living that ancient life

experimental archaeology & ancient history. prehistoric, not primitive!

[morallygreyginger]

rating actual medieval names i have found as a medieval studies student but they get progressively more unhinged:

William de Appeltrefeld: 8/10 bc appeltrefeld sounds like a nice place to live. who wouldnt want to live in a field full of apple trees? points deducted cause there are like fifty bajillion williams in england

Luke de Luka, merchant of Luca: 6/10. ur parents really werent creative huh

Hugh de Wlonkeslowe: 7/10. looks like a straight person trying to keyboard smash. *laughs in english place names*

Roger Smert: 10/10 absolute banger of a name. does it make any sense? absolutely not! but you guys. i dont think you understand. smert!!

John de la Bro: 7/10. when ur such a bro that its literally ur name and 800 years in the future its all people know of u

Hugh Sad: 7/10. weve all been there buddy

Gaylarde de la Mote: 10/10. slay. i bet this guys mote was the gayest mote youve ever seen

Hugh de la Penne: 9/10. we stan a pasta man

Richard de Astlegh: 10/10. verily, he shall ne'er give thee up, ne'er let thee down, nor shall he run with great haste and desert thee, he shall ne'er cause thee to weep, ne'er bid you farewell, ne'er shall he speak wicked falshoods in thine ear or cause thee harm

Bindo Hug: 8/10. who is this man a hobbit???

Eudo la Zusche: 6/10. deadass sounds like something youd see in a really bad fantasy novel

William crisp: 7/10. w h a t.

Asser son of Licoriz: 7/10 there is so much going on here i dont even know what to tell you

Baldwin Panik: 10/10 cause this is a heckin mood

Richard Cok, aka Dick Cok: 69/10. nice.

[rex-sidereus]

I JUST FOUND A LATE ANTIQUE VERSION OF ‘LIVE LOVE LAUGH’ AND I WISH I WERE KIDDING

[rex-sidereus]

‘health, life, joy, peace, good cheer, hope’. Mosaic, 4th century, Roman Anatolia. British Museum.

[stickandthorn]

I have such an issue with dnd spells because of how much they would revolutionize the setting but so often don’t. Take Druid spells, hell, take Druid cantrips like Druidcraft or Mold Earth. Those two spells alone would fucking revolutionize agriculture. Go up to first level. Purify food and drink? Cure wounds? Detect poison and disease? Wild Cunning? Goodberry? Do you know how much any one of these spells, let alone all of them, would completely change the mortality rate and quality of life of the average person? Do you know how fucking world shatteringly big it is for the average citizen to have access to these spells? The ripple effects these changes would cause through the whole society?

Even if it isn’t the average citizen, even if it’s hard to train Druid and you won’t have that many around, one single traveling 2nd level Druid who goes from farm to farm and town to town would make life changing differences. That’s just one class, applied to one specific scenario, at extremely low levels. There are so many world changing differences that come from dnd spells that totally change how the societies you design have to function.

And I know it’s a fun fantasy game and this doesn’t matter that much, and I can ignore, but it will always bug me to some extent. It also makes it super hard for me to design dnd settings because I always spiral about how this world would function when it has all these resources.

[elizabethemerald]

I think one, in world, explanation for why the existence of magic isn't as revolutionary as it should be might be the high mortality rate for adventurers? Like staying in towns is usually pretty safe with city guards or whatever, but actually traveling the wilds of a dnd landscape is very dangerous. And without a party with a variety of skills to keep you safe, it is far too easy to die out in the wilds by yourself, so maybe even low level casters wouldn't be able to travel around to help out neighboring villages.

And maybe another Watsonian explanation could be that so many villages and towns are regularly attacked by powerful creatures and face world ending calamities. So maybe a lot of the time and attention of the casters are focused on defending their homes, stop-gap measures to hold back the flood then rebuilding. Kind of like Thebes in Disney's Hercules, except rather than just one town it's every town.

My roommate and I like to try and examine and explain some of the weird things about dnd worlds, so I hope this makes sense! So when you're building your world you could have roaming bands of whatever enemy or monster you like and have smaller towns get regularly attacked and the local casters are exhausted and just doing their best to keep their town from getting wiped off the map, much less changing agriculture at a fundamental level.

[stickandthorn]

I see where you’re coming from, but I disagree on the principle that agriculture would not be prioritized. Put it this way: agriculture is not predicated on towns, towns are predicated on agriculture. I’m no historian or farmer, so I’m sure this will be an oversimplification (and potentially incorrect), but from my understanding: the reason we are able to live in big populations and survive and not devote all our time to finding food, is because somewhere down the line, people domesticated crops. Besides that, it’s only extremely recently that such a large part of the population doesn’t have to devote all their time to farming (and a very large part of the population still devotes their time to farming). Agriculture is insanely crucial to this kind of culture and society.

So if your world is so dangerous that the agriculture wizards can’t devote any time to agriculture, despite it being so crucial, how could anyone have domesticated crops and animals and started farming in the first place? If we never moved beyond the level of danger that requires the people who have magical abilities specifically related to plants and animals to not spend any time with plants and animals, how could the average non-magical person? If it’s constantly down to a village to village basis to defend themselves (and if this is a feudal lord style situation, the lord has failed at his job of protecting the agricultural workers with the resources he has), it sounds like we aren’t in the kind of society that can support agricultural or the consistent population size that requires said agriculture.

Besides that, why would you send valuable agriculture wizards to fight monsters when they could be keeping your harvest safe? When they could be pumping healing words into birthing mothers and babies so they survive a notoriously hard to survive part of life? When they could be making Goodberrys to offset starvation? Making enough food for the population to survive, and keeping the people who farm the food functional enough to farm the food, has to take priority at some point.

And Druid spells change agriculture in on a fundamental level by their sheer existence, with no extra special effort involved. Druidcraft can make any seed within a 30 foot radius sprout. For free. So does that mean farmers never have to worry about their plants not germinating? Does that mean they can control when they germinate? Even if it isn’t ideal conditions? That one effect of one cantrips is life changing, and there is no logical reason that that wouldn’t be used unless the circumstances were so dire that it couldn’t. Does detect poison and disease mean a Druid can tell which crops are diseased at a much earlier time? If it is that simple to do those spells, nothing really makes sense to me as to why that wouldn’t be their first priority.

This is all vague and oversimplified and possibly wrong, this isn’t at all my area of expertise, but this is the conclusion I’ve come to with what i know. As a note, I’ve found the one of the only ways it logically makes sense for me is that magic is just really rare. Spellcasters are so uncommon that this kind of society couldn’t have been built on the back of them because they were just not at all common.

[butserancientfarm]

okay we might be uniquely placed to actually answer this one. we're a working period farm, so we grow stuff basically the way they would have in medieval times!

RAW flavour supports druids being reclusive and mysterious, so if you need a reason for them not to be involved in agriculture it's probably fairly easy to invent one

but the most interesting thought is: what if they are involved in agriculture? what if basically every farming town has a druid on retainer, or there are travelling druids that come by every couple months to bless the fields? would it actually change that much?

in our opinion, no!

(for the sake of argument we are imagining a limit on uses of goodberry per 24 hours, partly 'cause that's how we rule it as a dm and partly because you're right it does absolutely break the world, and kind of makes farming irrelevant?)

but with farming -- listen. druids can help with the weather, with germination, with terraforming, and yes those are all mad helpful, but they can't change a couple of crucial things: manpower requirements, and yields.

take wheat. modern wheat wasn't developed until the 1960s. the wheat we grow at butser is a lot closer to what we can assume they'd have in your average medieval fantasy, and the yields are terrible in comparison! medieval farmers are working without tractors, pesticides, modern fertilizers, bird scarers, combine harvesters, etc, and they're getting roughly less than half the yield of a modern crop for their trouble

druids can't help with that. they can make farming more reliable and protect against famine, and they can help you grow more than you might otherwise manage in a season, but they can't help with harvesting, and they can't help with yields. (to our knowledge; we've not played a druid!)

so even with the help of druids, d&d farmers would likely still be operating very similarly to their medieval counterparts; the main difference is the reliability druids can offer, which would definitely help but not be world-breakingly powerful

in our own history, it's the surplus of food created by farming that allowed people to take on other jobs, like being craftsfolk, artists, musicians etc, or eventually answering emails until your eyes bleed

in actuality, a d&d world would need more food surplus than our own medieval world, because it has a bunch of jobs our world didn't -- like, wizard. hell, 'adventurer' seems to fully be a career path, and requires a bunch of other jobs in the infrastructure to support it -- magic potion brewers, a ton of weaponsmiths, enchanters, adventuring shopkeepers, etc. for these people to be able to do stuff other than help with farming, there has to be enough surplus generated that they're not needed to help

so, maybe druids are working in agriculture already, 'cause otherwise frankly we're not sure how the d&d world would be supporting all these people!

[circletofcircles]

There is one exception to this at low levels; Plant Growth, which if you spend 8 hours casting it, doubles the amount of food produced by all plants in a half mile radius.

[butserancientfarm]

oh that's huge actually, and it lasts a year. if we're imagining itinerant druids going from village to village, this is 100% what they'd be casting. tbh the very existence of this spell kind of suggests that's what's happening?

doubling your yield effectively cuts the space and manpower needed in half, which then either frees up those people to go off and be adventurers or means you can get 2x your previous yield from the same space and labourers, which then allows for your d&d cuisine to have more widespread 'frivolous' foods like cakes and pastries 'cause there's all this extra farmed food going around

[stickandthorn]

I have such an issue with dnd spells because of how much they would revolutionize the setting but so often don’t. Take Druid spells, hell, take Druid cantrips like Druidcraft or Mold Earth. Those two spells alone would fucking revolutionize agriculture. Go up to first level. Purify food and drink? Cure wounds? Detect poison and disease? Wild Cunning? Goodberry? Do you know how much any one of these spells, let alone all of them, would completely change the mortality rate and quality of life of the average person? Do you know how fucking world shatteringly big it is for the average citizen to have access to these spells? The ripple effects these changes would cause through the whole society?

Even if it isn’t the average citizen, even if it’s hard to train Druid and you won’t have that many around, one single traveling 2nd level Druid who goes from farm to farm and town to town would make life changing differences. That’s just one class, applied to one specific scenario, at extremely low levels. There are so many world changing differences that come from dnd spells that totally change how the societies you design have to function.

And I know it’s a fun fantasy game and this doesn’t matter that much, and I can ignore, but it will always bug me to some extent. It also makes it super hard for me to design dnd settings because I always spiral about how this world would function when it has all these resources.

[elizabethemerald]

I think one, in world, explanation for why the existence of magic isn't as revolutionary as it should be might be the high mortality rate for adventurers? Like staying in towns is usually pretty safe with city guards or whatever, but actually traveling the wilds of a dnd landscape is very dangerous. And without a party with a variety of skills to keep you safe, it is far too easy to die out in the wilds by yourself, so maybe even low level casters wouldn't be able to travel around to help out neighboring villages.

And maybe another Watsonian explanation could be that so many villages and towns are regularly attacked by powerful creatures and face world ending calamities. So maybe a lot of the time and attention of the casters are focused on defending their homes, stop-gap measures to hold back the flood then rebuilding. Kind of like Thebes in Disney's Hercules, except rather than just one town it's every town.

My roommate and I like to try and examine and explain some of the weird things about dnd worlds, so I hope this makes sense! So when you're building your world you could have roaming bands of whatever enemy or monster you like and have smaller towns get regularly attacked and the local casters are exhausted and just doing their best to keep their town from getting wiped off the map, much less changing agriculture at a fundamental level.

[stickandthorn]

I see where you’re coming from, but I disagree on the principle that agriculture would not be prioritized. Put it this way: agriculture is not predicated on towns, towns are predicated on agriculture. I’m no historian or farmer, so I’m sure this will be an oversimplification (and potentially incorrect), but from my understanding: the reason we are able to live in big populations and survive and not devote all our time to finding food, is because somewhere down the line, people domesticated crops. Besides that, it’s only extremely recently that such a large part of the population doesn’t have to devote all their time to farming (and a very large part of the population still devotes their time to farming). Agriculture is insanely crucial to this kind of culture and society.

So if your world is so dangerous that the agriculture wizards can’t devote any time to agriculture, despite it being so crucial, how could anyone have domesticated crops and animals and started farming in the first place? If we never moved beyond the level of danger that requires the people who have magical abilities specifically related to plants and animals to not spend any time with plants and animals, how could the average non-magical person? If it’s constantly down to a village to village basis to defend themselves (and if this is a feudal lord style situation, the lord has failed at his job of protecting the agricultural workers with the resources he has), it sounds like we aren’t in the kind of society that can support agricultural or the consistent population size that requires said agriculture.

Besides that, why would you send valuable agriculture wizards to fight monsters when they could be keeping your harvest safe? When they could be pumping healing words into birthing mothers and babies so they survive a notoriously hard to survive part of life? When they could be making Goodberrys to offset starvation? Making enough food for the population to survive, and keeping the people who farm the food functional enough to farm the food, has to take priority at some point.

And Druid spells change agriculture in on a fundamental level by their sheer existence, with no extra special effort involved. Druidcraft can make any seed within a 30 foot radius sprout. For free. So does that mean farmers never have to worry about their plants not germinating? Does that mean they can control when they germinate? Even if it isn’t ideal conditions? That one effect of one cantrips is life changing, and there is no logical reason that that wouldn’t be used unless the circumstances were so dire that it couldn’t. Does detect poison and disease mean a Druid can tell which crops are diseased at a much earlier time? If it is that simple to do those spells, nothing really makes sense to me as to why that wouldn’t be their first priority.

This is all vague and oversimplified and possibly wrong, this isn’t at all my area of expertise, but this is the conclusion I’ve come to with what i know. As a note, I’ve found the one of the only ways it logically makes sense for me is that magic is just really rare. Spellcasters are so uncommon that this kind of society couldn’t have been built on the back of them because they were just not at all common.

[butserancientfarm]

okay we might be uniquely placed to actually answer this one. we're a working period farm, so we grow stuff basically the way they would have in medieval times!

RAW flavour supports druids being reclusive and mysterious, so if you need a reason for them not to be involved in agriculture it's probably fairly easy to invent one

but the most interesting thought is: what if they are involved in agriculture? what if basically every farming town has a druid on retainer, or there are travelling druids that come by every couple months to bless the fields? would it actually change that much?

in our opinion, no!

(for the sake of argument we are imagining a limit on uses of goodberry per 24 hours, partly 'cause that's how we rule it as a dm and partly because you're right it does absolutely break the world, and kind of makes farming irrelevant?)

but with farming -- listen. druids can help with the weather, with germination, with terraforming, and yes those are all mad helpful, but they can't change a couple of crucial things: manpower requirements, and yields.

take wheat. modern wheat wasn't developed until the 1960s. the wheat we grow at butser is a lot closer to what we can assume they'd have in your average medieval fantasy, and the yields are terrible in comparison! medieval farmers are working without tractors, pesticides, modern fertilizers, bird scarers, combine harvesters, etc, and they're getting roughly less than half the yield of a modern crop for their trouble

druids can't help with that. they can make farming more reliable and protect against famine, and they can help you grow more than you might otherwise manage in a season, but they can't help with harvesting, and they can't help with yields. (to our knowledge; we've not played a druid!)

so even with the help of druids, d&d farmers would likely still be operating very similarly to their medieval counterparts; the main difference is the reliability druids can offer, which would definitely help but not be world-breakingly powerful

in our own history, it's the surplus of food created by farming that allowed people to take on other jobs, like being craftsfolk, artists, musicians etc, or eventually answering emails until your eyes bleed

in actuality, a d&d world would need more food surplus than our own medieval world, because it has a bunch of jobs our world didn't -- like, wizard. hell, 'adventurer' seems to fully be a career path, and requires a bunch of other jobs in the infrastructure to support it -- magic potion brewers, a ton of weaponsmiths, enchanters, adventuring shopkeepers, etc. for these people to be able to do stuff other than help with farming, there has to be enough surplus generated that they're not needed to help

so, maybe druids are working in agriculture already, 'cause otherwise frankly we're not sure how the d&d world would be supporting all these people!

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

To make sure they stabbed the right people, ancient Britons formed primitive gangs, called tribes, and like many gangs they got into graffiti - vandalizing the countryside with gigantic doodles. Like this badly drawn horse. Or this decorative pervert.

Before Snapchat, hills were the most efficient way to distribute dick pics to a wide audience. As a result, Cerne Abbas became the second rudest hill in British history - after Benny.”

[noragaribotti]

ROMA-Fresco depicting natural scenes of birds, flowers, and plants in the 2nd style, from the House of Livia.

[thoodleoo]

me: hm, feeling kind of down, wish something would cheer me up :(

ancient roman enamleled owl brooch c. 1st-3rd century AD: 8>

me: :)

[undefinedivine]

Vera Nazarian // The Epic of Gilgamesh // 44,000 year old Indonesian rock art, "world's oldest recorded story" // Tahir Shah // Welcome to Nightvale

[classicslesbianopinions]

interesting article about classicists and modern greek

[thewynne]

It's worth noting that high school students in Greece learn ancient Greek in school. It's not completely dead to them, it's part of the curriculum.

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

But don’t they insist on pronouncing it like it’s modern Greek?

[classicslesbianopinions]

does it matter? it's not like any of us are pronouncing ancient greek with full accuracy. especially considering it was a tonal language

[butserancientfarm]

we're polishing our newest mosaic!

oiling a mosaic brings out the colour in the tesserae (aka mosaic tiles) and helps protect the materials. we don't know what the romans would have used, so we're using modern concrete oil. it's working a treat!

this mosaic was just laid this summer, and it was made using authentic roman techniques -- and even some real roman tesserae. we're really happy with how it turned out!

[butserancientfarm]

progress on our latest iron age roundhouse!

this is a really cool and unusual build based on a structure at the iron age danebury hillfort, and our experimentation has been getting us very familiar with wattle, postholes, and 👻 ghostholes 👻

danebury hillfort is a great site, and we've got some lovely archaeology to work from on this build. look how beautifully clear and circular it is! but it's got some quirks that are proving a little tough to build and interpret...

those little round beans are the stave holes -- ie, the uprights in a wattle and daub wall. they're super clear, but they're also much closer together than usual. we're discovering that with this spacing it's actually really hard to get a wattle weave through them

the other interesting thing about the archaeology is that there aren't regular postholes. we wondered if that might mean the wattle would support a roof on its own as it's a tighter weave, but that doesn't look likely after all...

so, posts! we're using scots pine to create an inner ring of posts and rafters, handmade using augers and axes and fitted together with oak dowels. but there's only evidence for about 50% of these posts in the archaeology. so what does that mean for our build?

well, not all posts leave clear archaeology behind, and not all postholes are always found. if a post wasn't driven deep enough into the ground, it might never show up in the archaeology.

we've been calling these 'ghostholes' -- places where we can surmise there might have been a post from the pattern of the rest of the archaeology (and our experimentation), but where there isn't any physical evidence of one

with that in mind, we've chosen to interpret this building as having a full ring of posts by extrapolating from the postholes that *are* in the archaeology. but that's just one explanation -- this building might have supported a roof on its wattle after all, and just used a different technique to achieve that. or maybe it didn't have a roof at all!

this is what experimental archaeology is all about! we'll let you know how this experiment goes 😊

[butserancientfarm]

okay listen we understand there's a twitter migration going on however does it affect your opinion to know that the person running this account (hi) has been here since 2012 check and mate

[butserancientfarm]

this morning, the last of the summer suns rose over our standing stone; now it begins its journey to winter...

happy equinox!

[menelaiad]

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (2/2)

[thesilicontribesman]

Bronze Age Arm Ornaments and Pin Jewellery, Hungary, The British Museum, London

[butserancientfarm]

sunshine on the last of our rosebay willowherb in the iron age village, and some of this year's harvest from our roman garden ☀️💚

in its prime, the rosebay willowherb is a firm favourite of insects like bees and butterflies! it's part of our wild-growing area around our roundhouses 🌼

[ancientcharm]

‘House of  Amphitrite’, Roman Villa (2nd century) with an extraordinary  mosaics floor.  Archaeological site of Bulla Regia, Jendouba Governorate, Tunisia.

Photographs: Noomen9 /CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons