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Wrath Of Gnon
@wrathofgnon
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Stone, bronze and iron age homes in Europe had insulation that was not surpassed in (German homes) until 1995. Commercial buildings are still not even near the level of insulation of a pre-historic double wattle-and-daub timber frame structure. exarc.net/issue-2016-3/e…
What is more, the insulation was cut/dug from the lot itself (transport of materials less than 10 meters compared to our modern petro-fueled global supply chain), cost nothing (seen insulation prices lately?) and carbon negative (we moderns are still working on that one).
Another thing our pre-historic ancestors didn't have to worry about was accidental house fires. Sure it was a bit spartan, but almost no flammable interiors and walls clad in clay? No worries. Us moderns, not quite so carefree:
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Wrath Of Gnon
@wrathofgnon
Native Americans built some of the most impressive defensive walls in the history of mankind. Even their ruins are magnificent. Here is one example from the city of Cusco in Peru. Some of the base stones are over 3.5 meters tall.
Of course, the fortress walls would have been the strongest, but the city had its own defensive wall, and in addition to this the city blocks were divided by tall, massive stone walls, leaving the streets like tiny canyons. Here is Callejón Loreto (Loreto Street).
When they didn't have stone they used adobe bricks or rammed earth, like in Chan-Chan, founded in 850 A.D. and once the largest city in Pre-Columbian South America, 40-60 000 people. It had an inner wall system 32km long, 50-60 ft high, 15-18 ft wide. The outer walls, 100s of km.
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Wrath Of Gnon
@wrathofgnon
Those delicious final sentences of Ralph McInerny's introduction to Joseph Pieper's book The Silence of Goethe (Über das Schweigen Goethe)...!
Josef Pieper wrote this in 1945 being plucked from the chaos of war and delivered into a German military prison cell. Here he learned about Goethe's "not only Castle of the soul but also the town", the walls Goethe built around his mind to stay true to himself. The Goethe Option?
Reading this I can make sense of Goethe's incredible calm. He was present during some very violent fighting and must have seen chaos up close, first hand. But still, the walls of his soul preserved him.
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Wrath Of Gnon
@wrathofgnon
Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794) was a French journalist who did his best to work the Parisians into a revolutionary frenzy, famously with his 1789 "Discours de la lanterne aux Parisiens" (The Streetlamp’s Address to the Parisians) advocating for lynching the enemies of the people.
In the true spirit of revolutionaries everywhere, Desmoulins was himself sent to the guillotine after a farcical trial where the prosecuted were not allowed to defend themselves, in essence still giving him more justice than what he advocated ought to be given his "undesirables".
Camille made a terrible spectacle of his execution, but his young wife Lucile, sentenced a few days later, carried herself very nobly, earning the crowd's admiration. Perhaps he knew he deserved what he was getting, and she knew that she did not. Innocence is a remarkable thing.
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Mike Stuchbery💀🍷
@MikeStuchbery_
I've always been interested in how our access to, and mastery of resources has led to cultures spreading and strengthening. That's why I'm fascinated by the ancient salt miners of Hallstatt. /1
Hallstatt is a town in Austria, about 70 km ESE of Salzburg, known to most as being particularly scenic - it's rammed by tourists, mostly Chinese, a lot of the time. However, it's been a centre of attention for far longer. /2
People have lived in Hallstatt for around 5,000 years, primarily due to the presence of large amounts of mineral salt. Before refrigeration, salt was vital in a way we don't understand. It preserved meat & other foods. /2
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Mike Stuchbery💀🍷
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I love it when I find something that excites me - you know, old stuff. It’s not every day, however, when I come across something that has me racing to find out more, to take a dive into folklore & the past. Let me introduce you to ‘Roland’ - or, more accurately, ‘Rolands’. 1/
‘Roland’ stands in the marketplace of Halle, a city in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt (where that Nebra Sky Disk I’m obsessed is kept). This Roland dates from the 19th century, replacing a number of copies over time - it’s thought the first appeared in the 1200s. /2
‘Roland’ is a potent figure in German legend. He’s based on a real figure, a knight called ‘Hruotland’ who was involved in driving the Moors back into Spain and died heroically in 778, fighting against some angry Basques (Turns out they've always been angry). /3
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Mike Stuchbery's Spooky Universe (of Terror)! 💀🍷
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We live in a world of light and noise. For many, huddling around the warmth of a fire is a novelty, not a necessity. We have no fear of the restless dead and their torments. It’s not often we get a window into a world where this was not the case… THREAD #FolkloreThursday /1
Sometime around the turn of the 15th century, a monk at a Cistercian monastery at Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire used the blank pages of a manuscript (Royal MS 15 A xx) to write down a number of stories. /2
Centuries later, in 1922, the Cambridge medievalist M. R. James - remember that name - translated the stories from Latin, & what he discovered was something terrible & wonderful. What he had, in the voice of a 15th century man, were tales of the dead walking among us. /3
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Mike Stuchbery's Spooky Universe (of Terror)! 💀🍷
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I should have done a little thread on these guys ages ago - but anyhoo...

If you love history &archaeology, if you dream of squatting in a trench picking out bits of Samian ware pottery, if you've ever shotgunned a box set of Time Team, can I get you following @TheDigVenturers?
Ok, so what is @TheDigVenturers - a few years ago, a bunch of archaeologists noticed that money was drying up for site digs - and more sites were being unearthed than ever before.

Seeing how well sites like Kickstarter were doing, they came up with a fundraising platform.
Not only is @TheDigVenturers a fundraising platform for digs (which would be cool enough), it's designed so that the people funding can access the site from their phone - seeing finds, data and talking to the archaeologists.

It's the next best thing to being on-site...
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Mike Stuchbery's Spooky Universe (of Terror)! 💀🍷
@MikeStuchbery_
Let’s talk about bog bodies. Let’s talk about what’s to see. Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things they could be... THREAD 1/
Among all the kinds of burials that archaeologists encounter, there is one that seems to be localised to northern Europe - very possibly because of a unique landscape feature found there. That is to say, peat bogs, consisting of dead wetland vegetation & moss. Yum. /2
There’s very little that we can say we truly know about the Bronze and Iron Age cultures of Europe, but we can reasonably be assured that they considered bogs to be either sacred or special - a ‘liminal space’, if you want to get all wanky about it, somewhere ‘between worlds’. /3
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Mike Stuchbery 💀🍷
@MikeStuchbery_
One area of archaeology that fascinates me are deviant burials - burials deviating from the norm, such as execution victims. I'm lucky, there are deviant burials at nearby Galley Hill & Five Knolls - both Saxon. All featured decapitations, some amputations.
The fascinating thing about these deviant burials are that 1. Both occurred near old Bronze & Iron Age barrows & 2. Both occurred on hilltops. It's as if the victims were placed in what were considered 'liminal spaces', haunted, away from the protections of home/church.
It's always fascinating to see one people's holy site become another's place of dread and fear. One of the barrows at Five Knolls contained a woman, about 35 years, buried with a knife. Her skeleton showed she often wore a headdress - a powerful priestess of 3000BC or so.
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