Having lived in Italy for 7 years as a teen, the word is that construction of commercial, governmental, and private sites will be shut down for sometimes years so the Italian government and bureaucracy can have its go in deciding what action to take. A Roman era catacomb was found when my sister's school was being expanded, and the Nuns running the school managed to hush it up pretty well. I imagine they explained to the working crew their loss of a job if word got out..
It seems reasonable a similar thing happened here even as far back as the 1870s when the original construction was taking place.
Similar thing in Tunisia where if ruins are found, the government will own the site. Theoretically, it should compensate the owners for their loss, but practically they pay peanuts. So if people find ruins in their lands, they just hide it/throw it/bury it.
There is a phrase "Shoot, shovel, shutup" used in the US whenever anything is found on private property (usually endangered animals) that the government has an interest in protecting/restricting. The owners will destroy it immediately and before anyone finds out so that they don't lose their property rights. Thus you have the unintended consequences that these regulations accelerate rather than mitigate their destruction.
That's why all civilizations need to proactively obliterate any durable structures and artifacts they create on a regular basis. Destroy everything in that sweet spot where it's old junk that no one cares about' nothing should survive long enough to become valuable due to its antiquity.
If you don't leave anything behind, future generations can just build without caution, because the past will forever be shrouded in mystery. Let's not repeat ancient civilizations' mistakes.
Fun fact: back in 1600s the Swedish government wanted to make our old history grander than perhaps it had been. As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in:
https://www.icomos.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1666-Placat...
The commenter doesn't recognize that nordic countries have exceptionally high quality of life despite less sunlight (a common cause of depression) than whatever country in which they likely reside. They aren't curious about the world enough to learn about others.
That's the original definition. I think now first, second, third are used to annotate which level of development a country is at. Especially that now, not all developing countries are equal.
It's more nuanced than that. First was the USA, the first nuclear state (and the west / allies). Then the Soviets. The Third World was the anticipated rise of the nations that would join us on the world stage, a hopeful and optimistic term[0]. Then we deliberately sabotaged them and kept them under our boot to extract resources.
Third World is now a slight for developing nations.
> As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in
> It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices
But the melting price of an ancient bronze sword is nothing. Most ancient artifacts have no material value.
The solution is for the government to pay the actual cost of the regulations instead of making the property owner eat most of it.
The reality is either you (the policymaker) find it important enough to bear the cost or it's not important enough for anyone to do it. The Swedish solution in the sibling comment demonstrates the right mindset.
> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
For a modern example, see the Raising of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. I think I've seen an image of what the old ground level looks like now, and / or that you can take tours there. There's probably loads of stuff buried there now.
My understanding of the Chicago case is that most of what the old "ground level" was is just sewers today. I heard some of it was railroad tracks and maybe some are still used for cargo-only trains, but most of Chicago wasn't really raised a full "floor" with enough headroom for interesting underground spaces.
Some of Cincinnati's underground exists from plans to build subway trains that never completed. I think that makes Cincinnati's particularly sad being that it constitutes a perpetually unfinished public works/public transportation project.
Relatedly to that, Atlanta also has a tiny underground leftover from passenger train lines that ended passenger travel decades ago (and so was turned into a mall, because America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
Old cities used to just level old buildings and build on top of the rubble.
But that doesn’t work if you need to support a skyscraper (not if you want it to stay upright), or dig a metro line, so new developments are now excavating the old rubble.
As an American, where we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!) visiting Rome is almost mind blowing to see SO MUCH ancient history right there, and almost everywhere. So cool!
There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
Also if one expands it to the Americas more broadly it goes back pretty far. Earlier this year on a trip to Central America I stayed in a home that dated to the mid-16th century. Still not as impressive as what Europe has, but was neat!
250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not start with the founding of your country.
The adobe structures of the American southwest, and mounds in many other areas survived, but for the most part there was not much left of historical value in terms of ruins of structures of the native americans. Europeans more often build with stones, rock, brick, etc and more regularly other more survivable building materials.
I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.
Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it.
The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?
Unfortunately, the American Indians did not have writing, and so the histories of the tribes is pretty murky.
For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them.
"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former.
On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.
As evidence of the paucity of historical knowledge of the Indian peoples, estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary from 10 million to 100 million.
I know about the various rock paintings with symbols, but there isn't enough of that to represent much of anything.
> I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.
I had an early-midlife crisis where I considered moving to another profession. After a great deal of thought, I determined that the profession that I would find most rewarding would be as a professor of history for university students. If I could share my passion for history in such a way as to inspire one student per semester, I'd have achieved something great.
It makes me sad that history is taught in such boring terms in high school. It's endlessly interesting. I hated school far too much to realistically believe I'd earn the required accreditation, hence I remained a tech guy.
Check out "Lies My Teachers Told Me." A university professor wrote it after becoming frustrated at how much deprogramming had to be done with incoming college students. I saw it in a used book store and immediately bought it. I liked it.
Comparatively few historical ruins built out of materials that would have lasted this long, but a long history, actually, and some you can still see...
Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.
It was a carefully planned large city with the road along the main axis pointed at 15 degrees east of north, and the large pyramids were integrated into the city's design, but we definitely don't know who did that planning. Hundreds of apartment compounds were standardized. Tens of cubic meters of earth were moved and they had to quarry lots of basalt and other stone.
There is strong evidence it was a multi-ethnic city, especially since there are distinct ethnic neighborhoods based on artifacts such as pottery. No trace of writing or how the city and government were organized, and whether a ruling elite called the shots or if there were ruling families from different ethnic groups working together.
> Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
...so what? Why would you compare "the size of Teotihuacan" to "the area enclosed in the Aurelian Walls"? Why not compare it to "the size of Rome"?
Not the OP, but I have heard that Rome is defined by the seven hills, so I thought the Aurelian Wall definition was excluding a hill or something. The Wikipedia article says the walls cover all seven hills and the Campus Martius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian_Walls
Are you saying you'd include even more in "the size of Rome (the city)"? If so, what?
There were some people living outside that perimeter, but I just included the Seven Hills and the Campus Martius because it was a typical border for the city and was densely packed with maybe a million people. Teotihuacan possibly had up to 200,000 people, so a bit more breathing room.
I was in Pompeii just 2 weeks ago, the thing that absolutely blew my mind was that there is a section where archeologists are working _right now_ still uncovering more buildings, and you can see them exactly as they are coming out of the ground - I think with the rest of the ruins I've had this feeling that you know, it got somehow cleaned up and repaired a bit for tourists, but nope, you can see in that section of active excavation works that these 2000 years old structures are really coming out of the dirt with the frescoes and mosaics still intact.
And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).
There's almost no original art in Pompeii, it's all in the archeological museum in Naples. There are some reproductions in place in Pompeii, but mostly it's bare brick walls that the art has been scraped from. You need to see the brick walls, then see the art in the museum, then compose the two in your head.
> (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!)
We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).
The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.
Stuff built long time ago still serves its purpose - the people.
Anyway yes we have some comparatively old stuff here, you get used to it quickly. Colleague lives in cca 400 years old house, nothing special. Just more building restrictions, not because its somehow protected but simply due to meter-thick stone walls and corresponding architecture, statics and so on. One couldn't tell if its 100 years old or 400 from outside. After renovation even less (it was a farm house before, so french state doesn't feel the urge to interfere with his property).
Wifi must be a nightmare. Very interesting to think about. Every building I've lived in is plaster and wood beams and I get annoyed when audio starts dropping / distorting on BT earbuds at a distance.
we have some omega ancient history here in america like possibly 13,000-16,000+ year old history, we just don't have structures that stood the test of time mostly stone crafted tools and hunting weapons and such. but first peoples history goes way back mindblowingly far
> we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years)
You didn't exactly say this, but I'd stop short of defining history around the existence of the current US government and structure. Ironically 250 years is probably longer than any continental European government has been around in its present state.
In terms of history as such, we have just as much history in the US as Europe does. Just ask the Native Americans / First People. There are lots of examples elsewhere in the conversation.
There are several levels of understanding of your history. Firstly, you have none. At the second level you suffer the misapprehension that your country has been there forever (which is the level that most nationalists get stuck at).
> A room with monochrome stucco decorations Cantieri Narranti
Unlikely. We know that the white marble statues that we have were once painted. Time turned them into what we see today. This room was surely vividly painted.
It's pretty much like this everywhere in Italy. I'm originally from southern Italy and my father worked as a laborer for a local municipality. About 20 years ago, during excavation work to rebuild a wall, he personally unearthed some pottery that turned out to be the contents of a Magna Graecia storehouse dating back roughly 3,000 years.
Another time, more recently, on the outskirts of my hometown, during roadwork to repave a sidewalk, a Greek tomb dating back approximately 2,400 years was discovered.
The lands around the Mediterranean have been inhabited for so long that wherever you dig, you're very likely to find some kind of artifact.
There must be a metaphor somewhere in this, when somehow it is the angry youth that discovers something of value hidden in plain view that no one bothered to look at before !
I visited Rome last year. There was a lot of talk about how long it was taking to build a new subway line, because they kept running into ancient artifacts. It was also commonly said that the city was like a lasagna, with layers upon layers of history under everything. Building that were originally built elevated are now at street level.
It almost seems hard not to find ancient ruins. It then becomes a question of priorities and resource allocation.
I thought the buildings getting lower was just the ground compressing. The foundation is solid, but the ground underneath still compresses. There are circumstances like Seattle where they literally built up the city, but those are less common
No. The ground does not usually significantly compress under those loads. Remember for much of human history buildings are build with wood and non vitrified bricks that readily break back-down into mud/gravel/organic matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)
If they're so common, why not incorporate into the construction project?
Walk through a modern subway, see bits & pieces of ancient history all over the place. Buy icecream, sit on a bench that labourers hacked out of stone 2ky ago.
I visited Athens in 2006 shortly after the Olympics were held there and the city had been refreshed. The Syntagma Square subway station did exactly this, with layers of archaeology revealed behind glass as you descended the stairs. It was magnificent!
I’m not sure how deep the new one is, but some of them I went on already seemed extremely deep. I felt like I was on escalators for a long time, and multiple tiers, to the point I was Googling what the tallest escalators were when getting back to my hotel (Rome didn’t make the cut). There is definitely a cost to going deeper, in construction, ongoing maintenance, and the experience for the rider.
In my tuscanian city the university is building a new building for the engineering department. While digging they randomly found an ancient etruscan well. In this case everything went smoothly and timely and it will be preserved, an underground parking near the center had ww2 remains and deeper than that, archeological ones that slowed down the whole thing
> The students who found a way into the ruins weren’t the first amateur explorers to rediscover the site. Some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the villa dates to between 1920 and 1950, when the building was occupied by a religious order. Other markings are more recent, perhaps left by students at the high school
Surprised that Smithsonian magazine makes such an awful website. Every minute, new ads are loaded, shifting the text up and down, making it hard to read.
It seems that the students who actually reported the ruins may not have been the ones who graffiti'd it. They supposedly heard from other students who'd discovered it before. Whether or not that's true is harder to say.
Having lived in Italy for 7 years as a teen, the word is that construction of commercial, governmental, and private sites will be shut down for sometimes years so the Italian government and bureaucracy can have its go in deciding what action to take. A Roman era catacomb was found when my sister's school was being expanded, and the Nuns running the school managed to hush it up pretty well. I imagine they explained to the working crew their loss of a job if word got out..
It seems reasonable a similar thing happened here even as far back as the 1870s when the original construction was taking place.
Similar thing in Tunisia where if ruins are found, the government will own the site. Theoretically, it should compensate the owners for their loss, but practically they pay peanuts. So if people find ruins in their lands, they just hide it/throw it/bury it.
There is a phrase "Shoot, shovel, shutup" used in the US whenever anything is found on private property (usually endangered animals) that the government has an interest in protecting/restricting. The owners will destroy it immediately and before anyone finds out so that they don't lose their property rights. Thus you have the unintended consequences that these regulations accelerate rather than mitigate their destruction.
Well that's not going to work on bigger animals (e.g. buffalo) as you can only carry back 100 lbs at per hunt.
The plan also fails miserably with elephants, giraffes, and rhinos.
And whales, don't forget whales.
That's why all civilizations need to proactively obliterate any durable structures and artifacts they create on a regular basis. Destroy everything in that sweet spot where it's old junk that no one cares about' nothing should survive long enough to become valuable due to its antiquity.
If you don't leave anything behind, future generations can just build without caution, because the past will forever be shrouded in mystery. Let's not repeat ancient civilizations' mistakes.
Fun fact: back in 1600s the Swedish government wanted to make our old history grander than perhaps it had been. As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in: https://www.icomos.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1666-Placat...
It lead to many treasures reaching museums etc instead of being melted down! It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices: https://www.raa.se/kulturarv/arkeologi-fornlamningar-och-fyn...
There’s a reason Nordic countries do so well and are a real “first world”. They’re smart. In the good sense.
This is a weird comment.
I'd argue that this (your) comment is much weirder. Could you provide a reason or point us at least to what you find so particularly weird?
The commenter doesn't recognize that nordic countries have exceptionally high quality of life despite less sunlight (a common cause of depression) than whatever country in which they likely reside. They aren't curious about the world enough to learn about others.
“First world”?
First world is a political term meaning non-aligned with the West or Communist states during the Cold War.
Historically, Sweden was a non-aligned country. The very definition of a “third-world” country.
That's the original definition. I think now first, second, third are used to annotate which level of development a country is at. Especially that now, not all developing countries are equal.
It's more nuanced than that. First was the USA, the first nuclear state (and the west / allies). Then the Soviets. The Third World was the anticipated rise of the nations that would join us on the world stage, a hopeful and optimistic term[0]. Then we deliberately sabotaged them and kept them under our boot to extract resources.
Third World is now a slight for developing nations.
0. The Jakarta Method (Vincent Bevins) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method
> As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in
> It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices
But the melting price of an ancient bronze sword is nothing. Most ancient artifacts have no material value.
Then it's a very good thing you're offered more than the melting value!
The solution is for the government to pay the actual cost of the regulations instead of making the property owner eat most of it.
The reality is either you (the policymaker) find it important enough to bear the cost or it's not important enough for anyone to do it. The Swedish solution in the sibling comment demonstrates the right mindset.
> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
For a modern example, see the Raising of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. I think I've seen an image of what the old ground level looks like now, and / or that you can take tours there. There's probably loads of stuff buried there now.
Edit: Actually it was Seattle, you can still visit its old ground level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Old_New_York
... was once New Amsterdam
My understanding of the Chicago case is that most of what the old "ground level" was is just sewers today. I heard some of it was railroad tracks and maybe some are still used for cargo-only trains, but most of Chicago wasn't really raised a full "floor" with enough headroom for interesting underground spaces.
A US city often overlooked for some intricate people explorable underground spaces is Cincinnati: https://www.visitcincy.com/blog/post/unmistakably-cincinnati...
Some of Cincinnati's underground exists from plans to build subway trains that never completed. I think that makes Cincinnati's particularly sad being that it constitutes a perpetually unfinished public works/public transportation project.
Relatedly to that, Atlanta also has a tiny underground leftover from passenger train lines that ended passenger travel decades ago (and so was turned into a mall, because America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
And Edinburgh in Scotland
Old cities used to just level old buildings and build on top of the rubble.
But that doesn’t work if you need to support a skyscraper (not if you want it to stay upright), or dig a metro line, so new developments are now excavating the old rubble.
Vot a nice... castle...
In Italy, almost anywhere you can find roman artifacts. They're just in the layer underneath the WW2 bombs.
It's truly amazing. In Rome, you can find ruins of all historical periods, all the way up to early 2020s!
As an American, where we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!) visiting Rome is almost mind blowing to see SO MUCH ancient history right there, and almost everywhere. So cool!
There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
I've been to Cahokia, and look forward to revisiting it in future decades since only 10% has been excavated so far!
Same!
A few years ago I made a graphic showing the years before present dates of some of the earliest archaeological sites across the Americas for Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_the_Clovis_Fir...
Narwala Gabarnmang says hi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
44,000 years of continuous human occupation. (Except for a brief period during the 20th century ..)
Those are very cool. Worth a visit if you’re ever in the St Louis, Missouri area.
Also if one expands it to the Americas more broadly it goes back pretty far. Earlier this year on a trip to Central America I stayed in a home that dated to the mid-16th century. Still not as impressive as what Europe has, but was neat!
250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not start with the founding of your country.
Really? My history class taught me that before the Europeans arrived there were only the native americans, so nothing of historical value.
The adobe structures of the American southwest, and mounds in many other areas survived, but for the most part there was not much left of historical value in terms of ruins of structures of the native americans. Europeans more often build with stones, rock, brick, etc and more regularly other more survivable building materials.
You might have missed the sarcasm
> You might have missed the sarcasm
I didn't. It's pretty frustrating how many people on the internet can't infer intent. I upvoted your clearly absurdist statement because I got it.
Sadly, that's the modern internet. Enough people are incurious and bigoted so as to make absurd statements appear genuine.
On an up-note: at least one person understood your snark and appreciated it for what it was.
Europeans are the descendants of the third little pig?
I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.
Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it.
The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?
Unfortunately, the American Indians did not have writing, and so the histories of the tribes is pretty murky.
For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them.
See "Empire of the Summer Moon" by Gwynne.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
It's a fantastic account, and I'm amazed nobody has made an epic miniseries about it.
"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former.
On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.
I ordered the book, thank you!
As evidence of the paucity of historical knowledge of the Indian peoples, estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary from 10 million to 100 million.
I know about the various rock paintings with symbols, but there isn't enough of that to represent much of anything.
> I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.
I had an early-midlife crisis where I considered moving to another profession. After a great deal of thought, I determined that the profession that I would find most rewarding would be as a professor of history for university students. If I could share my passion for history in such a way as to inspire one student per semester, I'd have achieved something great.
It makes me sad that history is taught in such boring terms in high school. It's endlessly interesting. I hated school far too much to realistically believe I'd earn the required accreditation, hence I remained a tech guy.
Check out "Lies My Teachers Told Me." A university professor wrote it after becoming frustrated at how much deprogramming had to be done with incoming college students. I saw it in a used book store and immediately bought it. I liked it.
Comparatively few historical ruins built out of materials that would have lasted this long, but a long history, actually, and some you can still see...
Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.
Nitpick but we do know who built Teotihuacan -- it was the Teotihuacanos! Unfortunately it's true that we know relatively little about them.
We know who robbed the bank, it was clearly the bank robbers!
Archeology is my fav.
It was a carefully planned large city with the road along the main axis pointed at 15 degrees east of north, and the large pyramids were integrated into the city's design, but we definitely don't know who did that planning. Hundreds of apartment compounds were standardized. Tens of cubic meters of earth were moved and they had to quarry lots of basalt and other stone.
There is strong evidence it was a multi-ethnic city, especially since there are distinct ethnic neighborhoods based on artifacts such as pottery. No trace of writing or how the city and government were organized, and whether a ruling elite called the shots or if there were ruling families from different ethnic groups working together.
This feels kind of tautological. We know who built Teotihuacan, it was the Teotihuacanos! What do we know about them? Well, they built Teotihuacan...
(Seriously, though, _is_ anything much known about them beyond that?)
The general term for this type of argument is "dormitive potency".
https://brucebyfield.com/2012/07/11/recognizing-dormitive-ex...
> Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
...so what? Why would you compare "the size of Teotihuacan" to "the area enclosed in the Aurelian Walls"? Why not compare it to "the size of Rome"?
I can think of one reason you'd do this...
Huh?
Not the OP, but I have heard that Rome is defined by the seven hills, so I thought the Aurelian Wall definition was excluding a hill or something. The Wikipedia article says the walls cover all seven hills and the Campus Martius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian_Walls
Are you saying you'd include even more in "the size of Rome (the city)"? If so, what?
You'd include the entire city. That's what people will take you to mean when you refer to a city.
There were some people living outside that perimeter, but I just included the Seven Hills and the Campus Martius because it was a typical border for the city and was densely packed with maybe a million people. Teotihuacan possibly had up to 200,000 people, so a bit more breathing room.
I see someone who might really enjoy the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Check it out. I love it.
some folks in USA have houses older than that too
I was in Pompeii just 2 weeks ago, the thing that absolutely blew my mind was that there is a section where archeologists are working _right now_ still uncovering more buildings, and you can see them exactly as they are coming out of the ground - I think with the rest of the ruins I've had this feeling that you know, it got somehow cleaned up and repaired a bit for tourists, but nope, you can see in that section of active excavation works that these 2000 years old structures are really coming out of the dirt with the frescoes and mosaics still intact.
And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).
The crazy thing is that Pompeii's art was so well preserved by the ash but now it is exposed to the elements and will degrade.
There's almost no original art in Pompeii, it's all in the archeological museum in Naples. There are some reproductions in place in Pompeii, but mostly it's bare brick walls that the art has been scraped from. You need to see the brick walls, then see the art in the museum, then compose the two in your head.
Yes, it will still degrade in the museum, is all I mean.
Early settlement of Europeans into present-day USA started in earnest in the early 1600s.
> (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!)
We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).
The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.
Stuff built long time ago still serves its purpose - the people.
Anyway yes we have some comparatively old stuff here, you get used to it quickly. Colleague lives in cca 400 years old house, nothing special. Just more building restrictions, not because its somehow protected but simply due to meter-thick stone walls and corresponding architecture, statics and so on. One couldn't tell if its 100 years old or 400 from outside. After renovation even less (it was a farm house before, so french state doesn't feel the urge to interfere with his property).
> meter-thick stone walls
Wifi must be a nightmare. Very interesting to think about. Every building I've lived in is plaster and wood beams and I get annoyed when audio starts dropping / distorting on BT earbuds at a distance.
we have some omega ancient history here in america like possibly 13,000-16,000+ year old history, we just don't have structures that stood the test of time mostly stone crafted tools and hunting weapons and such. but first peoples history goes way back mindblowingly far
some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!
TBF, so do some folks in the U. S.; though in most cases, just barely.
> we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years)
You didn't exactly say this, but I'd stop short of defining history around the existence of the current US government and structure. Ironically 250 years is probably longer than any continental European government has been around in its present state.
In terms of history as such, we have just as much history in the US as Europe does. Just ask the Native Americans / First People. There are lots of examples elsewhere in the conversation.
There are several levels of understanding of your history. Firstly, you have none. At the second level you suffer the misapprehension that your country has been there forever (which is the level that most nationalists get stuck at).
After that it starts to get complicated.
A caption for one of the photos:
> A room with monochrome stucco decorations Cantieri Narranti
Unlikely. We know that the white marble statues that we have were once painted. Time turned them into what we see today. This room was surely vividly painted.
It's pretty much like this everywhere in Italy. I'm originally from southern Italy and my father worked as a laborer for a local municipality. About 20 years ago, during excavation work to rebuild a wall, he personally unearthed some pottery that turned out to be the contents of a Magna Graecia storehouse dating back roughly 3,000 years. Another time, more recently, on the outskirts of my hometown, during roadwork to repave a sidewalk, a Greek tomb dating back approximately 2,400 years was discovered. The lands around the Mediterranean have been inhabited for so long that wherever you dig, you're very likely to find some kind of artifact.
There must be a metaphor somewhere in this, when somehow it is the angry youth that discovers something of value hidden in plain view that no one bothered to look at before !
I visited Rome last year. There was a lot of talk about how long it was taking to build a new subway line, because they kept running into ancient artifacts. It was also commonly said that the city was like a lasagna, with layers upon layers of history under everything. Building that were originally built elevated are now at street level.
It almost seems hard not to find ancient ruins. It then becomes a question of priorities and resource allocation.
I thought the buildings getting lower was just the ground compressing. The foundation is solid, but the ground underneath still compresses. There are circumstances like Seattle where they literally built up the city, but those are less common
No. The ground does not usually significantly compress under those loads. Remember for much of human history buildings are build with wood and non vitrified bricks that readily break back-down into mud/gravel/organic matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)
If they're so common, why not incorporate into the construction project?
Walk through a modern subway, see bits & pieces of ancient history all over the place. Buy icecream, sit on a bench that labourers hacked out of stone 2ky ago.
I visited Athens in 2006 shortly after the Olympics were held there and the city had been refreshed. The Syntagma Square subway station did exactly this, with layers of archaeology revealed behind glass as you descended the stairs. It was magnificent!
They do do that? https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260408-a-150-metro-tick...
I mean, it's the rest of the subway line thats the problem -- how many ancient sites do you tunnel through to reach the next stop?
Reminds me that story about the beach table in Bulgaria, that turned out to be a 1,700-year-old Roman tomb: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article2...
That's actually done a lot in ruin-heavy cities. For instance, here's a Lidl with bonus underfloor Viking village in Dublin: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/aungier-street-lidl-arch...
Because it's more expensive and takes longer (which then makes it even more expensive).
Which is why ancient ruins in construction sites are often covered up, unreported, or even destroyed.
> If they're so common, why not incorporate into the construction project?
If it's the same one I read about, they did.
My obvious thought is why not dig deeper to build the subways?
I’m not sure how deep the new one is, but some of them I went on already seemed extremely deep. I felt like I was on escalators for a long time, and multiple tiers, to the point I was Googling what the tallest escalators were when getting back to my hotel (Rome didn’t make the cut). There is definitely a cost to going deeper, in construction, ongoing maintenance, and the experience for the rider.
There was graffiti as well so others had already found it
I feel like the real news story is kids protesting against school being closed
In my tuscanian city the university is building a new building for the engineering department. While digging they randomly found an ancient etruscan well. In this case everything went smoothly and timely and it will be preserved, an underground parking near the center had ww2 remains and deeper than that, archeological ones that slowed down the whole thing
Clickbait title
> The students who found a way into the ruins weren’t the first amateur explorers to rediscover the site. Some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the villa dates to between 1920 and 1950, when the building was occupied by a religious order. Other markings are more recent, perhaps left by students at the high school
Did the ruins come alive at night with like Roman soldiers and stuff running around, etc?
had you ever been to rome? totally normal.. there is an entire hill made of roman pottery waste.. is a public park! best city ever
This is like the physical version of exploring a legacy codebase. ;)
Surprised that Smithsonian magazine makes such an awful website. Every minute, new ads are loaded, shifting the text up and down, making it hard to read.
Dang, all I found was a used condom when I did this.
This has Magic School Bus episode written all over it.
Whose first instinct is it, when finding an ancient roman villa hidden underneath your school, to smear graffiti on the walls. I cannot relate.
It seems that the students who actually reported the ruins may not have been the ones who graffiti'd it. They supposedly heard from other students who'd discovered it before. Whether or not that's true is harder to say.
Does it matter which generation of students did it?