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Did The Dark Ages Exist? (NEW CONCEPTS)
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EndlesslyRocking



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When ancient artifacts are dug up, where did all the dirt on top of them come from? Are all these things purposely buried, or do they just get covered up by dirt because it is floating around the air? If it's from the air, how does the dirt get created in the first place?
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frank h



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So, Frank, where did everybody live?

As a possible scenario here goes:
The whole process of 'bury' building probably got going around 500BC and only temporarily stalled when the Romans arrived but carried on after as in the AS Chronicle.

As expansion proceeded (see map in Hill forts thread) I guess most of the peasantry were gradually drawn into the emerging tons, leys, worths, hams and ings etc. as the lowlands farming system evolved and the herding communities dissipated. Patently the kinds of Iron Age settlements found in the fields by the archaeologists were abandoned, while those living in the uplands seem to have largely stayed put in their enclosed homesteads.

Others that resisted huddled in the hillforts until seen off, some of which housed a few thousand, eg. Malverns, Credenhill etc. A few late in the process (ie. as the Romans arrived) ended up in refuges such as the upland oppida found at Silchester, Bigbury, Bagendon, Colchester, Selsey, Winchester, Loose and so on which then helped form the nearby Roman towns and caesters.

North of Yorkshire had to await the Roman advance into Scotland before the appearance of 'burys'.

Presumably the spread of 'bury' building involved incomers bringing better technology and organisation in which case those north of the Thames/Chilterns look to be a different group to the southern advance if discovered coinage and pottery is any guide. Maybe a hint to the presence of more than one new language involved in replacing Brittonic or whatever ? - I like Renfrew's wave theory of language replacement to explain this aspect.
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Mick Harper
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Yer crazy, Frank. In lowland Britain, intensive cereal agriculture was introduced thousands of years before the Iron Age. (It can't really be stopped wherever conditions are halfway decent.) So these dudes have gotta go somewhere.

As expansion proceeded (see map in Hill forts thread) I guess most of the peasantry were gradually drawn into the emerging tons, leys, worths, hams and ings.

Quite so. In about 3000 BC at the latest. Remember, the most radical thing about THOBR is not the linguistic stuff, it is the fact that the bottom is thereby removed from the whole of pre-Iron Age Western Europe.
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frank h



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Yer crazy, Frank. In lowland Britain, intensive cereal agriculture was introduced thousands of years before the Iron Age.

Maybe, but I guess those that got hold of iron weapons and implements first had an advantage, and iron making apparently arrived here around the time of my proposed 'bury' builders - similar to, but much later, the Spanish and Portugese in S. America where the few changed the many?
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Hatty
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But in any case, it's not true to say villages are not underlain by Iron Age remains: lately, they've turned up Iron Age stuff virtually every time they put a spade in the ground in a built-up area. Finding roundhouses out in the fields is another matter.

The most surprising aspect of a 'dig' for an unprepared visitor like me is the lack of depth, considering the antiquity of the site; last summer at Silchester they'd got to the Iron Age (third? fourth?) level and it was no more than a few feet deep (Time Team trenches are similarly shallow, they merely remove turves).

After each successive level representing hundreds of years has been literally sieved through inch by careful inch, the evidence is obliterated in order to reach the next layer down. All that remains are latrines and wells.
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EndlesslyRocking



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Hatty wrote:
The most surprising aspect of a 'dig' for an unprepared visitor like me is the lack of depth, considering the antiquity of the site; last summer at Silchester they'd got to the Iron Age (third? fourth?) level and it was no more than a few feet deep (Time Team trenches are similarly shallow, they merely remove turves).

But why would it be expected that these digs be deep? I'm not alluding to Fomenko date-shifting or anything like that, but how could these digs be deep unless it is in a desert where the sand blows around easily?
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Hatty
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No particular reason except that all those seemingly magnificent Roman villae couldn't have had very deep foundations. Must make it hard to separate one lot of foundations from another especially where the materials were re-used.
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EndlesslyRocking



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I recently finished reading a book called The Lost Millennium by Florin Diacu, a Romanian-Canadian mathematician from Victoria. I liked it; it's calm and not written in gobbledygook.

He takes a level-headed approach to critiquing Fomenko. Overall, this is what he concludes:

The good: Fomenko is at his best with regard to the eclipses of the Almagest. He followed the path of previous chronologists and made reasonable but different choices from orthodoxy and reached different conclusions.

The mediocre: His contributions on statistical methods for maps and texts, overlapping dynasties, and the dating of Egyptian horoscopes. The theory behind his approach is generally sound, but his application of it is sloppy.

The bad: He is out to lunch in the linguistics arena. His belief in widespread forgery is too fanatastic for anyone to believe except those who believe in fantasy.
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EndlesslyRocking



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Here's a quote from Diacu about Fomenko's interpretation of the Almagest, which shifts some dates forward by a millennium:

On shifting dates forward based on a new interpretation of the Almagest:
The new chronology shifts the traditional dates forward in time by more than a millenium. It may solve some problems but it certainly raises others. For example, it qualifies the Almagest's reference to "Alexander". Traditional history has taken his name to refer to Alexander the Great, but it could refer to someone else. There is one emperor, Alexander II of Byzantium, who ruled from AD 886 to 913, a death date falling within Fomenko's range. But Fomenko doesn't explain how this assumption affects the dates of rulers connected to Alexander II.

Among the problems this chronology raises is the connection between Antoninus Pius and the Almagest. In his text, Ptolemy used the first year of Antoninus' reign as the epoch of his star catalogue - and for this reason historians think the book was written during the rule of the emperor. Could it be that the original catalogue was later modified in terms of this epoch? It is hard to exclude this possibility, but if many facts were changed or added to the Almagest, how reliable is this document for chronological purposes? Beyond that issue, Fomenko has come up with some interesting methods of extracting new data from the Almagest.


On careful ignoral by the academy:
Without forcing the data he has come up with new ways of extracting information from the Almagest...he obtained consistent results that have been published in respected journals. Neither historians nor the scientists who rely on traditional chronology have reacting to these findings.
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Ishmael


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EndlesslyRocking wrote:
[Fomenko] is out to lunch in the linguistics arena. His belief in widespread forgery is too fanatastic for anyone to believe except those who believe in fantasy.


I agree that Fomenko is weakest in the area of linguistics. But it is needlessly insulting to apply phrases like "out to lunch", especially to someone who has made such an invaluable contribution to our understanding of history and historiography (and especially considering how "out to lunch" even the profesisonal linguists have been shown to be in light of THOBR).

The further insults hurled now at those who take Fomenko's claims seriously, with regard to forgery, are words their author may live to regret. I have looked into this matter personally and have found only more and more evidence to support Fomenko's view.

My conclusion is that Fomenko is more right than wrong when it comes to the matter of forgery.
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Pulp History


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Getting back to the archaeological matters....

Surely stratographic archaeological layers can only build up in areas of little to no use. If I live in an area and discard or lose items, they will only become covered with successive layers of dust / mud / grass if the area in which they come to rest is inactive. If I am tramping about all day over the area then it becomes eroded and items are unearthed, grass does not grow and mud or dust is cleared / moved away. This is why when excavating an Iron age roundhouse all we find are a couple if inches of heavily compacted soil, with only postholes or purposefully buried items. If an area is lived in for successive generations then items cannot become accidentally buried due to the processes of life - they become buried in rubbish tips, middens or disused places.
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Pulp History


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EndlesslyRocking wrote:
When ancient artifacts are dug up, where did all the dirt on top of them come from? Are all these things purposely buried, or do they just get covered up by dirt because it is floating around the air? If it's from the air, how does the dirt get created in the first place?


Apparently the items get covered up because soil particles accumulate and grass grows over them. As year upon year of grass dies and grows, layers of soil are created and compacted.

As I say above this cannot occur in an active and lived in site, so explaining why, when sites are excavated, they are such shallow affairs. All this really can tell us is the depth of soil ABOVE the dig can give a clue as to the length of time a site has been disused. Or am I missing something too??
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Hatty
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Apparently the items get covered up because soil particles accumulate and grass grows over them. As year upon year of grass dies and grows, layers of soil are created and compacted.

As I say above this cannot occur in an active and lived in site, so explaining why, when sites are excavated, they are such shallow affairs. All this really can tell us is the depth of soil ABOVE the dig can give a clue as to the length of time a site has been disused. Or am I missing something too??

It may not be such a random process; places which are used for agriculture routinely need to be levelled where the ground is too uneven for cultivation. Artefacts therefore may not be near the surface but be embedded in pockets and become more inaccessible to casual observation or ploughing especially if soil above is further added to by farmers.
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EndlesslyRocking



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Ishmael wrote:

I agree that Fomenko is weakest in the area of linguistics. But it is needlessly insulting to apply phrases like "out to lunch".

Sorry, didn't mean to offend you. Just for the record, the author I was commenting on didn't use that phrase, that was my summation.

Ishmael wrote:

The further insults hurled now at those who take Fomenko's claims seriously, with regard to forgery, are words their author may live to regret. I have looked into this matter personally and have found only more and more evidence to support Fomenko's view.

My conclusion is that Fomenko is more right than wrong when it comes to the matter of forgery.


While I don't believe our current interpretation of the dark ages is correct, I still think it's hard to believe in forgery to the degree that he suggests.

If forgery was as widespread as he claims, it would require that any earlier contradictory documents be routed out and destroyed. Either that or the development of written language occurred much later than we assume so that there weren't really any earlier documents.
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Ishmael


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EndlesslyRocking wrote:
Either that or the development of written language occurred much later than we assume so that there weren't really any earlier documents.


Bingo. We have a winner.
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