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Did The Dark Ages Exist? (NEW CONCEPTS)
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TelMiles


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William Rufus, assassinated or accident?
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TelMiles


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Mick Harper wrote:
The Swiss version is that W Tell hit the apple and missed the boy but the Austrians say, "And do we ever hear about the boy again? I think not."


So..ummm...what's your point, Mick? Am I missing something?
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Ishmael


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TelMiles wrote:
Mick Harper wrote:
The Swiss version is that W Tell hit the apple and missed the boy but the Austrians say, "And do we ever hear about the boy again? I think not."


So..ummm...what's your point, Mick? Am I missing something?


He's pulling your leg Tel! :-) Joking!
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Mick Harper
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Speaking of Tells an interesting point has just been posted on the Time Team thread in an exchange between the baying crowd and Bystander re the age of British villages.

The point they make over and over again is that present villages are not underlain by Iron Age material (which is a goodish one only partly met by our "But they never look!"). Though in return their complete refusal to see that they can pile up "settlement sites" by the thousand (is it the tens of thousands by now?) and still the number of actual houses amounts to a row of beans means that something radically is wrong. (I mean with British Archaeology, the TT people cannot help what they are.)

But these latest posts, by Aardvaak and BAJR, point out that Middle Eastern tells can be fifty metres thick because of thousands of years of continuous occupation....so why aren't British villages likewise if they too have been continuously occupied as we argue? But the answer is that British villages have no "tell"-like qualities irrespective of age. A Domesday village is, even by orthodox acknowledgement, getting on for fifteen hundred years of continuous occupation and yet what is its tell-structure? The Anglo-Saxon stuff (which is itself suspiciously difficult to identify) is only...um...a foot down.

Of course we would all agree that tells are formed in conditions where
a) climate tends to preserve archaeology and
b) local inundations are frequent, even annual
but even so the lack of tells in Britain is systematic. We might say that orthodoxly it would point to no site in Britain ever having been continuously occupied which would be an odd state of affairs in itself. It would mean that Britain has been continuously occupied by people who consistently disagree about where the best place to live is!

Or it means that British culture is systematically anti-tell. My guess is that stone buildings would do that. My guess is that a permanent road network would do that. But other ideas as to why the British surface tends always to be the British surface would be helpful.
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Mick Harper
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I'm finding these exchanges on Time Team most useful. The weakest point in the villages-are-English thesis is of course the lack of Iron Age material. Consequently in the book and in subsequent exchanges I have steered clear of this and just hoped something would turn up. It has! These two hapless professionals, in waging war against me, have inadvertently blown the gaffe. [Though as most of you know this is a tried and truested technique of AE.]

The more they blather on about the wealth of evidence (and the wealth of literature that I haven't consulted) the more they are painting a picture of complete chaos. A sort of nihilistic chaos in the sense of "things are where you find them" which is of course death to systematic stratigraphical archaeology. Here's an excellent example

Actually I think archaeology generally reached that sort of knowledge almost a century ago as the result of fieldwaking and excavations - funnily enough primarily those rural sites on the chalklands.

He's confirming not only that the paradigm was fixed in place before anybody had much of a clue about anything but also that in rural conditions stuff hangs about the surface in a chaotic state.

I am much relieved at an old ache being put gradually to bed.
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Hatty
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But these latest posts, by Aardvaak and BAJR, point out that Middle Eastern tells can be fifty metres thick because of thousands of years of continuous occupation....so why aren't British villages likewise if they too have been continuously occupied as we argue?

The most noticeable difference between Middle Eastern and English housing is the English garden; anyone who's ever had one knows about the ubiquitous 'builders' rubble' underneath. English homes tend to expand outwards through 'extensions' rather than upwards, something to do with not obscuring the church spire? A trend easily seen in the great family houses, usually a hotchpotch of styles, with wings added.
[Talking of churches, in a programme about Romania the other night, an Orthodox church threatened by bulldozers creating an outsize avenue leading to one of Ceacescu's outsize monstrosities was bodily moved out of the way in less than a year, apparently none the worse except for a couple of cracks which were painted over - but how was it accomplished?]

Of course we would all agree that tells are formed in conditions where
a) climate tends to preserve archaeology and
b) local inundations are frequent, even annual

I disagree, an awful lot of settlements on the Mediterranean littoral suffer from salt erosion. That might be due to shoddy modern materials of course, and iron is affected rather than mudbricks or stone. There aren't many floods in the ME as far as I know, inadequate rainfall is more of a problem.
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Mick Harper
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I was referring to the annual Nile and Tigris/Euphrates floods.
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EndlesslyRocking



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Ishmael wrote:
Yes. I've got details on the Russian Bloke. I'm going to present said details in good time.

I bought the Bloke's first volume of 7. It's a long book. I'm about 1/20th of my way into it. I can't really move this to the top of my To Do list at this moment, but I'll report back what I think of it once I'm done.

One interesting thing I've learned so far though. Chronology was a branch of mathematics in the olden, olden days. Who knew - History was once a sub-specialty of the Math Department.
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EndlesslyRocking



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One other thing. Fomenko complicates my learning process of historical events because it requires that up to 3 stories be kept in mind: the orthodox story, the AE story, and the Fomenko story.
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Ishmael


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EndlesslyRocking wrote:
One other thing. Fomenko complicates my learning process of historical events because it requires that up to 3 stories be kept in mind: the orthodox story, the AE story, and the Fomenko story.


Actually, that's what AE is all about (one of the many things it's all about): Holding multiple, conflicting theses in your head all at once and assuming each one true, depending on the circumstances.

One of our number is a bold advocate of his own, brilliant prime-mover theory yet claims also to be a convert to that of another.
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DPCrisp


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Mick wrote:
Actually I think archaeology generally reached that sort of knowledge almost a century ago as the result of fieldwaking and excavations - funnily enough primarily those rural sites on the chalklands.

He's confirming not only that the paradigm was fixed in place before anybody had much of a clue about anything but also that in rural conditions stuff hangs about the surface in a chaotic state.

It's also acknowledged that iron survives in chalky conditions very poorly indeed.

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.
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EndlesslyRocking



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Here's an interesting quote from wikipedia from the Ottoman Empire page:

The empire was at the centre of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. With Constantinople (Istanbul) as its capital city, and lands during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent which largely corresponded to the lands ruled by Justinian the Great exactly 1000 years earlier, the Ottoman Empire was, in many respects, an Islamic successor to the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
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frank h



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The point they make over and over again is that present villages are not underlain by Iron Age material (which is a goodish one only partly met by our "But they never look!").

The 'bury' model in the Hill forts thread suggests they may never find Iron Age material under English villages since these probably did not exist in that form until the Hill forts disappeared - as far as I can tell starting around 500BC to the arrival of the Romans.
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Mick Harper
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So, Frank, where did everybody live? We know from the archaeology that they didn't live in the hillforts. So if not in the present day villages where are you going to stash these several million people?
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Hatty
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The 'bury' model in the Hill forts thread suggests they may never find Iron Age material under English villages since these probably did not exist in that form until the Hill forts disappeared

The dig at Silchester, the only one I've personally visited and in some respects unusual since no developers are in the wings waiting to build a car park, has got down to (Middle? Late?) Iron Age -- after a decade of methodical digging -- and they're still going down. Unless Silchester is considered an exception rather than the norm, is there any reason to suppose this isn't the case with other towns?
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