Just once (4th paragraph), the article refers to the object as a "short sword". That strikes me (passably-well-read in some related areas) as very different from "dagger".
Any more-expert folks here, to have a sense for how big a deal that is (in the context)?
It is a "pugio", a sort of small dagger sidearm for Roman soldiers. I can't think of any reason to refer to it as a short sword in English as that conjures up the image of a much larger weapon. These are essentially the same as the daggers used to kill Julius Caesar, for example.
Short swords do 40% more damage than daggers on average (1d6 vs 1d4) and this matters less over time as strength is maxed and magic bonuses are applied. If this Roman was at high level, the two words were effectively interchangeable for him.
Most of the complex classifications for swords is a modern development, that's often fairly arbitrary. Maybe short sword isn't the best term, but it is a short-sword
It's impressive to see the difference between the dagger as it was discovered and as it's been restored, but I'm really curious to see what it would look like in "like-new" condition.
Here is another one restored to a better shape [1], close-up [2]. I must admit it doesn't look as perfect as replicas (e.g. in movies), obviously we have much better and precise technology/craftsmanship these days. Probably "as new" may not differ that much from what we restore to.
I can never get over how real sword (or dagger) handles look so painful to wield. Maybe it's that most of them have lost some leather wrapping or else were just ornamental...but I've seen several that just looked guaranteed to hurt the wielder with each swing.
That's because most of them had leather wrapped hilts and after all these years the leather is long gone leaving just the tang and any decorative embellishments that it had.
The quality of metalwork back then was incredible.
Every so often I stumble on images of various hoards, and the gold work in particular is just awesome. Gold ages well, so there is that, but the workmanship is just incredible. The Great Torc from Snettisham is a good example.
Probably objects that make you imagine about what day-to-day living was like in the past.
If VR becomes widespread, perhaps the first VR headset. Or perhaps niche, quaint items with great craftsmanship (no longer used at all in the future), like a high-quality metal mechanical pencil, fountain pen, or ballpoint pen.
Early commercial spacecraft (SpaceX) would also be a certainty, as the expansion of humanity across space is near-guaranteed (as long as humanity doesn't destroy itself). Perhaps also today's fashion (thinking of fashion museums).
A few years ago in Amsterdam , The Netherlands a construction company had to dig a tunnel through a former canal. The canal existed for few hundreds of years and was only a decade ago filled and a road was build on top of it.
They found about 700.000 artifacts from the middle-ages till modern times. Speer arrows, swords, guns, money, credit cards, music cassettes, smoke pipes etc. I believe there is a exposition dedicated to those findings. Very interesting.
Space archaeology will be really interesting. So many satellites and other things to be found scattered around Earth, the solar system, and beyond.
Someone some day will perhaps dig up a completely buried Mars lander under windblown sand, or send their fast vehicle out to capture images of the Voyager probes.
Sometimes thought it is a bummer living in the states, less of an opportunity to go find some 1000+ year old relics knowing full well the likelihood of that happening is slim even if I lived in another country with bronze/iron age.
I think most folks would have more fun with a metal detector and a map of Civil and Revolutionary War military camps and battlegrounds, or even just poking around ghost towns or old farmhouses, than looking for pre-Columbian artifacts, up here north of the Rio. It's largely disappointing and if you actually manage to sort-of prove that the broken barely-recognizable spear point you found came from some named group of people circa 800 CE, you'll inevitably find that we know almost nothing about them and that what we do know makes them sound exactly like every other group around that time, since we just don't know much about any of them besides trite generalities.
The oldest copper artifacts we have are from the old copper complex around Lake Superior, and more recent metalworking traditions were present throughout much of the Americas.
Archaeological evidence has not revealed metal smelting or alloying of metals by pre-Columbian native peoples north of the Rio Grande; however, they did use native copper extensively.[32]
Which then further cites: George Rapp Jr, Guy Gibbon & Kenneth Ames (1998). Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: an Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. p. 26.
I do not own this book, so I apologize I cannot verify the citation.
I didn’t realize how easy native copper smelting was until I watched some of those primitive YouTube channels where they make a water filtration system and smelt some copper using a hand made smelter. Linked below if anyone is interested.
It's not exactly easy - requires good quality coal, and fine tuning to get the right airflow to coal ratio to create a sufficiently hot furnace without becoming oxidizing. Those guys describe having to try multiple times before working out a successful process to produce copper, documenting a couple of their experiments in videos. They've nicely fully documented their final configuration in this video - some high quality experimental archeology work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaJuab5riE
Keep in mind that you have to be wary of poisonous fumes - hopefully the elements giving their copper alloy a brassy appearance don't include lead, or worse, arsenic.
Native copper working is considered metallurgy in archaeology. If you disagree, feel free to take it up with the archaeometallurgists.
Moreover, purification from ores was done. The so-called copper bells of the southwest were mainly produced from ores rather than native copper and were often alloyed with arsenic or silver to modify the color. The main center of production was paquimé (~180mi west of the Rio Grande), but the cultural area extends well over the border into AZ, NM, and CO.
My understanding that advanced stone, shaped with metal, lasts. However, simple stone tools (think axes, hammers, flint arrowheads etc) tend to get easily lost. This is made furthermore difficult by the difficulty (impossibility?) of distinguishing them on tools like metal detectors
No, they're quite easy to find if you know what you're looking for and you look in the right places. Lithics in the ancient world were a bit like plastics today: ubiquitous and highly disposable.
For particular lithics industries/tools and certain situations you might get some amount of reworking, but ultimately people were producing new tools very frequently. That means that any area in which you might find them on the surface will usually have some and a long term production site will have overwhelming artifact density. They can occasionally look like normal rocks, but once you train your eye the worked faces become visually distinct.
I always felt there were millions of buried gold in certain parts of America. Buried money, and gold.
Back in the day before banks we buried, or hid our valuables.
There must be stashes of loot buried in people's back yard?
I bought a metal detector years ago, and got bored very quick. I found a quarter, and a pot metal medallion.
Here's a good treasure story.
I knew a lady years ago who went through a rough divorce. Her husband made his wad in the 80's as a drug dealer. When they were fat, and happy, they would whoop it up. This one night they went to the Fairmont Hotel for dinner. She drove home because he was to inebriated.
They lived out at the beach. In a drunken stupor, along with other substances running through his body, he decided to hide his "house money".
He walked out of the house with his pipe filled with $800,000.
He woke up the next day not remembering anything.
She told him what he did.
He rushed out to the back yard, and nothing was disturbed on the ground. He frantically ran around the neighborhood looking for his pipe of money. He went to the beach to no avail.
They were both disappointed.
But it was only part of their money.
Years later they got a divorce.
She told me this story many times. I was excited because I was planning on going to the new owners of the house, and offer free landscaping. It was a long shot, but I love capers.
The big problem was his money bank pipe was pvc, but it was still on my mind.
A few years later, my divorced friend saw the new owners of the beach house in Safeway, and told them the story.
I doubt they found any money, but I will always remember the lost beach/drug money.
(Both passed away, so I feel this treasure story can be told.)
Stone and ceramic are very durable (the latter tends to break into potsherds, but doesn't rust away as iron does). And population density doesn't need to be particularly high to be able to locate settlements and dig up artifacts.
This is simply not true. There are many places where you can go where the impacti of the Native Americans is still very obvious. There are places where you can find hundreds of religious carvings, arrowheads, obsidian artifacts, ect.
BUT!! The US has great magnet fishing - tons of guns thrown over bridges. (Be careful though - WWII guys threw contraband over these bridges - grenades etc).
I would reckon the chances are higher to still find something in the states.
The "old world" had quite a head-start in digging up stuff and is also much more densely populated, so more people have been digging up old stuff for longer.
51 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadAny more-expert folks here, to have a sense for how big a deal that is (in the context)?
1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeology-intern...
2. https://www.archaeology.org/news/8493-200302-germany-roman-d...
Every so often I stumble on images of various hoards, and the gold work in particular is just awesome. Gold ages well, so there is that, but the workmanship is just incredible. The Great Torc from Snettisham is a good example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Torc_from_Snettisham
If VR becomes widespread, perhaps the first VR headset. Or perhaps niche, quaint items with great craftsmanship (no longer used at all in the future), like a high-quality metal mechanical pencil, fountain pen, or ballpoint pen.
Early commercial spacecraft (SpaceX) would also be a certainty, as the expansion of humanity across space is near-guaranteed (as long as humanity doesn't destroy itself). Perhaps also today's fashion (thinking of fashion museums).
Someone some day will perhaps dig up a completely buried Mars lander under windblown sand, or send their fast vehicle out to capture images of the Voyager probes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detectorists
For an amateur but no less correct source, wikipedia provides a good quip for us:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am...
Archaeological evidence has not revealed metal smelting or alloying of metals by pre-Columbian native peoples north of the Rio Grande; however, they did use native copper extensively.[32]
Which then further cites: George Rapp Jr, Guy Gibbon & Kenneth Ames (1998). Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: an Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. p. 26.
I do not own this book, so I apologize I cannot verify the citation.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0BjU20kU5E
Keep in mind that you have to be wary of poisonous fumes - hopefully the elements giving their copper alloy a brassy appearance don't include lead, or worse, arsenic.
Moreover, purification from ores was done. The so-called copper bells of the southwest were mainly produced from ores rather than native copper and were often alloyed with arsenic or silver to modify the color. The main center of production was paquimé (~180mi west of the Rio Grande), but the cultural area extends well over the border into AZ, NM, and CO.
For particular lithics industries/tools and certain situations you might get some amount of reworking, but ultimately people were producing new tools very frequently. That means that any area in which you might find them on the surface will usually have some and a long term production site will have overwhelming artifact density. They can occasionally look like normal rocks, but once you train your eye the worked faces become visually distinct.
Back in the day before banks we buried, or hid our valuables.
There must be stashes of loot buried in people's back yard?
I bought a metal detector years ago, and got bored very quick. I found a quarter, and a pot metal medallion.
Here's a good treasure story.
I knew a lady years ago who went through a rough divorce. Her husband made his wad in the 80's as a drug dealer. When they were fat, and happy, they would whoop it up. This one night they went to the Fairmont Hotel for dinner. She drove home because he was to inebriated.
They lived out at the beach. In a drunken stupor, along with other substances running through his body, he decided to hide his "house money".
He walked out of the house with his pipe filled with $800,000.
He woke up the next day not remembering anything.
She told him what he did.
He rushed out to the back yard, and nothing was disturbed on the ground. He frantically ran around the neighborhood looking for his pipe of money. He went to the beach to no avail.
They were both disappointed.
But it was only part of their money.
Years later they got a divorce.
She told me this story many times. I was excited because I was planning on going to the new owners of the house, and offer free landscaping. It was a long shot, but I love capers.
The big problem was his money bank pipe was pvc, but it was still on my mind.
A few years later, my divorced friend saw the new owners of the beach house in Safeway, and told them the story.
I doubt they found any money, but I will always remember the lost beach/drug money.
(Both passed away, so I feel this treasure story can be told.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9D1hcwq-8
The "old world" had quite a head-start in digging up stuff and is also much more densely populated, so more people have been digging up old stuff for longer.