guidoLaMoto

165 little birdie carcasses accumulated over what period of time? Particularly since this example is on an island, high volume sales of thrush as a fast food would quickly lead to extirpation of the local thrush population. One has to question the circumstances that produced this cache of remains-- a common menu item, an occasional "special" or one big, special feast? I don't know about more rustic locations, but most people in Rome itself lived in "insulae," 3-6 story apartment buildings, with each apartment (conclavium) only one room or, less often, a shared common room with two bedrooms (cubiculum) to accommodate two families. Neither had a kitchen (culina), so meals were taken at the tabernae or popinae. "Eating out" was the norm.

Interesting. There is evidence (bone lesions) that TB (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) existed as far back as the Neandertals, so it's reasonable to assume that other species of Mycobacterium are that old too.... Speciation doesn't occur because one indvidual developed a novel genome and then passed it along to a subsequent population, but rather, because the same novel genome developed spontaneously and contemporaneously in a significant portion of individuals in a population, and then selection &/or random drift increases that gene frequency in the population. ... M. lepromatosis may have evolved in multiple locations simultaneously (on a time scale of centuries or even millennia) rather than sequential "spreading" of the bug over geography. ...Compare it to the invention of, say, the bow & arrow at multiple locations around the world at roughly the same time in human history.

That's all Greek to me, but in Rome the general public was not allowed into the interior (cella) of temples where the large statue of the pertinent god stood. The priests performed sacrifices on the ara, a raised platform just outside the columns out front. The sacrificed animal then became the main course for a public feast. Temples were usually ostentatious displays of public thanks for services rendered by the god to win some battle and used mainly for major public holidays....The "day to day" religious activities of Romans was private and resolved around the family household gods, the Lares & Penates.

https://www.physics.purdue.edu/demos/display_page.php?item=2B-03#:~:text=Four glass tubes of varying,dependent upon vertical height only. "Water seeks its own level." No particularly clever application of physics here. The question becomes why did they bother building aquaducts when a simple pipe or channel at ground level or slightly buried would have sufficed?... I bet they didn't actually know the physics and thought they needed a more gradual, continuous grade to keep the flow going....and when they encountered a terrain too rugged to build an aquaducts, they went with the more expediant "inverted siphon," but when it worked, they didn't extrapolate the principle to the more general case. Maybe they weren't as smart as we think.

-not sure "inverted siphon" is a good term.....A siphon requires a bit of energy input (Eg- actively sucking fluid up a tube to empty a higher reservoir over the lip of it's container into a lower basin, or powering a roller coaster train up that first big hill....once accomplished, gravity takes over). .....As long as the source reservoir is higher than the destination reservoir and there are no higher points along the way, the water will flow......For gravity powered systems, PE + KE = a constant. The Romans could have avoided building the elevated, arched aquaducts if they had adequate piping to contain the very rapid, high pressure flow along the low points of the course. (You'd think stone & cement joints would have done it.)...Maybe they used the elevated sections to avoid tedious tunneling or to avoid blocking traffic with extensive solid walls and save on materials. The engineering physics of aquaducts is pretty simple. The amazing part is the sheer audacity of the first guys (Appius Claudius Caecus & Caius Plautius 312 BC) to think they could bring water from 10 miles away to Rome.

Very interesting. They claim hollow logs were used, but it's a good bet that trees less than a foot or so in diamater are rarely found to be hollowed by natural forces, and any hollowing is usually only a few feet in length, not involving six foot runs as stated in the article...and they'd need to find about 18 such examples to complete a run of piping 100 ft long.....OTOH, that would be quite a trick to manually core out six inch tree stems without an iron of steel auger..... Then again, the aeronautical engineers tell us bumble bees shouldn't be able to fly....??? Space aliens must have done this for the Romans.

Excellent example, Guy...a brilliant tactic, but decidedly unusual. Livy frequently describes the common result of a cavalry charge with the words "fundunt et fugiunt"-- literally "they poured out and fled."

I bet that's gunna leave a mark. Dumb move. Pollice verso. -- got me thinking....American football players "spike the ball" after scoring a touchdown. Roman gladiators spiked each other.

This is surprising that they took the time (let alone the space) to bury horses instead of simply immolating them as we still do today. The Romans became the greatest civilization with the aid of their invention cement....Imagine what they could have accomplished had they also discovered glue?

A few thoughts-- An ancient horse was smaller, generally, than a modern one, but still went 8-900 lb, and could go 30 mph....An ancient foot soldier went <150 lb. Wearing clumsy helmet, grieves and lugging a 20 .lb shield, he probably couldn't run 10 mph.....No way could a wall of shields withstand a cavalry change. If bowling pins could run away from an approaching bowling ball, they certainly would ..but then they'd just be running into and trampling each other.....Now complicate that picture by having 10 bowling balls coming down the lane at time. As I read thru Livy, Caesar, etc,it seems to me that most cavalry charges vs foot soldiers were done from the flanks, not as frontal charges.

A couple of pertinent points-- -Copper is the element with symbol Cu- for Cuprum in Latin....in classical Latin, "y" is actually pronounced "o-o-o" as in "you," so "Cyprus" would have been pronounced "Koo-prus.' -It's been calculated that Old Worls coper mines couldn't have produced enough Cu to account for all the bronze in use in The Bronze Age, and that the huge amount of Cu mined during that time in the Lake Superior area of NA can not be accounted for among the NA artifacts..... ...and furthermore, certain genetic markers found in the Minoan population are also found among modern Ojibwa (or do you say Chippewa?) tribe members today (!)...Coincidentally, copper mining and copper usage in NA fell off just when the Minoan civilization collapsed. Go figure. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42185-y https://chapelboro.com/town-square/columns/common-science/bronze-age-part-ii-the-case-of-the-missing-copper

While most of us who've ever had 2 of 3 y/o kids to care for know the strong temptation to rub out the over-active, little nuisances, most us resist the urge. Apparently neither the Mayans nor the Cartiginians had such good self control. Long thought to be anti-Carthage propaganda, Roman and Greek reports of child sacrifice there now have been confirmed by archeological evidence. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children

Colder temps & prolonged droughts are well known to probably be important factors in the fall of civilizations, from ancient Sumeria to the Anasazi to the Aztecs to Rome itself....but in this case, the very short drought was from 364-366, so why did the rebellion wait to start until 367?...Maybe the starving barbarians were too weak from starvation to wield their swords in the three drought years? In applying this concept to more modern events, recall that the "Arab Spring" uprising a decade ago (remember Bengazi/Hilary/destroyed phones?) was precipitated by a sudden rise in food prices in Tunisia (those @#*+ Cartiginians causing problems again)...and that the trade negotiations going on now between the US and China has a lot to do with China's limited food supply. (I'm assuming that's a typo in the title above....If it isn't, then it's easy to see how a shortage of beer could cause a rebellion in Britain.)

An amazing compilation......What do you do in your spare time? What are your reference sources?

It's been said that all computer models are wrong, but some are useful. They show us what, if the modeler is close to being right, to expect. They can serve as a basis for forming hypotheses that can then be tested. That's their biggest value. JD Murray https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-08542-4 has done some amazing modeling to reproduce animal coat patterns, for instance, just by varying the values of the constants in the model. I'm just pointing out that it's absurd for the authors of that paper to assert single digit per cent differences between Roman and Han economics when their data is probably not more accurate than a 50% level at best...Eg- did a Roman laborer earn 1 or did he earn 2 sisterci a day?...and how many days did he work each year?....and what was the total value of all money in circulation? ...How do they know?

Computer modeling is art, not science. The model only tells you what you told it to tell you. Anyone visiting this site, for instance, probably is already well aware that the Roman elite were filthy rich and the plebs were just getting by. Any attempt at quantitating that with any more precision is just an exercise in imagination..... Not only do we have only very rough indications of average wages, but we don't even know what the population numbers really were.

I haven't read the article yet, but at first glance at the graphs presented here, I'm highly suspicious that they can discern three significant figure accuracy in collecting such remote data from such incomplete sources. ...I bet the only thing they are justified to conclude is that the ancient 10th decile group was relatively richer than the other 9 deciles compared to the modern USA.

You're absolutely right about being most likely to find things concentrated at the narrow points of a funnel shaped field. This is why prospectors pan for gold in the streams rather than sifting thru random shovels full of dust on the mountainside. My original comment was tongue in cheek....An order-of-magnitude estimate-- Suppose a village consisted of 200 people, half whom had amulets of which only 0.1% were lost each year over a 500 year existence of the village-- That's 50 amulets for archeologists to find today at that one site....and how many sites are there? It adds up fast.

You're right about the generally secondary role of women in Roman society, but the Vestals and Sacerdotes Cerealis were notable exceptions, as mentioned in the article.... ...I'm not sure if those are laurel branches she's holding. Laurel leaves are flat. Those look more like a sheaf of grain-- a more likely symbol for the goddess of grain.

Probabilities are still the major factor involved in finding artifacts- from the effect of any object's durability to survive the years to the numbers of any particular object that existed....Future archeologists will find more Chevies than Ferraris and more Ferraris than Tiffany chandeliers....Biological specimens present particular problems. To become fossilized, the object must be buried rapidly to be separated from oxygen-- but the chances of eventually finding one still depends on the original population numbers- common species are found more often than uncommon ones.

...which means for us to find them so frequently, they must have been amazingly careless with their possessions. Surely only a small fraction of those items would survive to be found thousands of yrs later.....Maybe they lost so much because they hadn't yet invented the pocket for their togas? We often blame the dryer for losing all those socks....Have we considered that maybe it was really the washer's fault? I'm currently trying to invent a plastic detector so archeologists of the distant future will have a chance to find our lost artifacts.

Amazing what the computer can do. Apparently the programmer assumed that BVDs hadn't been invented yet in the 4th century BC. Impressively realistic art work compared to murals at Pompeii even 400 yrs later.

You're right that the particular bugs involved in the fermentation process influence the final product. We must deduce, therefore, that the feet of certain Italian & French contadine are contaminated with the best dirt. The civilized Romans diluted ther wine with water and ridiculed the provincials who didn't. Pliny wrote that a dilution of 2:3, IIRC, is optimum. Hollywood would have us believe the wild orgies were commonplace, but Romans actually looked down upon drunkedness, and to this day alcoholism is faily rare in Italy as opposed to France. The traditional wisdom is that drinking fermented beverages helped reduce water borne illness, but that's probably not true. Even highly concentrated alcohol requires a prolonged exposure time to kill bacteria....I think they drank wine simply because water was relatively hard to get at in the arid Mediterranean areas.

Further confirmation that everyone drank wine. To this day, it's not unusual for Italian mothers to give their young kids diluted wine..... Both Livy and Dion--of Halic-- claim that one possible reason why Brennus and the Gauls moved south to capture Rome in 390BC was because they had been introduced to wine by Etruscan merchants and they wanted to gain good wine growing land. Dion-- wrote that before that, they only drank a foul tasting concoction made from rotting grain....Maybe de gustibus non disputandum est, but I gotta agree-- beer is foul.

Was Caesar driven by altruism or ambition & greed?....and don't forget that he was suspiciously supportive of Cataline in the Senate deliberations in 63.