The archaeology thread

I think the real problem there is that assumption about the jungle being pristine. Because jungle can grow so fast, it tends to look a lot older than it really is, and that has tripped up many assumptions about the past of that region. After all, when you assume the jungle is pristine and ancient, with no human interference, you are not going to assume there are entire civilizations buried underneath.

I think the last, pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands, disappeared some 10,000 years ago.

The Maori reached New Zealand around 1300.

There's actually a few spots left. The Stone Forest in Madagascar has never been fully explored, for example.

Almost all the pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands, disappeared around 10,000 years ago.

Antarctica was only discovered about a century ago, and remains largely pristine.

And I do mean discovered in the most literal, absolute sense. As far as we can tell, no human has ever been there before that discovery.

Edited by Redmess on Jan 15th 2024 at 9:31:48 PM

About two centuries ago actually. The earliest documented sighting was in 1820, and while it's possible that it were sightings or even landings in the years leading up to that, it's very possible that no human eyes saw any part of Antarctica before the early 19th century.

I don't count Antarctica, since it's nearly uninhabitable without modern science and extensive support. The point about untouched wilderness is more about expecting human intervention long before European settlers showed up. We messed up extensive civilizations that had been managing their hinterlands for millennia.

I feel like the point you ended up making was "there's no pristine untouched wilderness for the past 10,000 years except for all the places I decide don't count". Which isn't really a useful statement.

It was intended as a light throwaway comment, but the point was that we shouldnt be suprised that the Amazon "wilderness" was essentially managed by the people living there long before we showed up. This point obviously does not apply to any place humans weren't living. If humans were there, it wasn't pristine. Make the necessary adjustments for places like New Zealand and Antarctica.

Yeah humans have been managing and looting ‘wilderness’ for as long as we’ve been able to reach it, since industrialisation we’ve done it on a grander scale, but we’ve always been doing it.

Rice domestication in the Amazon goes back at least 4,000 years, and the same region might have been the cradle for domesticater peanut, cassava and capsicum.

Wait, they have wild rice in the Amazon? I thought that was an Asian crop?

Probably came across the land bridge with the migrants. It's not exactly hard to transport.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 15th 2024 at 5:47:43 AM

Yeah, you're right, rice is probably close enough to the land bridge to have crossed that way. Still, I've never heard of any Native Americans farming rice.

I was watching Spartacus, and that gladiator school seemed oddly familiar. And then it struck me: it's just a medievalized American prison!

So how accurate is that gladiator school anyway? I doubt it was as much of a prison as the movie likes to depict it as.

Iirc a good chunk of the gladiators were actual workers that rarely fought to the death, especially the popular ones? (They also carried ads/sponsorships because of course nothing's original)

Yeah. They were also generally pretty big and overweight because that made it easier to set up for cuts that would look really impressive and shocking without being dangerous.

...or at least more dangerous than any cut would be in a time without antibiotics.

Granted being the non workers/jobbers(probably not the best terminology to be used here) absolutely sucked in this case.

Yeah, and from my understanding they got pretty pampered too. It was hardly a prison system.

I have the impression that what makes it a bit confusing is the overlap between "professional" gladiators and people who were sentenced to death with gladiatorial combat as the means. Which I think (?) also overlapped with times when the spectacle/"fun" involved killing a lot of people at once.

Not sure off-hand what type of gladiators were involved (maybe both?) but under Emperor Claudius, there was a fake naval battle gladiator combat, and that was pretty deadly, as were similar spectacles. IIRC, the naval battle was the origin of the famous "We who are about to die salute you" slogan, which gives you an idea of what was involved.

Tl; dr, when Romans did gladiator combats that were things like "acting out a historic battle with real casualties" or "performing a play but the deaths are real", there were few if any survivors.

Yeah I think the Romans did both elaborate public executions and theatrical performances, they were done in a similar enough way we can’t easily differentiate specific instances.

Another thing worth remembering is that individual gladiators didn't fight non-stop. The fights were usually for big events and they spent the in between time training. So it's not like your life was on the line every other week.

That said, historians have found your average gladiator usually didn't live past 30, some even arguing that being killed between 18 and 25 was more common. They'd usually fight about 10 matches over the course of their lives before dying in the arena or from injuries afterwards.

So what would their prospects for fame and fortune be? Could they become demi-gods, for instance?

Start a revolution, die fighting, get their name used as a boggy man for little Roman children, get forgotten for a while, then be rediscovered by people living 1800 years later, and become a symbol of freedom and rebellion, immortalized in dozens of books, novels, movies and TV series around the world.

They may even get a trope to their name in TV Tropes.

Edited by jawal on Jan 16th 2024 at 7:48:38 PM