman historians blamed Rome’s decline on creditors using fraud, force and political assassination to impoverish and disenfranchise the population. Barbarians had always stood at the gates, but only as societies weakened internally were their invasions successful." ----------------------------------- Hudson in the book (and in his writings and appearances elsewhere) repeatedly stresses that the same principles could be applied today and something like a debt jubilee/debt relief/moratorium on rent seeking is needed in the USA/other economies today for similar reasons: " The burden of debt tends to expand in an agrarian society to the point where it exceeds the ability of debtors to pay. That has been the major cause of economic polarization from antiquity to modern times. The basic principle that should guide economic policy is recognition that debts which can’t be paid, won’t be. The great political question is, how won’t they be paid? There are two ways not to pay debts. Our economic mainstream still believes that all debts must be paid, leaving them on the books to continue accruing interest and fees – and to let creditors foreclose when they do not receive the scheduled interest and amortization payment. This is what the U.S. President Obama did after the 2008 crisis. Homeowners, credit-card customers and other debtors had to start paying down the debts they had run up. About 10 million families lost their homes to foreclosure. Leaving the debt overhead in place meant stifling and polarizing the economy by transferring property from debtors to creditors. Today’s legal system is based on the Roman Empire’s legal philosophy upholding the sanctity of debt, not its cancellation. Instead of protecting debtors from losing their property and status, the main concern is with saving creditors from loss, as if this is a prerequisite for economic stability and growth. Moral blame is placed on debtors, as if their arrears are a personal choice rather than stemming from economic strains that compel them to run into debt simply to survive. Something has to give when debts cannot be paid on a widespread basis. The volume of debt tends to increase exponentially, to the point where it causes a crisis. If debts are not written down, they will expand and become a lever for creditors to pry away land and income from the indebted economy at large." It's funny that brings in the same kinds of reactions today as it did in antiquity - reactionaries and people who see themselves as benefiting from the system insisting that it can't and shouldn't be done, to the detriment of the system as a whole. mila kunis fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Nov 3, 2021 |
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Nov 3, 2021 17:31
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That's legit my favorite book of the last several years. Possibly just in general.
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Nov 3, 2021 17:58
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Finished 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity'. Fantastic and very hopeful book. My earlier characterization of it:quote:His explanation is that, as opposed to something like 'guns, germs, and steel', rather than seeing indigenous / hunter-gatherers as somehow lower down on any kind of rung of civilization and wonder 'Why didn't they advance as fast as Europeans?', you can more accurately see them in the same way as, say, the Amish. Not that they were deliberately regressive as the Amish are, but rather that their cultures were/are the way they were/are because they liked it that way and preferred that way of life, not that they were unaware of alternatives or lacking in the technology or ability to do otherwise. And a lot of the traditional explanations otherwise are chauvinistic reactions to the stinging criticism of European civilization from the indigenous peoples themselves. was pretty fundamentally inadequate and based on having only read the first few chapters. What the book is REALLY about is basically proving from a leftist-anarchist perspective that the late-stage capitalist dystopia we currently live in wasn't inevitable and isn't inescapable; better alternatives not only could be conceived but were implemented successfully many times throughout human history. Fundamentally the message is: "It didn't have to be like this, and it still doesn't." I really needed to hear that right now.
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Nov 3, 2021 20:02
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Romans usually drank wine diluted in water, which also reduced the amount they needed to produce. Most wines now cut off fermentation with sulfates to leave some sugars. I’d imagine anything made before sulfates might be higher alcohol content because they’d get complete fermentation. It’s also be pretty dry unless one drank it early.
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Nov 3, 2021 23:58
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Grand Fromage posted:Probably thinking of Misenum, which was the home port of the Classis Misenensis, the primary fleet. Not quite right next to Pompeii but not that far away, it's on the northwest tip of the Bay of Naples. It's where Pliny was stationed and wrote the eyewitness account of Vesuvius' eruption and where the ships came from that evacuated most of the population. Right, close enough that he could see something weird going on the other side of the bay and boldly sail his ship into the maelstrom to try and rescue people from it.
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Nov 4, 2021 05:50
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Sorry if this has come up before, but I'm interested in North Africa (especially what is now Algeria) in the period of say 700BCE to 500CE. I'd appreciate recommendations for both primary sources (translated) and good secondary material. TIA
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Nov 4, 2021 05:57
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On the subject of drugs (kinda), we're currently discussing what medicine was kept in around the year 1000 at my museum. The humble hide pouch was definitely used for transporting plants and drug compounds in the field, but if you're a healer and want it to keep, what then? We got in touch with a blister pack manufacturer who was a goon about drug packaging, and he says stoneware was common up to the 1700s, but that would likely include advanced ceramics not around in our period. On the other hand, even bulky raw stone containers would keep out moisture and contamination. How would bark or knotted hay jars work? Ointments and salves could conceivably be made to last by drawing plant matter out in flax oil and then in plant or beeswax, but I'm not sure anyone actually did this.. PeterCat posted:I've seen the movie, Adam Driver's character has the same type of helmet. You can't really know, that is why you swear a statement. The threat of supernatural sanction (in the case of western oaths, usually from God almighty, whose divine force is thought to 'trump' that of profane enchantments) is supposed to keep the warrior in line. Tias fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Nov 4, 2021 |
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Nov 4, 2021 11:11
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Most wines now cut off fermentation with sulfates to leave some sugars. I’d imagine anything made before sulfates might be higher alcohol content because they’d get complete fermentation. It’s also be pretty dry unless one drank it early. Current wines are around 8%-12%, and complete fermentation is about 15%. So it's stronger than modern wine, but not a huge amount. Watering it down 4 parts to 1 would give you a 3% abv drink.
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Nov 4, 2021 11:20
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Most wines now cut off fermentation with sulfates to leave some sugars. I’d imagine anything made before sulfates might be higher alcohol content because they’d get complete fermentation. It’s also be pretty dry unless one drank it early. It takes pretty good conditions to ferment it completely dry, but in the best wine regions of Italy and Greece that wouldn't be a rare occasion. It's also mentioned fairly often that the Romans actually discovered that additive by exposing the wine to sulfur candle smoke, but it looks like the source material for that is a bit thin, as this winemaker has written about : https://ovineyards.com/sulfur-candles-in-ancient-winemaking/
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Nov 4, 2021 11:37
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