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Comments on Walking Ancient Landscapes (British History)
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Rocky



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Keimpe wrote:

I have finished Chapter One and am absolutely thrilled by it!
The 'Saddling Up' part, where the theory is explained, is a real gem. What struck me most, is that you (Mick) were able to write all this without once using your familiar "I'm smart, you're stupid" tone that we've all come to love so much on this forum (and is what makes THOBR such a good read).


Interesting. I thought the tone was more formal than THOBR, so I assumed it was mostly written by Hatty, and Mick added some exclamation points here and there.
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Rocky



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Mick Harper wrote:
Wiseacres predicted that hordes of folk would be wandering the land now that travel was free but wiseracres pointed out correctly that once you get beyond (about) two buses the problems of co-ordination, and just knowing, make the journey a nightmare. To visit my mum in Dorset would take all day on the internet and all day on the buses.


But if you went to visit your mom on the bus everyday, then you'd get used to it and it'd stop being a nightmare.
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Rocky



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Mick Harper wrote:
The chief problem with short-exchange is not so much organisation (though that is formidable indeed) as cost. Droving sheep is not going to make any sense if you have to pay mark-ups every few miles -- and it is the costs of exchange that beggar you, remember that every link in the chain has to find it worth his while, all the time, every time. What's left at the end...the lamb's tale?


So you think there were no middlemen anywhere in the entire exchange? Just the seller, the transporter, and the buyer?
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Rocky



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But should you find him, since it takes a lifetime to learn how to memorise fourteen hour epics (which is why there is a bardic profession), you had better be prepared to pay bardic rates of pay for this exceptional person. And don't think you can just ask him to tell you the way--unless of course you yourself are trained to memorise fourteen hour epics.


OK, this isn't all that relevant to the book, but I think you're overestimating how difficult it was for people to memorize things in a pre-literate society. When my daughter was a toddler she had an extraordinary ability to memorize storybooks. I could read her a book twice, and on the third time she'd know if I had skipped a sentence or had changed some of the words around.

She could "read" them out loud because she had memorized which paragraphs went with what pictures.

Now, I would have had a hard time just trying to do what a toddler was able to do naturally. I think we all lose this ability once we start to read.

I think that memorizing a specific set of information would be a job, but I'm not convinced that in a pre-literate society this was an extraordinarily difficult job, if the set of information was restricted (e.g. poetry about sea voyages, or how the constellations look at a certain time of year, or which crops were planted in what part of the field 10 years ago, etc.)
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Rocky



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I've got a question. Do you think the people that delivered the goods took the same route all the time? Wouldn't they have been vulnerable to highwaymen lying in wait in that case? I guess they would have travelled in big groups for protection. Is that right?
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Mick Harper
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But if you went to visit your mom on the bus everyday, then you'd get used to it and it'd stop being a nightmare.

You miss the point entirely. A local bus goes....what?...ten miles max. So we are talking Notting Hill to Winterbourne Abbas...what?....ten buses min. Even assuming the buses run every hour (which in the deepest country is a heroic assumption) you would be hard pressed to do the journey in a day. I'll pay the few quid that a long-distance bus service will charge.

So you think there were no middlemen anywhere in the entire exchange? Just the seller, the transporter, and the buyer?

By no means. The situation then is exactly what it is now. Once you have the Megalithic System up-and-operating it is entirely a matter for individual users to decide. Remember the film Rob Roy? Liam Neeson was a cattle drover who wanted to make more money by personally sending his cattle to (I think) Carlisle rather than, as presently, relying on his local middleman to do it. And how the middleman reacted. etc etc. Plus ça change.
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Mick Harper
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Rocky, I am not denying the efficacy of memory-systems, Megalithic Britain relied on them. They were so good that literacy was deliberately kept out of Britain by the memory-experts (read on!). The problem does not lie in being able to memorise the journey Llandudno-Birmingham, it is that you require somebody to have memorised every journey in Britain (Llandudno to every bronze foundry in the country, for starters). You would require (exactly) an infinite nuimber of memory-people.

Wouldn't they have been vulnerable to highwaymen lying in wait in that case? I guess they would have travelled in big groups for protection. Is that right?

No, it is emphatically not right. To travel in large groups re-introduces the Infinite Journey problem in a different guise. Caravanserais are only economic when you have extraordinary mark-ups from one country to another country (where each country has internal order but the space in between does not). When tin from many mines in Cornwall has to get to bronze foundries all over the country, caravanserais are out of the question. There are trunk routes in the Megalithic System, where people can travel together, but that is a different matter. Do you suppose Chaucer's Pilgrims travelled together because of highwaymen?
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Keimpe


In: Leeuwarden, Frisia
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Rocky wrote:
I've got a question. Do you think the people that delivered the goods took the same route all the time? Wouldn't they have been vulnerable to highwaymen lying in wait in that case?


I don't think highwaymen would be interested in stealing copper or tin, because then (in order to sell it to an interested party) they would have to haul it to Birmingham themselves!
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Mick Harper
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This canna be right, hen. People steal metal off church roofs profitably right now when scrap is cheap. The Megalithic System, because it is pre-wheeled transport for the most part, must have relied on high-value/low weight goods. Every Megalithic traveller would be worth robbing.

One of the reasons why Orthodoxy rejects long-distance systems is because they absolutely require a large degree of law'n'order. Once it is accepted that long-distance systems must have operated (whether via Megalithic methods or not) attention can finally be switched to how Ancient Britain was actually ruled, and it wouldn't have needed two thousand "hillforts" to do it.
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Keimpe


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Mick Harper wrote:
People steal metal off church roofs profitably right now when scrap is cheap.


They do so, because they can sell it somewhere within a 10 mile radius.

Megalithic robbers stealing tin in Cornwall could only sell it to a) the original tin mine, b) another tin-traveller, c) somewhere near Birmingham.

If I were a megalithic robber, I'd try to steal something made of bronze, because I could sell that within a 10 mile radius.

Hey....could this be a clue as to why there are many different Megalithic routes leading west-east cross-country to the center of England (where individual travellers carried relatively worthless metals) and then (starting from Avebury) ridge-like (above the valleys) mass-transport routes with hillforts where all the precious end products were carried to the sea (probably carried by people travelling in groups?)
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Hatty
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All you'd need to do is find a smith and you wouldn't have to go far to find him.
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Keimpe


In: Leeuwarden, Frisia
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Hatty wrote:
All you'd need to do is find a smith and you wouldn't have to go far to find him.


Were they everywhere at the time? And if so, why bother taking all the raw materials to Birmingham in the first place?
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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The guy in Birmingham will pay a premium, because he can't source his tin locally.
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Mick Harper
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You're all (slightly) missing the point. The point is that when a modern archaeologist digs up a bronze axehead in Birmingham he has to explain how the copper and tin (known from analysis to come from Llandudno and Cornwall respectively) got there. [Writer's note: I chose Birmingham because a) it is the modern metalbashing city par excellence b) it is easily accessible from Cornwall via the Michael Line and yet c) requires a completely different route from Llandudno.]

Whichever way the modern archaeologist turns his arguments fail because, since there are ancient bronze foundries everywhere (I am guessing there must be some in the West Midlands but it doesn't really matter) both tin and copper have to be shifted to Birmingham in their raw state ie he can't argue that the axe itself was all that had to be moved. If that is so then he can take refuge either in potlach theories or have the copper moved to the tin by sea or vice versa.

What I am attempting to show is that Ancient Britain must have been shifting huge amounts of relatively heavy goods around, which requires mass navigation. Just as, later on, grain exports to Gaul would require true roads for wheeled carts to replace the drovers' paths of Classical Megalithia.
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Rocky



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I am in the process of reading the second part of the first chapter. I was wondering about something.

Transporting meat is always best done on the hoof, meaning that ancient abattoirs will have been near the coast. So next time you come across a 'hillfort' overlooking the sea, don't immediately assume it is for defence.


Do you mean the abattoir was on a hill? Is this so that there was some kind of infrastructure so that when then animals were bloodlet, you could get the blood to drip down the hill, so it would easier for the rain to wash away?
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