Missing Link

[spiral]

Spiral

'However something around the 4th c. CE happens and the Aqueducts are destroyed and the population plummets.'

I'm not sure about the 4th century but in about 535 something happened across the world to cause untold damage and suffering.

Well, I guess we all have our own views on chronology, which (according to Heinsohn) is only supported by 300 years of archaeology.....

[Boreades]

Just received in an email from Visit Wiltshire:

“The Vikings in Wiltshire”

An event tonight near Marlborough. Actually at Alton Barnes, point zero of the Crop Circling Universe.

Their promotion blurb:

Andrew Reynolds is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and Editor of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine. He has long had an active interest in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval archaeology of our area and gave a fascinating talk at Stanton St Bernard last year on the Wansdyke. Together with Joshua Pollard, Andrew published Avebury: The Biography of a Landscape in 2002.

On 20 November he will tell us about what is known of “The Vikings in Wiltshire”. Written evidence shows that the Vikings ravaged Wiltshire in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, with a number of key battles fought within the county boundary. Despite being relatively well documented, archaeological evidence for a Scandinavian presence is limited and thus this lecture will draw upon documents, place-names and archaeology to examine the range and depth of Viking impacts on this part of Anglo-Saxon Wessex.

Does the TME team have a position on this?
Should I attend the event as the official TME heckler?

[TisILeclerc]

Go dressed as a Viking and tell them Resistance is Futile. And Where's the Loot?

[Boreades]

Where's the Loot?

It's hidden somewhere on this map.



http://www.aspects.net/~janus/vikingspt1.htm

[hvered]

So, was the mead (or sack) any good?

[Boreades]

Sadly, Daddy Taxi duties took precedence.
I'll have to wait for the next time they pass through.

[spiral]

Over in the other place (our lords) are considering Taiwanaku. With its high, raised terraces, and massive hydraulic engineering, we can speculate that orthodoxy has underestimated the vast population and the cities that the area was previously supporting. Of course this sort of specialisation/dependence on hydraulic engineering comes with a risk....

By the time the conquistadors arrived the locals already had suffered destruction and massive population loss....

It was very little to deal with guns and germs......

[Boreades]

In the House of Lords?
Does that make us the Commons?

[hvered]

By the time the conquistadors arrived the locals already had suffered destruction and massive population loss....

It was very little to deal with guns and germs......

A TV programme about the Inca empire showed how the network was organised around food production and distribution, with large, still extant, store-houses at strategic points. The technique of terracing basins protected by mountains seems to have created a series of micro-climates, enabling a variety of crops to be grown at different levels.

The programme also showed the mummified body of a young Inca woman who'd died not long after the Conquistadors' arrival. She hadn't died from disease, European or home-grown, but from malnutrition. The Incan population was presumably as susceptible to diseases as any other but the main culprit seems to have been malnutrition which, if it doesn't kill you immediately, certainly lowers resistance.

[spiral]

The technique of terracing basins protected by mountains seems to have created a series of micro-climates, enabling a variety of crops to be grown at different levels.

The programme also showed the mummified body of a young Inca woman who'd died not long after the Conquistadors' arrival. She hadn't died from disease, European or home-grown, but from malnutrition. The Incan population was presumably as susceptible to diseases as any other but the main culprit seems to have been malnutrition which, if it doesn't kill you immediately, certainly lowers resistance.

One idea I had for "missing link" was to answer the question "Why did early cities (used in the D Crisp sense) start in these sort of terraced basins/mountains where you least expect ?" (rather than say on the plains). The conclusion I came to (not sure that it is original) was that these protected terraced basins, with their different micro climates, were ideal for the development of domestication of crops. They are a bit like experimental space labs..... Specialised Agriculture was then exported downwards.