New Views over Megalithia

[Boreades]

Let's do some field trials!

Too late! You'll just get us in trouble with the spider-hugging local authority.

[TisILeclerc]

Wiki tells us that the word Ria comes from the Portuguese or Galician.

Strangely enough it then goes on to tell us that there are no true Rias in Portugal.

Portugal: the country has no rias as such: the Ria de Aveiro in Aveiro, and Ria Formosa in Eastern Algarve are actually lagoons.

The word ria comes from Portuguese ria or Galician ría, which is related to Spanish and Galician río and Portuguese rio (river). Rias are present all along the Galician coast in Spain. As originally defined, the term was restricted to drowned river valleys cut parallel to the structure of the country rock that was at right angles to the coastline. However, the definition of ria was later expanded to other flooded river valleys regardless of the structure of the country rock.

Galicia and northern Spain however are full of them. Brittany has them and the next big area for Rias appears to be the south coast of England.

England: The south coast of England is a submergent coastline which contains many rias, including Portsmouth Harbour, Langstone Harbour, Chichester Harbour, Pagham Harbour, Southampton Water, Poole Harbour, the estuaries of the Exe, Teign and Dart, then Kingsbridge Estuary, Plymouth Sound in Devon, and the estuaries of the River Fowey, River Fal and Helford River in Cornwall. On the north coast is the River Camel and the River Taw. In Essex is the Blackwater River and River Crouch. The River Severn also forms a large ria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ria

Galicia was a centre of tin and gold mining.

Its rich mineral deposits of tin and gold led to the development of Bronze Age metallurgy, and to the commerce of bronze and gold items all along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. A shared elite culture evolved in this region during the Atlantic Bronze Age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Spain)



It would appear that minerals, an elite culture with claims to a common origin, all combine to give shape to western coastlines.

More modern Iron mines also used the rock itself to support the roofs until the ore was exhausted.

[hvered]

My tin guru. R.D. Penhallurick, says that tin mining in Galicia did not have the same 'uninterrupted success' as Cornish tin mining due to remoteness/ inaccessibility and lack of running water of the inland sites prior to the mid-nineteenth century so production had to be seasonal. However tin itself was accessible, at or near the surface unlike in Cornwall, and the tin belt, according to him, stretches from Galicia in the north-west along the Spanish-Portuguese border down into Extremadura.

The coincidence of the large tin-rich area of north-west Spain, the inlets giving access to running water and coastal trading are pretty obvious clues yet Penhallurick makes no reference to rias, anywhere. However the sub-title of Tin In Antiquity is "its mining and trade throughout the ancient world with particular reference to Cornwall". One suspects our Cornishman is parti pris.

[Boreades]

Emmanuelle Meunier' PDF article
(available here: https://www.academia.edu/8507467/Thinki ... ives_2014_ )
is useful; it lists 35 specific sites in Galicia or Northern Portugal.

After classical authors, we have to wait until the 18 th c. and the Enlightenment to find
some works which give us concrete data about tin mining in our area. Cornide Saavedra
y Folgueira is the oldest author whose work was accessible 5 . He did not questioned the
classical texts, and give some examples of tin mining places from Galicia or Northern
Portugal. We realize that very few tin deposits were known in that time: he noticed only
3. It seems that people had forgotten where the tin was mined in NW Iberia. We will
have to wait the end of the 19 th c. to find more information about tin deposits, from an
English mining engineer who worked in our area: Borlase 6 . The number of known sites has
increased since the second half of the 19 th and made him accept than classical authors
were right when they wrote NW Iberia was a wealthy tin producer. In the beginning of the
20 th c., the abbot Alves redacted an encyclopedic work, Memorias arqueológico-historicas
do distrito de Bragança 7 , whose second volume deals with mineral resources from his area.
This book really provides a lot of data, although the chronology indicated is sometimes
quite vague.

Continuing in the 20 th c., most of the information comes from mining engineers,
because of public incentives in order to work tin and tungsten deposits. In Spain, the
Instituto Geologico y Minero de España (IGME) is the entity who stores all the reports about
these investigations. In Portugal, the database SIORMINP, managed by the Laboratório
Nacional de Energia e Geologia (LNEG), available in internet, gives us information about
tin deposits, although it does not show elements about possible ancient works. We can
collect from this channel data about the geological context and the type of mineralisation
in each case. The negative point is the criterions used to detect and assess the interest of
the ore deposits are not comparable with the ones used in archaeological times.
The last group of documents is made up of archaeological works. The archaeological
path towards field work in mining studies has been slow. Archaeologists started studying
classical texts and objects from museums, and the first theories about the importance and
chronology of tin mining were built without field data. Joleaud gives us the first example
of such a work in 1929 8 : within two pages and a half, he maintains that tin had to be mined
in NW Iberia since the Bronze Age to make possible the production of all the bronze axes
known. Geological information is little by little integrated, for example by Serpa Pinto in
1933 in a synthesis about Portuguese mining activity during Bronze Age 9 or by Davies in
1935 in his Roman mines in Europe

See the article for the list of sites and the maps.

[Mick Harper]

If you look up 'rias' in a fairly standard source eg https://pediaview.com/openpedia/Ria you will discover they are suspiciously common in places we're interested in and suspiciously uncommon anywhere else. For a natural phenomenon allegedly caused by a world-wide effect (i.e. sea-level change) you would think that, say, Africa might have more than one.

[Boreades]

suspiciously uncommon anywhere else

Really? Did you forget to scroll down?

Africa

Kenya: Kilindini Harbour, which is a deep channel between Mombasa island and South Coast mainland, is a ria.

Asia

Sanriku Coast: North Japan, east coast of Honshū Island (main island). Sendai city, Miyagi Prefecture and Iwate Prefecture are included.
Coasts on western, southern sides of the Korean Peninsula: Rias formed by sea level rising after Ice Age.

Oceania

Papua New Guinea: Rias formed by eroded volcanic lava flow are found all around the town of Tufi at Cape Nelson, in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province.
Australia: The east coast of Australia features several rias around Sydney, including Georges River, Port Hacking, and Sydney Harbour. There are many examples in Western Australia, including the Swan River around Perth and several rivers in the west Kimberley region.
New Zealand: Rias of various scales abound on the eastern shores of the upper North Island. On the west coast, in contrast, they are fewer but larger; Kaipara Harbour is the country’s largest, and the Hokianga Harbour, further north, is of historical significance to the native Māori people. The Marlborough Sounds at the northern tip of the South Island form a large network of rias.

North America

United States: Narragansett Bay, New York Harbor, Delaware Bay, Indian River Bay, the Chesapeake Bay, and Charleston Harbor are rias on the East Coast. Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor in Washington and San Francisco Bay in California on the West Coast are also rias.
Canada: Charlottetown Harbour, Prince Edward Island

South America

Argentina: Patagonia has the Deseado ria, on the coast of Santa Cruz Province, on the Atlantic Ocean.

https://pediaview.com/openpedia/Ria

I can bear personal witness that New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds are a spectacularly good example of a Ria.

Covering some 4,000 km2 of sounds, islands, and peninsulas, the Marlborough Sounds lie at the South Island’s north-easternmost point, between Tasman Bay in the west and Cloudy Bay in the south-east. The almost fractal coastline has 1/5 of the length of New Zealand’s coasts.

The steep, wooded hills and small quiet bays of the sounds are sparsely populated, as access is difficult. Many of the small settlements and isolated houses are only accessible by boat. The main large port is Picton on the mainland, at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound. It is at the northern terminus of the South Island’s main railway and state highway networks. The main small boat port is Waikawa which is one of New Zealand’s largest and provides a base for leisure sailors and vacationers.

The main sounds, other than Queen Charlotte Sound, are Pelorus Sound and Kenepuru Sound. Tory Channel is a major arm of Queen Charlotte Sound, and between them they isolate the hills of Arapaoa Island from the mainland. Other islands in the sounds include D’Urville Island.

M'lady Boreades also very much likes the Marlborough Sounds - but that might be connected to the region being a major producer of world-class awarding winning grapes.

[Mick Harper]

Borry, you must give me a little credit. I said there was only one in Africa. Which you confirm. Please explain why you think this is. Did the sea not rise round Africa? But the point about all of the examples cited (which naturally I perused most carefully) and which I still maintain are remarkably few relatively -- is that the term ria is inexact. There are similar things, for example fjords, and since you are personally acquainted with Plymouth Sound, Marlborough Sound and Norwegian fjords perhaps you can give us the benefit of your keen (a bit keener, if you don't mind) insight.

[Boreades]

I'll gladly agree the term ria is inexact.

In fact, it reminds me of another inexact term : "Chalk streams". That too was defined and phrased in a way that gave the south coast of England a strange world-beating dominance, while ignoring the many larger examples around the world that are geophysically identical, but defined in slightly different ways in their own localities.

Did the sea not rise round Africa?

It looks more like it rose much more around other coastlines, especially in the North Atlantic, Australasian and North West Pacific regions. Why should this be? Perhaps supporters of a Single Large Ocean Theory (SLOT) should be grasping this with glee and both hands.

While I'm keenly applying my mind, I've remembered that I've visited the Chesapeake Bay as well. It gave me jealous feelings that I tried to repress. Why did every other house have its own tidal creek and mooring for a boat? Bloody Yanks.

[Boreades]

David Beckham's shoes are 2,000 years old.
Or : What were they doing at Vindolanda?
Or : Cobblers

The idea that Hadrian's Wall was an active military operation has taken another stumble.

Roman sandal found at Hadrian's Wall looks just like David Beckham's football boot

The shoe was discovered around a fortnight ago in the Severan ditch at the fort by Vindolanda archaeologists and will now go on permanent display. It is one of 420 shoes to have been found in the ditch, which was a Roman rubbish dump. Archaeologists have dated the shoe back to around 212AD and say it was been made from a single piece of leather.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09 ... id-beckha/

You’d think the Roman fort of Vindolanda just south of Hadrian’s Wall was a footwear manufacturing concern rather than a military outpost with an attached a civilian settlement considering how many shoes have been found there. Literally thousands of shoes, their leather preserved in excellent condition by the waterlogged soil, have been unearthed at the fort and settlement over the decades. This season the excavation team has added another 350 shoes to the tally since digging began in April.

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44194

The idea that Hadrian's Wall was make-work for idle Roman Army units is still eluding our historians.

It would be more entertaining if they offered some reasons why so many shoes were chucked in a ditch.
e.g.
Last year's fashion?
Left over stock from a closing-down sale that nobody wanted?
Toys out the pram by upset army vets being given redundancy notices instead of a nice bronze diploma after 25 years service?
Over-exuberant stag party?

Coincidentally,

In 212, the Constitutio Antoniniana, issued by the emperor Caracalla, granted Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire, thus ending the second-class peregrini status. This made military diplomas largely redundant, and indeed the last known auxiliary diplomas date from AD 203.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_military_diploma

[Bmblbzzz]

I like your last idea best! Though you'd have to check – were they all men's shoes or were there any Roman stilettos*? Could've been a hen party too...

*Yes, this doesn't prove anything. Even without the pun.