Ancient Celtic culture was really into the practice of casting valuable objects into bodies of water - apparently this was a central religious practice for them.
So what did the Romans do when they conquered Celtic territory?They would auction off the rights to dredge a captured lake and keep its treasure, Storage Wars style. Truly a pioneering capitalist civilization!
The Romans are really… familiar. They invented the blueprint for western civilization and there are lots of things about the people that feel very modern. With a few tweaks and lucky chances, the Industrial Revolution could have happened more than 1000 years earlier.
To get a sense of this go look up translations of Roman graffiti, especially at Pompeii.
Fascinating article... But when you consider that the driving initial application was pumping water (out of coal mines), you have to acknowledge that pumping water would've also been a major concern for the Romans too -- i.e. hydrology and aquaducts
Not sure I buy the article's explanation. It seems to hinge on the Industrial Revolution being dependent on coal, which was dependent on a use case for coal, which was powering Spinning Jennies at scale... but it was always my understanding that the invention of the Spinning Jenny was "the" start of the Industrial Revolution, and in any case the article just punts the question: what stopped the Romans from inventing the Spinning Jenny or something comparable? Surely the Roman textile market would've warranted it, no?
When you think about it, that's not so surprising. I imagine that set up would be the optimal one for a good of unknown but probable high value. It'll always be more work than it's worth for the army, and yet by auctioning off the unknown treasure they could capitalize on it. I wonder if this was employed anywhere else in the ancient world, if others came to the same conclusion in similar situations.
If I remember my Marxism classes in college, the capitalists worked longer hours than many workers, and used that as a moral argument in their favor.
The Marxist response was that capitalists weren’t estranged from their labor in the same way. A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business.
The former CEO of Yahoo took two weeks maternity leave and promised to work 9-5 for all of it.
Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.
I was in downtown San Francisco not long ago. There’s a Classical style statue in praise of the workers who built downtown. You won’t find anything like that in a pre-capitalist society.
Edit: in many capitalist countries, left wing party is called Labour. I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
> A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business.
More like 90 hours "supervising" the people actually building all parts of the business (or, more commonly, supervising one or more intermediate layers of supervisors who then supervise the people actually building all parts of the business). And that's taking the implication of 90 hour CEO workweeks being even common (let alone representative of most CEOs) at face value.
More importantly, the Marxist response didn't/doesn't revolve around the nature of the work; rather, it revolves around the ownership of the profits from that work. Specifically, the Marxist argument is that the workers are the ones actually creating the vast majority of the company's value, yet do not typically receive commensurate compensation (i.e. wages + benefits + ownership stake). Ownership stake in particular is the main point of contention: the difference between "value created by this worker" minus "compensation paid to this worker" (which is necessarily a number greater than zero if executives/managers are getting salaries) would in any honest accounting be an investment - yet rarely do workers receive shares of the companies they build, and when they do it's typically a small fraction of what they "paid in". Likewise, employees rarely have any control over who their executives and supervisors even are; if their CEO spends 90 hours a week "working" on golf courses and in fancy restaurants with CEOs of other companies, employees rarely have any ability to fire that deadbeat and hire a replacement who actually provides value to their company.
That, if you remember from your Marxism classes, is the estrangement of workers from their labor. They work, but are denied commensurate ownership/control over the results of that work. This is what cooperatives and unions seek to resolve "within" a capitalist system - whether by creating companies which do give workers commensurate ownership or by pressuring existing companies to address their employees' needs/wants.
> Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.
History in general is filled with New Money's descendants becoming Old Money. New Money complaining about said descendants becoming Old Money ain't exactly unique to capitalism.
> I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
Nor can I imagine one called the Racism Party, yet my country manages to have multiple parties for whom such a name would be quite apt.
The Marxist response does revolve around the nature of work!
For the worker, estrangement isn’t about losing out on profits, but the fact that they lose the object of their labor as soon as it is produced.
A worker uses tools they do not own to manipulate raw material they do not own to create products they do not own.
The more the worker works, they less valuable and important they become.
I spend hours every day writing programs on a laptop I don’t own, run on servers I don’t own, for companies whose services are unknown and foreign to me.
The company I work for may or may not be profitable (startups, right?), but the alienation is there nonetheless.
Marx certainly wrote about profit. But alienation/estrangement is a very different thing.
I mean, yeah on the one hand it's showing disregard for another culture, but on the other hand, it would be a waste of good and valuable resources not to recover the objects.
It might all be chance, but Ive visited a few Roman religious sites that appear to be built on top of earlier sacred sites and it makes me think that the Romans just slapped their temples down on top of other religious places and carried on with the rituals.
That pretty much describes almost every civilization I read about. Sometimes, they are even lazier. They'd just re-purpose the church as a mosque or vice-versa. Heck, we had a recent instance of that (hagia sofia)
Unless you kill all the locals chances are they also would like to carry on with their rituals. So a strategy is to mix your own religion with the local rituals and thus absorb the population into your own culture.
I wonder if the Arthurian legend of Excalibur being thrown back to the Lady of the Lake as an offering is some distant echo of that (far older) Celtic tradition.
Assuming they were thick enough to not bend or break, I guess pretty long. Enough to pass through fabric more than one or two times? The longest look like they could temporarily sew a cloak shut like zipper.
I immediately wonder if someone wished to be remembered… thus unearthing this 3k years later grants their wish.
Does anyone know how delicately these sites are dug up? Ie: would we know if they had thrown straw or other degradable materials in and it had been covered up? Seems like a well being deeper than usual has the opportunity to have multiple ages of use and artifacts.
[0] is a good example of the standard, expected quality of practice on a site. I've seen better and I've seen a lot worse.
As for what you can tell from excavations, it depends. I excavated a bronze age burial in the UK where you could see the soil impression left by a bag holding remains in excavation, even though the bag itself had long since rotted away. In other cases you may recover the actual organic material, especially if it's been burned. Even in cases where you're not that lucky it still may be possible to tell through phytoliths or other analytical methods.
I always wonder what they mean by "ritual", it always seems to be a throwaway word for modern or ancient cultures that just have different beliefs or traditions. But it's rarely used when talking about the author's (or anthropologist's) own culture.
I like this because it's a double-reflection at this point: It's someone trying to Other what they considered to be Normative American Culture, by attempting to see it as if they were an anthropologist observing a "tribe" somewhere... but it was written in 1956, so it focuses exclusively on White America in the late 1950s, which is pretty significantly Other to a lot of people these days due to shifts in culture and technology. Like, "vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress" is... what, exactly? I assume most of us here are Sufficiently Ancient to get that right off, but it isn't lampooning an extant group of people. Similarly, the Listener is no longer as prominent as he was back in the Age Of Anxiety, because the whole of mental health practice has moved on.
The archaeological/anthropological sense of "ritual" is more about a behavior being performed consistently and commonly than it is about attempting to describe an belief system underlying behavior (or even if one exists at all).
My culture has quite a few rituals; I'm indeed engaging in one (eating a meal and some drinks in a communal space at a long table) right now :)
My favorite archeologic discovery when it comes to ancient central Europe is the Tollense Valley Battle.
Around 3300 years ago in central Europe two groups, estimated 4000 men total, have clashed on and around a 120 meters long stone bridge crossing the river and valley of Tollense. By the time those men engaged, this bridge was some 500 years old already, which means it was build 3800 years ago.
This battle tells us that there were organized forces in central Europe thousands of years ago, and that there was important road going through the region that required construction and maintenance of such structure for this many years. But we currently have no idea who were those people or even what points of interests was this road supposed to connect.
"archeologists discovered a porcelain chair on which one can sit like a throne, with a hole in the center and an elaborate mechanism for flushing water, used for ritual purposes"
“The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a recent book that really opened my eyes to how much the usual interpretation of prehistory is subject to myths of inevitable progress from small egalitarian organizations to kings and cities. The societies of past were probably much richer in form and more consciously designed that we have assumed.
45 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadSo what did the Romans do when they conquered Celtic territory?They would auction off the rights to dredge a captured lake and keep its treasure, Storage Wars style. Truly a pioneering capitalist civilization!
Any additional reading you might recommend?
The Romans are really… familiar. They invented the blueprint for western civilization and there are lots of things about the people that feel very modern. With a few tweaks and lucky chances, the Industrial Revolution could have happened more than 1000 years earlier.
To get a sense of this go look up translations of Roman graffiti, especially at Pompeii.
Ahem.
The debate between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson convinced me it was the Greeks.
Actually, you may be on to something there.
Romans saw work as servile and debasing. One reason they had slaves was so they could be insulated from it.
It’s hard to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
It's easy to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
The Marxist response was that capitalists weren’t estranged from their labor in the same way. A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business.
The former CEO of Yahoo took two weeks maternity leave and promised to work 9-5 for all of it.
Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.
I was in downtown San Francisco not long ago. There’s a Classical style statue in praise of the workers who built downtown. You won’t find anything like that in a pre-capitalist society.
Edit: in many capitalist countries, left wing party is called Labour. I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
More like 90 hours "supervising" the people actually building all parts of the business (or, more commonly, supervising one or more intermediate layers of supervisors who then supervise the people actually building all parts of the business). And that's taking the implication of 90 hour CEO workweeks being even common (let alone representative of most CEOs) at face value.
More importantly, the Marxist response didn't/doesn't revolve around the nature of the work; rather, it revolves around the ownership of the profits from that work. Specifically, the Marxist argument is that the workers are the ones actually creating the vast majority of the company's value, yet do not typically receive commensurate compensation (i.e. wages + benefits + ownership stake). Ownership stake in particular is the main point of contention: the difference between "value created by this worker" minus "compensation paid to this worker" (which is necessarily a number greater than zero if executives/managers are getting salaries) would in any honest accounting be an investment - yet rarely do workers receive shares of the companies they build, and when they do it's typically a small fraction of what they "paid in". Likewise, employees rarely have any control over who their executives and supervisors even are; if their CEO spends 90 hours a week "working" on golf courses and in fancy restaurants with CEOs of other companies, employees rarely have any ability to fire that deadbeat and hire a replacement who actually provides value to their company.
That, if you remember from your Marxism classes, is the estrangement of workers from their labor. They work, but are denied commensurate ownership/control over the results of that work. This is what cooperatives and unions seek to resolve "within" a capitalist system - whether by creating companies which do give workers commensurate ownership or by pressuring existing companies to address their employees' needs/wants.
> Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.
History in general is filled with New Money's descendants becoming Old Money. New Money complaining about said descendants becoming Old Money ain't exactly unique to capitalism.
> I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
Nor can I imagine one called the Racism Party, yet my country manages to have multiple parties for whom such a name would be quite apt.
For the worker, estrangement isn’t about losing out on profits, but the fact that they lose the object of their labor as soon as it is produced.
A worker uses tools they do not own to manipulate raw material they do not own to create products they do not own.
The more the worker works, they less valuable and important they become.
I spend hours every day writing programs on a laptop I don’t own, run on servers I don’t own, for companies whose services are unknown and foreign to me.
The company I work for may or may not be profitable (startups, right?), but the alienation is there nonetheless.
Marx certainly wrote about profit. But alienation/estrangement is a very different thing.
The profits are the object of their labor. It's the entire reason they're hired in the first place: to produce profit.
> The company I work for may or may not be profitable (startups, right?), but the alienation is there nonetheless.
And the profit is there nonetheless. Whether or not a venture is profitable does not change the fact that profit motivates it.
cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibula_(brooch)#Use for a page on their successors.
Does anyone know how delicately these sites are dug up? Ie: would we know if they had thrown straw or other degradable materials in and it had been covered up? Seems like a well being deeper than usual has the opportunity to have multiple ages of use and artifacts.
As for what you can tell from excavations, it depends. I excavated a bronze age burial in the UK where you could see the soil impression left by a bag holding remains in excavation, even though the bag itself had long since rotted away. In other cases you may recover the actual organic material, especially if it's been burned. Even in cases where you're not that lucky it still may be possible to tell through phytoliths or other analytical methods.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcT1vGyJzyg
In case anyone doesn't know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema
I like this because it's a double-reflection at this point: It's someone trying to Other what they considered to be Normative American Culture, by attempting to see it as if they were an anthropologist observing a "tribe" somewhere... but it was written in 1956, so it focuses exclusively on White America in the late 1950s, which is pretty significantly Other to a lot of people these days due to shifts in culture and technology. Like, "vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress" is... what, exactly? I assume most of us here are Sufficiently Ancient to get that right off, but it isn't lampooning an extant group of people. Similarly, the Listener is no longer as prominent as he was back in the Age Of Anxiety, because the whole of mental health practice has moved on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Anxiety
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2888013/
My culture has quite a few rituals; I'm indeed engaging in one (eating a meal and some drinks in a communal space at a long table) right now :)
Around 3300 years ago in central Europe two groups, estimated 4000 men total, have clashed on and around a 120 meters long stone bridge crossing the river and valley of Tollense. By the time those men engaged, this bridge was some 500 years old already, which means it was build 3800 years ago.
This battle tells us that there were organized forces in central Europe thousands of years ago, and that there was important road going through the region that required construction and maintenance of such structure for this many years. But we currently have no idea who were those people or even what points of interests was this road supposed to connect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield