GUYS THEY FIGURED OUT THE ROMAN CONCRETE RECIPE THAT MAKES IT IMMUNE TO SEAWATER
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I KNOW RIGHT?!???
I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
Ok I would like to point put that, in recent times (I’m talking probably…80s to the present?) Archaeologists/are/ the ones figuring this shit out. This site loves bashing on archaeology so much but y’know what? Yeah, in a shocking twist, we don’t all ignore oral tradition, or ancient writings. The people who /do/ do that are widely despised in the field and considered, shockingly, ///bad archaeologists./// Before that, back in the 1800s all the way through even the 50s and 60s? Yeah, the field was dominated by rich white men who saw the world the way they wanted to see it. It’s tainted the field ever since, but what people on tumblr seem so bad at recognizing is that it has /changed!/ Archaeology nowadays (and anthropology, which, for us Americans at least, is an integral part of archaeology and vise versa) is quickly approaching a completely equal gender balance, and many people have begun studying it to learn about their native countries! Long story short: feel free to bash on the old guard of the profession: Wheeler, Schlieman, hell, even the famous ones like Carter and Canarvon, were all crochety racist old white men. But before you start spouting crap about how archaeology is universally terrible and accomplishes nothing, remember that these people are largely seen in the modern community as what they are- terrible people, and bad scientists to boot. Maybe do some reading on modern archaeological studies and digs- you might even learn something yourself.