A reconstruction of the different levels of the road discovered at Bayston Hill quarry in Shropshire. Photograph: Caroline Malim/James Reed PR
Posted on 06/10/2011 8:23:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The route had long been known as a lost Roman road... dig director Tim Malim noticed that the road had twice been rebuilt, and knew its history could be dated using a technique that tells you when buried mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight.
The unexpected result was a more than 80% chance that the last surface had been laid before the Roman invasion in AD43. Wood in the foundation was radiocarbon-dated to the second century BC, sealing the road's pre-Roman origin. And Malim thinks a huge post that stood in 1500BC close to the crest of the hill was a trackway marker...
...notwithstanding villas with central heating and public statues of Roman emperors, some academics portray the... occupation as a mere ripple on the longer and stronger flow of native culture and politics... Could Britain have been more "Roman" than was thought... Britons were more aware of Rome than Rome was of Britain... in a cemetery near Colchester, Essex, excavated mostly in the 1990s... members of the ruling class who had died between about AD40 and AD60... the things the deceased took with them... precious Roman objects requiring Roman expertise... there is "the doctor". This man had his wine jar, his imported pottery service and copper vessels. But he also had a set of surgical instruments -- one of the oldest known in the ancient world... scalpels, forceps, probes and more -- and comparable to finds made around the Roman empire.
But they are not Roman. On current evidence, they were made in Britain to designs that merely borrowed from Greece and Italy... Many things here once thought "Roman" could, in fact, be older. Shropshire's road, then, could be the start of a journey that changes the way we think about early Britain.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
A reconstruction of the different levels of the road discovered at Bayston Hill quarry in Shropshire. Photograph: Caroline Malim/James Reed PR
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Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Attendee: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace - shut up!
What is more interesting to me is both Civilizations decided that a road should go through the area, typically roads served some commercial or military purpose that apparently both decided needed that huge an expenditure of manpower to build.
If they knew so much about Roman ways then why didn’t Boadicea infiltrate the woods behind the Roman legion at Watling Street? Or at least set fire to them? Top 5 preventable worst defeats of all time. imho
Probably any empire serves as an aggregator, innovator and purveyor of knowledge. Peoples on the periphery of an empire would be involved with it and so acquiring and passing knowledge. The ending of an empire would then isolate the peoples it had connected.
Or so it seems to me.
Fascinating.
Add to that the fact that lanes follow animal trails, roads follow lanes, avenues connect lanes or simply increase their capacity....and:
Eventually, a druid road can easily become a roman road.
Or, Route 66 becomes a side note to the interstate system.
Generations add techniques and/or specialization (skids vs two wheels vs four wheels, etc.)...
Purpose pretty much remains the same.
Makes sense. The road is where it is for some reason.
Of course the Britons were more aware of Rome than the Romans were of them. The Greeks were aware of the Persian Empire before the Persians were aware of them (after the Athenians joined in the Ionian attack on the city of Sardis, Darius supposedly had to ask “who are the Athenians?”). Probably 100% of the people of the island nation of Dominica are aware of the U.S., while probably only a minority of Americans are aware there is such a nation as Dominica (a former British colony in the Lesser Antilles).
Try walking across a hill 1n Germany, and see how much the language changes. Until the Duden, the Germans could not even talk to each other.
“Neanderthal” means from the next vally, you know.
... and the width of a roman horses’ ass defines the diameter of the booster rockets for the space shuttle.
Snopes says that myth is wrong - actually, Snopes is wrong - the myth is true.
Like NOLA? I heard many people say, after it flooded, that it was there - because it needed to be there. Transit point for about half of US commerce, etc.
And the freight rail link, unlike government stuff, was fixed in days. Crane barges brought in - they lifted the tracks and put them back on the rail burms. Freight rail service to the docks restored two days after Katrina.
I've heard that the dialects persist in Germany. Hard to imagine how.
Try this -
“’etzat ma klur”, in low german (Austrian, actually)
“Jetzt ist es mir klar”, in high german (Duden).
both mean, “ok, I get it.”
Both are used today - one in the local vernacular, the other in trade, or on TV. Actually, TV does more to unify language than anything else...
The US version of “High Englisch” is a midwest accent. Indiana, I think. All else is slang.
Funny thing - if you didn’t have two code talkers in WWII, put two southern hicks on the radio. It confused the heck out of the germans. GA, MS, LA - another language to them entirely.
Or, as I tell my my kids - there is no such thing as French. Just badly mispronounced peasent Latin with an attitude,
We lived in Luxembourg from 1986-1999 and were told that the northern dialect is difficult to understand in the southern part of the country. (Luxembourg is about the size of Rhode Island) The official language of Luxembourg is French.
We lived in Luxembourg from 1986-1999 and were told that the northern dialect is difficult to understand in the southern part of the country. (Luxembourg is about the size of Rhode Island) The official language of Luxembourg is French.
Sorry for the duplicate post.
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