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"Bronze Age Pompeii" Discovered
FortKnox writes "Italian archaeologists that were selling rights to build an underground parking lot, north of Pompeii, have discovered an ancient village within it. This discovery is a village that is basically a snapshot of the bronze age. The city, which is north of Vesuvius, was given the name "Nola". One odd thing, though, unlike Pompeii, they haven't found bodies in Nola. Good stuff to find, and a good place to compare theory with proof."
With its well-preserved shops, houses, amphitheater and baths, Pompeii is one of Italy's top tourist sites.
Well, I guess that explains where everyone was...
Now all we need is a bronze age emulator we can load the snapshot with!
This is really a gold mine. I can't believe how fortunate we are to have a site like this. It may well do for Bronze age knowledge what Pompeii did for Roman knowledge.
We are going to see, for the first time, what life was REALLY like in bronze age Europe. It could very well change all our ideas about the development of early societies.
Yeeha! I can't wait to go . . .
Later . . . . . . WebBug
"Today, a giant pool of magma still lies beneath Vesuvius and extends at least 400 square
kilometers under some of Italy's scenic coastline, making a fresh eruption possible at any
time."
If there's another eruption, future scientists will be able to study how 20th century tourists interacted with bronze-age archeological tourist attractions.
@home doesn't do it for ya? Try NOT@HOME.
tcd004
All you have to do is read the article...
- MayorQ
I think the archaeologists were hired by some governmental entity to do the testing...
--Blair
One odd thing, though, unlike Pompeii, they haven't found bodies in Nola
They pr'y saw the lava coming and said "let's get the hell outta here"...
IIRC, Atlantis is traditionally described as a ring island system, with the "downtown" located in the middle of these rings, of which there were 3 I believe. It is also thought to be past the Pillars of Hercules, which some believe to be the straights of Gibralater(sp), placing it in the Atlantic. However, due to errors/variations in translation it's location is pretty hard to pinpoint.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Natural time capsules like Pompeii, Herculaneum, the "ice man", Peruvian mountain mummies fascinate the Hell out of me because they give a hint of the life that was lived by those using the things left behind.
This discovery seems especially interesting because reconstructing bronze age villages has been the province of experimental archaeologists like the late Dr. Peter Reynolds. It should be good to have more data to compare their reconstructions with.
I'm guessing since they haven't found any remains (as of yet) the villagers must have known what was about to happen. I also wonder how big this city was in terms of population and influence.
From the article:
So, apparently, they were given a small amount of warning, but not much. This is typical of the volcanos in the region, and in fact, most volcanos on earth: large, devastating eruptions typically follow a day or two of small earthquakes, accompanied by small eruptions and occasional small fissures opening in the ground. This provides a lot of warning for those in the immediate area: people know they need to escape, so they leave; they dont know how much time they have, so they tend to leave things behind. The result is that the city is left in near perfect condition (perfect being relative, obviously it was completely destroeyed), yet very few people seem to have been killed.
I'll politely ignore your second comment.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
Italy is quite amazing in that when ruins are found, they are generally left untouched. Rome is a great example of this in that there are vast ruins right in the downtown areas!! Imagine the businesses and contractors that were planning on building on those sites! Imagine the great many ruins hidden underneath all of the modern buildings! Yikes.
- MayorQ
...assuming they abandoned the plans for the underground parking lot.
In this day and age it wouldn't surprise me if a company was more irritated at a find like this than anything else, as it presents more rubble for them to clear out, and possibly more media attention that they want.
Where's the profit in archaeology, anyways?
I guess they were smart enough to avoid the "Duck and Cover" technique that Pompeii's residents tried...
for about 5 years from now, after they've had time to excavate more.
My wife and I went to Italy on our honeymoon in March and toured Pompeii. It truly is humbling to stand in the middle of this city. All at once it gives you a sense of 1) the fleeting nature of life 2) the complete and total lack of significance that the moment in time that we occupy right now has and 3) wonder at the way civilization has changed in the past few thousand years. I tend very easily to lose any sort of perspective on my place in the universe, visiting historical treasures such as these have the ability to show you a much broader and more complete picture of the world and your place in it...
I can't wait to visit Nola...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
In a lot of places, archaelogists have to do an examination before development can begin on a site. The article seems to be saying that it was a routine examination for the state, and not that they were selling the rights. "Vecchio discovered the village north of Vesuvius while doing routine tests to grant a company a license to build a shopping center and underground parking lot on the site."
It's also quite likely that Atlantis doesn't exist.
ROME, June 12, 2002
Archaeologists excavating the ruins of the buried city of Nola have found documents which provide a stunning insight into the nature of Nolan society, and the possible causes for its destruction.
One of the documents, 'Specimen 42A/6', after translation from the ancient cunieform, reads:
"To the people of Nola - we have written to you several times asking you to cease and desist your illegal activities.
"This is your final warning that if you don't immediately amend your ways, the government of Rome, at the decree of Emperor Numa, will invoke the fire gods to destroy your city without any further notice.
"One last time, we state our demands:
1) Cease trading in scrolls and engraved tablets. No one is to possess scrolls or tablets unless they have been licensed from Softius Micrius Gatius Billius.
2) Cease all use of the rotary bearing horizontal transport system, commonly known as the 'Wheel'. Your persistent use of the Wheel violates patents MDCCLXXVI, DCCXLIV, MMMCCLXXXVIII and CDLXIII. OR, purchase a 'Wheel End User License', which entitles you to a subscription to 'Wheel version VIII', as long as you pay the royalty of two pieces of silver per thousand rotations per wheel, and pay for regular new releases.
3) Hunt and slaughter all carrier pigeons. These birds have been used for copyright infringement purposes, and must die.
4) Hunt all birds of species parakeet or lorikeet (nicknamed by your local population as 'Aves em-pee-threeius' - these birds have copyright-infringing capabilities, and have been used to illegally record and distribute copyrighted music.
"Lastly, once again, failure to immediately comply with these demands will result in the destruction of your civilisation."
Signed
Riaa Porcius
Intellectual Property Enforcement Division
Global Roman Empire
under the authority of Zeus
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
"...and 60% are African-American..."
African-American. In Pompeii.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
Remember at Pompeii there were no bodies found only cavities in the ash which archaeologists filled with plaster. Three things can be supposed by not finding bodies.
They had time to get away.
They were incinerated
Any dead left were cremated indicating that the dwellers were Indo-Europeans and not aboriginal Italians who usually buried their dead.
They found bodies at Herculaeneum, which is one of the few finds of Roman remains because Romans followed the funerial practices of their nomadic forebears -- cremation. At least, the patricians did so.
Hot Damn! That degree in Classical Studies pays off finally. I am waiting for my check.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Yes, they abandoned plans for the parking lot, replacing them with plans for the ultra-lucrative Bronzo-Disney theme park.
42
Pompeii was buried by ash and pyroclastic flows. Lava (which is magma on the surface) didn't come anywhere close to Pompeii. The following website has a good account of the 79 AD eruption: http://urban.arch.virginia.edu/struct/pompeii/volc anic.html
I disagree. Most stories, myths, legends have at least SOME basis in fact.
Take for instance the Minotaur. People in Athens were conquered by the Minoans and forced to surrender young people for sacrifice. They were to fight the Minotaur - if they survived then they might return home.
The reality as we have ascertained it is... these young people were used as performers in a bull fighting ceremony where they leapt over the bull by placing hands on the bull's head and flipping over. Also, the maze of passages which we think is the labyrinth has been found.
The Homeric epics - The Troad and the Troadians. Troy has been found. We believe we have found Charybdis (sp?). We have found a civilization that follows closely on the culture that launched a thousand ships - Mycenae, Sparta, Athens, Achaia.
As for Atlantis, the legend was said to be ancient in the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. No doubt the story has been embellished and altered in the retelling. You can bet there is some truth in there somewhere.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
We are fortunate to have discovered a cache of clay tablets that appear to be the remnants of the Bronze Age Jargon File, as witnessed by this sample:
hacker - n., Military slang for warrior armed with a battle axe.
cracker - n., Military slang for a warrior armed with a war hammer. Civilians eager to show off their mastery of military slang often erroneously refer to crackers as hackers, much to the chagrin of the better informed military men.
ping - n., The sound a sling stone makes when it bounces off a bronze helmet. The word is often used as a verb as well, e.g. a general might send his slingers ahead to 'ping' a wood or village and listen for the characteristic sound indicating that the enemy has troops stationed there in ambush.
pron - n., Short for Pronifagri, the Mother Goddess. The term is most often used to refer to those obese Neolithic images of Pronifagri which are still easily found by those who know where to look. (See babe in the Neolithic Jargon File.) Some males collect pron compulsively, completely filling up their barns with it, and in some cases even buying a new, larger barn just to store their huge collections.
troll - n., Someone, usually an adolescent with no social skills, who hangs around the marketplace and makes quips that are calculated to start an argument with the more staid citizens. Taken from the verb trollo, trollere, meaning "to drag a fish ashore" or "to dig in the nose with a finger". (The verb itself is a conflation of traho and uolo, with a basic sense of "aspire to drag".) Trolling is thought to be common throughout the Bronze Age Mediterranean, as it later gave rise to Greek Philosophy. (See Socrates in the Classical Jargon File.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They had time to get away.
They were incinerated
Any dead left were cremated indicating that the dwellers were Indo-Europeans and not aboriginal Italians who usually buried their dead.
Or:
They didn't leave the bodies to rot in downtown Nola.
After all, they were only digging up the area of a parking structure (so far). American Indians have a lot to say about the hygene (or lack thereof) of Europeans. But even bronze-age Europeans didn't normally leave the dead lying around on downtown streets.
Pompei is a special case: They were killed and buried all in one event by a natural disaster.
So let's hang in there until they've dug up enough of the area to find the graveyard, eh?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They didn't leave the bodies to rot in downtown Nola
True. It would be interesting to see if they find any skeletal remains or not. That would say a lot about the origins of the people in Nola, if we suppose burial customs are indicative of origin.
They will probably find oblong shallow graves, like the ones you can see, cheek to jowl, with the circular ash burials in the Forum in Rome. Then again, that's a maybe.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Are they still building it?
Except Atlantis is not the same as those other myths. Atlantis was a morality play written by Plato to show Socrates idea of civil order and an ideal state, not a story to keep telling the kids years from now like The Illid and the Odyssey. The Atlantian stories were philosphical in nature and not a hyped report of current events, religon, or events. Plato was discussing events that occured some 8,000 years before the current Athens and described a war between Athens and Atlantis. Athens just simply didn't exist at this time and was known at the time not to be that old. And a story this cool would of been retold many, many times and in many different forms. The age of the story was given in the story by Plato who got it from some Egyptian Mystic. But with this information there should be references here and there about it, but there isn't a peep about it until Timaeus and Critias and not much afterwards until relatively modern times. And then add the fact that there is no real credibale evidence of a Atlantis Civilization. (There was evidence other stories, etc, of a Troy and a Minoa before the ruins were found.) Looking for Atlantis is finding connections were no exist.
The conclusion authors create stories to make a point. You don't think every author today bases his/her books on things that actually happened or did happen. Sometimes its just a story and they're not much there to be cracked.
The little village is a few thousand years older than the rest of the city.
Troy has been found.
An ancient city was found, and Schliemann claimed that it was Troy. Its possible; but the evidence is sketchy at best, and its possible that Troy really is mythological and never existed.
Personally I think that if you were to dig under a lot of Turkish cities you'd find ancient ruins. Just like if you look at a lot of islands, you're eventually going to find something that has some of the characteristics of Atlantis. Doesn't mean that it is the actual Atlantis Plato referred to in the Critias.
Pretty much every civilization with roots in ancient Mesopotamia (a la Tigris and Euphrates) has its own tale of The Great Flood. Joseph Campbell wrote about this. Atlantis, Noah, Numenor, etc.
Okay...so the article says they found the bones of a pregnant goat. Uh...how do they know this?
I guess either the goat's ribs expand or something, or perhaps they found goat-fetus bones or something?
Somehow I just have this vision of people digging up the site and someone walking in saying "Wow...this is wonderful, they cooked with this and that, and wow, look at that, pregnant goat bones."
The case against Atlantis is stronger than you present it here as being. The opening of the Timaeus presents itself as happening the day after Socrates related action of the Republic, at which point Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates present their version of that city. That is, they present their version of Socrates' made-up regime, changing it where they thought it needed it. Philosopher-kings are replaced with priest-kings, the communism is abandoned, and it is presented as an ancient model to follow rather than a new one.
If you look at what Critias actually says, the ancient Athenians he describes in the story are the citizens of Socrates' city -- he suggests that his story is made up, but in keeping in line with the radically more conservative character of this discussion, it is presented as being true.
That is, the story of Atlantis first told in the Timaeus and Critias is presented as being false! Later people apparently didn't get the joke.
Since the above might seem controversial to some, here's an explanation that might seem less so to them. Plato promises us three dialogues dealing with Atlantis: the Timaeus, the Critias, and the Hermocrates. We never get to see the third, and the second is unfinished. Plato was prevented from finishing by the FBI and various 19th century materialist skeptics.
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under-paid karma whore