Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available.
The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile nearby. Picking through those dumps can be really fascinating and a surprising amount of items are still in good shape. A simple heuristic for how old a glass bottle is is how thick it is. A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old.
Looking at old structures and tools really makes vivid how disposable many modern items are.
I don't see how you can call the climate "harsh" with a straight face since it never rarely get moist enough for long enough for water and bacteria to do much to wood and masonry.
There's a reason you pretty much never see 100yr old unmaintained wood and masonry structures in New England, midwest, the PNW, etc.
Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing.
SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.
This does even change vintage car prices, certain places out west (Arizona, Utah etc) vintage cars typically are less rare (and therefore cost less generally.) Whereas snow, the salt used to treat roads and rain will wreak havoc on the frames and bodies in other areas.
It's struck me, reading roman authors, that they were considerably more obsessed with building a legacy than we are. Not just getting powerful or famous in life, but entering the history books, to become big name like Scipio Africanus.
May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sand castles on the shores of oblivion. Making some form of lasting mark seems almost urgent when you look at it from that perspective.
Hard to know if their culture was different, it could easily be a case of survival bias. Those obsessed with creating a legacy for themselves were more likely to create a legacy that lasted.
Think about all your contemporaries, unless they're incredibly famous their story will be lost in time.
I read on here - and I hope someone can find the link because I just spent 20 minutes looking for it and now I can't find it - an economist or similar academic grousing about a rail bridge in the UK that had been upgraded for the first time in an [arbitrarily long amount of time] to support heavier trains. The complaint was that, surely, a bridge should not last that long without needing an upgrade; you should build a cheaper bridge and replace it, because whatever gains you can make from investing the difference will outpace the replacement cost.
I guess the point is that building a legacy of infrastructure is, generally, not economical and therefore should be foregone in favor of building a legacy of financial holdings.
Rome wasn’t very old by the standards of 1 AD. Elsewhere in Greece, Egypt and Middle East, cities had been inhabited for several millennia.
But Rome’s founding just 750 years earlier was mythological because the place was too remote to even have written history until much later. Virgil had to invent a Trojan connection to elevate the national epic.
Being obsessed with building a legacy is not so uncommon. Machiavelli comes into my mind, for whom future fame is one of the most important motivations for rulers. Or think of Pericles, who states in his famous Funeral Oration: "there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages".[1]
Maybe there's survivorship bias in that sample. Are ancient authors we still read more likely to be obsessed with legacy-building than the ones we've forgotten?
Capitalism has no legacy. After all, time preference can't be negative. Implying that destroying the earth is a perfectly viable idea because the discounted future value of earth is $0 to many people after their death.
A time preference of 0 is equivalent to never consuming (e.g. never consuming the earth in its entirety).
Did the Romans really know that using certain volcanic rocks would make their concrete structures last longer? Or did they mostly just use whatever aggregate was convenient and the structures that have survived are the ones that used the right rocks? The latter sounds more plausible to me.
Of course we can still learn valuable lessons from these surviving structures.
It’s not just the monuments. Everywhere you go in Rome there are fountains with cold, clean drinkable water. The combination of the roads, rivers, infrastructure, and monuments leaves you feeling like we kind of aimed a little low, at times.
One other explanation is that many of these monuments didn't stand around undisturbed for 2,000 years, a lot of work of hundreds of generations of humans went into these monuments.
The Porta Nigra is a great example - it's an ancient Roman city gate in Trier, Germany, still standing since it was built in 170 AD. The ground floor was buried for a long time (>800 years?) preserving it. The gate was a ruin for a few hundred years, around 1000 AD a church was built around the gate keeping the construction in place. As part of a general de-'churchification' 1802 Napoleon had the church-part taken off and had the gate and its insides fixed up (while the ground floor was still buried!).
So the gate didn't have to survive on its own.
Native speaker (Brit in USA) here. Either one is fine, although they have subtle differences in meaning and implication (to me) in this context.
The first thing that struck me before I gave this any real thought is that "How" here connotes a little incredulity or even amazement (to me). There's an implied, rhetorical sense of unlikelihood of the fact. ("How are Rome's monuments still standing?! Shouldn't they have fallen down by now?")
"How" also implies (to me) that we seek an explanation of processes, means, techniques, or methods. It invites an answer that's somehow more dynamic and more detailed. "Why" is asking "for what reason(s)?" The "Why" version of the question feels more direct, but the answer space is broader and more abstract. "How" feels, forgive me, more concrete here than "Why" :)
How -> explain the processes, techniques, or workings. Why -> explain the reasons/causes. Obviously, there's overlap there, and the distinction is subtle, so perhaps some of this is only in my head :)
How and why sound to me like slightly different questions and the best one might depend on the answer.
"Why is something still standing" could be circumstances related - eg all the other ones got demolished except this one for reason x, or y group of people stepped in to maintain it etc
"How is something still standing" sounds more like the method for it standing - eg the structure had some extra cross bracing on the lower level etc
one very impressive feat is the Pont du Gard, this thing has been in disuse for 1500 years, and lots of stones have been looted over the centuries. And its aspect ratio is somewhat thin.
How many of these have undergone serious repairs? I've seen multiple news stories about colosseum repairs and renovations during my lifetime, and I'm sure there were plenty of earlier efforts. Rome has burned or been hit by major earthquakes multiple times since these things were built.
I’m currently wrapping up a trip touring many ancient monuments during winter (aka off-season), and nearly all of them were having some kind of renovation work being done. Usually it’s a combination of whatever ancient stone is left from antiquity, combined with new material of the same type that would have been used originally (though not in all cases, there is some form of “artificial stone” that is used at times, not sure of what that is).
So, my guess at the answer to your question would be all of them, many times over.
I saw an article a while back about the unique properties of ancient Roman cement. It seems that the sea water hitting the walls created a rare mineral when due to a chemical reaction.
I often wonder about how things are built without preservation/archival in mind. We live in an age where so many things are built in so much faster than the past but, with the expectation that they will be replaced even faster than in the past.
The Romans had no arabic numerals and no arithmetic - that's why the statics of the buildings were not calculated. So some were over- and others under-dimensioned.
You only see the over-dimensioned ones. They are still standing today.
> Roman concrete, on the other hand, is a simpler mix of quicklime made from baking and crushing limestone rocks and, most importantly, volcanic rock aggregates of various types, which were abundant in the region surrounding Rome. In contrast to the aggregates used in modern concrete, these volcanic materials used by the Romans are highly reactive and the resulting concrete remains chemically active for centuries after it first hardens.
By the way, I don't buy this entirely. Let me tell you why.
The Pantheon is mostly stones and bricks, and "some" concrete to keep the bricks together. These large stones are held together by simple force of gravity, very much like the Pyramids in Egypt (~4,000 years old, or double the age of the Colosseum or the Pantheon).
I'm not a materials engineer (just a software engineer). Can someone with more knowledge comment on my view?
Does make me wonder what we’re building today that will last. I suppose the engineers who worked on Voyager or Pathfinder have the best shot of having built something enduring.
Sure, but the fact that some monuments have held that well is impressive.
It might have been a happy accident, it most likely was, but the valuable insight here is that we know that there is a recipe for concrete that lasts for thousands of years in real world conditions. We probably can do better today, we have a much better understanding of chemistry and computer simulations, but what we can't do is conduct a thousand year long experiment, and that's the Roman empire have done to us.
I wonder if there will come a time when society decides it's better to fix ruins such as the Colosseum and the pyramids instead of letting them just rot away.
With the Colosseum at least, it didn't just sit there untouched for two thousand years. The locals have repaired it after disasters. And also partially torn it down. And then rebuilt it.
About 150 years after it was built, it was partially destroyed by fire. And rebuilt. Another 200 years later there are inscriptions from late emperors who did more repair work. In the medieval era it was stripped of marble and suffered serious damage from an earthquake. In the 18th century it seems the Popes started to appreciate that it was historically significant, and various repairs and preservation activities have gone on ever since. One of the largest cleanings and repairs ever has just started in the last decade.
How much to repair though? At a certain point you have to start taking out original work to replace the ruined interior, and I can understand the extreme reluctance to do that.
As to the Pyramids, they've been rotting for 4300 years and they're still there mostly intact. The most severe damage was intentional acts in relatively recent history. As long as we don't decide to start tearing them down again for free stone, they'll probably outlast humanity.
[+] [-] rurp|4 years ago|reply
The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile nearby. Picking through those dumps can be really fascinating and a surprising amount of items are still in good shape. A simple heuristic for how old a glass bottle is is how thick it is. A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old.
Looking at old structures and tools really makes vivid how disposable many modern items are.
[+] [-] emodendroket|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poo-yie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
There's a reason you pretty much never see 100yr old unmaintained wood and masonry structures in New England, midwest, the PNW, etc.
[+] [-] trompetenaccoun|4 years ago|reply
SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.
[+] [-] Cody_C|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|4 years ago|reply
May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sand castles on the shores of oblivion. Making some form of lasting mark seems almost urgent when you look at it from that perspective.
[+] [-] trompetenaccoun|4 years ago|reply
Think about all your contemporaries, unless they're incredibly famous their story will be lost in time.
[+] [-] brendoelfrendo|4 years ago|reply
I guess the point is that building a legacy of infrastructure is, generally, not economical and therefore should be foregone in favor of building a legacy of financial holdings.
[+] [-] pavlov|4 years ago|reply
But Rome’s founding just 750 years earlier was mythological because the place was too remote to even have written history until much later. Virgil had to invent a Trojan connection to elevate the national epic.
[+] [-] Archelaos|4 years ago|reply
[1] http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html
[+] [-] yosito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pastel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
A time preference of 0 is equivalent to never consuming (e.g. never consuming the earth in its entirety).
[+] [-] KSS42|4 years ago|reply
Author of Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators and War Elephants
Why was Roman concrete forgotten during the Middle Ages?
https://youtu.be/dbvvlFHCNn4
See also his YouTube series: History of Rome in 15 Buildings
The Colosseum: https://youtu.be/m6iHR8zqbiM
[+] [-] roca|4 years ago|reply
Of course we can still learn valuable lessons from these surviving structures.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asimpletune|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bayart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_bonobo|4 years ago|reply
The Porta Nigra is a great example - it's an ancient Roman city gate in Trier, Germany, still standing since it was built in 170 AD. The ground floor was buried for a long time (>800 years?) preserving it. The gate was a ruin for a few hundred years, around 1000 AD a church was built around the gate keeping the construction in place. As part of a general de-'churchification' 1802 Napoleon had the church-part taken off and had the gate and its insides fixed up (while the ground floor was still buried!). So the gate didn't have to survive on its own.
[+] [-] bennysomething|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moosedev|4 years ago|reply
The first thing that struck me before I gave this any real thought is that "How" here connotes a little incredulity or even amazement (to me). There's an implied, rhetorical sense of unlikelihood of the fact. ("How are Rome's monuments still standing?! Shouldn't they have fallen down by now?")
"How" also implies (to me) that we seek an explanation of processes, means, techniques, or methods. It invites an answer that's somehow more dynamic and more detailed. "Why" is asking "for what reason(s)?" The "Why" version of the question feels more direct, but the answer space is broader and more abstract. "How" feels, forgive me, more concrete here than "Why" :)
How -> explain the processes, techniques, or workings. Why -> explain the reasons/causes. Obviously, there's overlap there, and the distinction is subtle, so perhaps some of this is only in my head :)
I found http://www.differencebetween.net/language/grammar-language/d... which seems to half-agree.
[+] [-] antod|4 years ago|reply
"Why is something still standing" could be circumstances related - eg all the other ones got demolished except this one for reason x, or y group of people stepped in to maintain it etc
"How is something still standing" sounds more like the method for it standing - eg the structure had some extra cross bracing on the lower level etc
Maybe it's just me :)
[+] [-] arcticfox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmelaich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freefal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nraynaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitwit005|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freewilly1040|4 years ago|reply
So, my guess at the answer to your question would be all of them, many times over.
[+] [-] Cody_C|4 years ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22231
I often wonder about how things are built without preservation/archival in mind. We live in an age where so many things are built in so much faster than the past but, with the expectation that they will be replaced even faster than in the past.
[+] [-] mro_name|4 years ago|reply
You only see the over-dimensioned ones. They are still standing today.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|4 years ago|reply
> Roman concrete, on the other hand, is a simpler mix of quicklime made from baking and crushing limestone rocks and, most importantly, volcanic rock aggregates of various types, which were abundant in the region surrounding Rome. In contrast to the aggregates used in modern concrete, these volcanic materials used by the Romans are highly reactive and the resulting concrete remains chemically active for centuries after it first hardens.
By the way, I don't buy this entirely. Let me tell you why.
The Pantheon is mostly stones and bricks, and "some" concrete to keep the bricks together. These large stones are held together by simple force of gravity, very much like the Pyramids in Egypt (~4,000 years old, or double the age of the Colosseum or the Pantheon).
I'm not a materials engineer (just a software engineer). Can someone with more knowledge comment on my view?
[+] [-] thinkski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kart23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anshumankmr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abinaya_rl|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadisvara_Temple,_Thanjavur
[+] [-] wsinks|4 years ago|reply
The ones that are still standing were built really well. Each will have its own reason for standing so long.
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
It might have been a happy accident, it most likely was, but the valuable insight here is that we know that there is a recipe for concrete that lasts for thousands of years in real world conditions. We probably can do better today, we have a much better understanding of chemistry and computer simulations, but what we can't do is conduct a thousand year long experiment, and that's the Roman empire have done to us.
[+] [-] frosted-flakes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zeckalpha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmitc|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Tba0il8IFF4
[+] [-] noyeastguy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retrac|4 years ago|reply
About 150 years after it was built, it was partially destroyed by fire. And rebuilt. Another 200 years later there are inscriptions from late emperors who did more repair work. In the medieval era it was stripped of marble and suffered serious damage from an earthquake. In the 18th century it seems the Popes started to appreciate that it was historically significant, and various repairs and preservation activities have gone on ever since. One of the largest cleanings and repairs ever has just started in the last decade.
How much to repair though? At a certain point you have to start taking out original work to replace the ruined interior, and I can understand the extreme reluctance to do that.
As to the Pyramids, they've been rotting for 4300 years and they're still there mostly intact. The most severe damage was intentional acts in relatively recent history. As long as we don't decide to start tearing them down again for free stone, they'll probably outlast humanity.
[+] [-] i_have_an_idea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bayart|4 years ago|reply