Newfie wrote:Well maybe it is for the votes, but maybe it is something deeper.
The events outlined above took place over many centuries, until the advent of the oil age which Tanda puts at around 1840.
Going out on a limb here to see how it sounds.........
Earlier things were constructed with the future in mind. Not everything, there were terrible hovels that soon returned to the dirt, but there were also the Roman roads, via ducts, cathedrals, etc that were built to stand the test of time. Folks had a sense of continuity. Things will be tomorrow as they are today. What I build today will be useful for a long time. People will remember I built this.
That sense of permanence is gone now. One wonders how long a stick built McMansion will last. I've been watching a 1960's era complex be razed, many acres of offices, to build a new complex. My home town is essentially gone, the name exists but it is otherwise unrecogniable
Among the things that have changed for us, including our anatomy and sheer physical strength, is our sense of time and permanence. We have adapted to a new pace, a new sense of inpermanence, things change, we move, family comes and goes.
But this also means we no longer have a sense of place or future. The 18th century peasant, as noted, was not mobile and had many generations behind him to reflect upon. He had no reason to believe that his great grandson would lead a different life than he.
A 21st century person looks to a different future with no certainty. Or worse with the certainty of change, for better or worse. Why SHOULD we build great roads and buildings if they will be inundated with water? Why should we worry how history will treat us if the future is likely to be one of mass depopulation and retrenchment?
Are we truly as stupid as we seem, or do we have some common unspoken understanding of the coming dark ages and wish to dissociate ourselves from it?
I don't know the answers. I do have a sense that many common folk have a good sense that things are seriously amiss, but are completely flummoxed about what to do.
......
Anyway, many years ago I worked at Amtrak after it was broken away from Conrail, and got to see first hand the devistation of deferred maintenance. Then again at SEPTA when we took the Regional Rail network from Conrail. In the mid 80's we still had crank phones. One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy, etc.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tanada wrote:Infrastructure improves standard of living. Cheap energy enables better infrastructure. Expensive energy causes infrastructure to fall into disrepair and as a side effect lowers standard of living. Since 1973 the infrastructure in USA has been undergoing progressive decay resulting in a stagnant or declining standard of living.
Bloomberg) -- The energy crisis crippling power grids across the U.S. showed no sign of abating on Tuesday morning as blackouts left almost 5 million customers without electricity during unprecedented cold weather.
Complex supply chains may have appeared more than 3,000 years ago
Long-distance supply chains, vulnerable to disruptions from wars and disease outbreaks, may have formed millennia before anyone today gasped at gas prices or gawked at empty store shelves.
Roughly 3,650 to 3,200 years ago, herders and villagers who mined tin ore fueled long-distance supply chains that transported the metal from Central Asia and southern Turkey to merchant ships serving societies clustered around the Mediterranean, a new study finds.
Remote communities located near rare tin deposits tapped into an intense demand among ancient urban civilizations for a metal that, along with copper, was needed to produce bronze, researchers report in the Dec. 2 Science Advances.
Tin access transformed herders and part-time cultivators into powerful partners of Late Bronze Age states and rulers, say archaeometallurgist Wayne Powell of Brooklyn College in New York City and colleagues. Until now, it has been difficult to demonstrate the existence of such an ancient, long-distance tin supply chain or its geographic origins.
Powell’s group builds their argument on previous archaeological evidence that mobile groups in Central Asia spread crop cultivation across much of Asia more than 4,000 years ago (SN: 4/2/14) and pioneered popular clothes-making innovations by 3,000 years ago (SN: 2/18/22). Land routes used by those groups would have connected Central Asian tin ore sources to the Mediterranean, the researchers say.
Evidence of an ancient tin pipeline stretching more than 3,000 kilometers from mining sites in present-day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to merchant ships carrying processed tin in the eastern Mediterranean is particularly striking, says anthropologist Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St. Louis.
“That complex tin network was an early version of modern-day supply chains for commodities such as gas and oil,” Frachetti says.
Writing on clay tablets from Bronze Age sites in what’s now Turkey and Iraq refers to tin arriving from far to the east as early as around 3,900 years ago. But precise sources for eastern tin have proved elusive.
An ancient shipwreck discovered in 1982 off Turkey’s coast enabled the new study. Known as the Uluburun shipwreck, the vessel dates to around 3,300 years ago and is one of the oldest known shipwrecks. Its cargo included one metric ton of tin. The metal had been cast into portable, distinctively shaped pieces called ingots.
Powell’s group documented chemical fingerprints of 105 tin ingots, nearly all of those found in the Uluburun shipwreck. Ingot IDs were based on distinct combinations of different forms, or isotopes, of tin, lead and trace elements in the ingots. Data on the isotopic profiles of tin ore deposits in different parts of Eurasia have become available over the last few years, allowing the researchers to match the ingots’ tin to deposits, Powell says.
Powell, Frachetti and colleagues traced the origins of about one-third of the Uluburun tin ingots to an ore deposit in Tajikistan and several others nearby in Uzbekistan. Previous excavations indicate that herding groups used stone hammers to mine tin from outcrops at those sites.
Most of the remaining shipwreck ingots were linked to small tin deposits in southeastern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Mountain communities controlled by the ancient Hittite kingdom probably collected tin from those deposits, Frachetti says (SN: 5/1/18). Until now, many researchers have assumed that Turkish tin sources were depleted by the Late Bronze Age.
Despite the new evidence, geographic origins of the Uluburun tin ingots remain unclear, says archaeometallurgist Daniel Berger of Curt-Engelhorn-Centre of Archaeometry in Mannheim, Germany. Berger, who studies Bronze Age tin sources with another research group, did not participate in the new study.
Tin ores typically contain low lead levels, but the shipwreck ingots display high levels. Lead was probably added, deliberately or via accidental contamination, to tin somewhere on its way to the Mediterranean, he suggests. If so, that potentially complicates the attempt by Powell’s group to combine tin and lead isotopes to identify tin sources.
Isotopic signatures of tin within the same ore deposits vary greatly, and overlap exists between different deposits, Berger says. So tin isotopes by themselves cannot definitively identify tin sources of the Uluburun ingots.
“Tracing the tin sources of the Bronze Age is and remains one of the most challenging problems in archaeology,” Berger says. Efforts to identify chemical and molecular properties of different Eurasian tin deposits are still in the early stages, he adds.
In February, Berger and colleagues reported that tin ingots from a Late Bronze Age shipwreck found off Israel’s coast displayed an isotopic connection to tin deposits in southwestern England. Further research is also needed to confirm that finding, he says.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Though bronze is generally harder than wrought iron, with Vickers hardness of 60–258 vs. 30–80,[10] the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age after a serious disruption of the tin trade: the population migrations of around 1200–1100 BCE reduced the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean and from Britain, limiting supplies and raising prices.[11] As the art of working in iron improved, iron became cheaper and improved in quality. As cultures advanced from hand-wrought iron to machine-forged iron (typically made with trip hammers powered by water), blacksmiths learned how to make steel. Steel is stronger than bronze and holds a sharper edge longer.[12]
theluckycountry wrote:An interesting insight into past trade. So much of ancient history is fascinating, it is like today really, just on a much smaller scale.
Wiki article on BronzeThough bronze is generally harder than wrought iron, with Vickers hardness of 60–258 vs. 30–80,[10] the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age after a serious disruption of the tin trade: the population migrations of around 1200–1100 BCE reduced the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean and from Britain, limiting supplies and raising prices.[11] As the art of working in iron improved, iron became cheaper and improved in quality. As cultures advanced from hand-wrought iron to machine-forged iron (typically made with trip hammers powered by water), blacksmiths learned how to make steel. Steel is stronger than bronze and holds a sharper edge longer.[12]
Bronze was still used during the Iron Age, and has continued in use for many purposes to the modern day.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
theluckycountry wrote: Wood is renewable, that would still work in 1000 years. Rail cars made out of hi-strength Aluminum box section, drawn by electric locos with small modular nuclear power stations located up the line
theluckycountry wrote:Trade transport over the centuries has been quite an affair, here in Australia we imported and employed Camels to ship stuff up through the central deserts 100 years ago or so. There are some fascinating youtubes on pack mule trains, up in the high country of the US and South America. Then there are all the canals built across England and elsewhere to facilitate transport.
And the big ones, the Corinth canal, the panama and Suez, huge undertakings just to move junk from one sea to another.
I think one of the biggest failures of modern society though is the abandonment of rail transport in favor of the road truck. We all know where that's heading of course. Just imagine if they had extended the network though and had never allowed all those interstate behemoths on the roads. Our roads would be in much better repair and we would be well positioned to transition the trains over to electric or even a modern super efficient steam engine. Wood is renewable, that would still work in 1000 years. Rail cars made out of hi-strength Aluminum box section, drawn by electric locos with small modular nuclear power stations located up the line
Newfie wrote: There are short term advantages to road transit. But in the larger scheme of things other paths would have been better.
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