- Crater Lake in Oregon is a beautiful national park. Mount Mazama erupted 7,700 years ago. Native Americans lived in the area at the time and have stories about the eruption passed down through time.
https://www.klamathtribesnews.org/2024/04/01/crater-lake-and...
- There doesn't appear to be any evidence the story was passed down from the time it occurred. It's more likely the they, like other peoples throughout the world, were able to see that clearly some time in the past a major geological event had occurred and made up a story to explain it.
I wouldn't totally rule it out, but the basis for this claim is very, very thin.
- I disagree. There is plenty of evidence of oral traditions being passed down through the different indo european languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German etc.) that date back to before the split 8100 years ago. Granted the specifics details and names get changed over the years but there is amazing similarities at can only be explained through oral traditions.
- There is no evidence whatsoever for your baseless disregard of oral transmission of historical events.
- This reminds me of the Inuit oral history of the location of the HMS Erebus and Terror.
https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/nu/epaveswrecks/culture/inui...
- The history of earthquakes in New England is valuable because the long-term risks are more poorly understood than other parts of the US. We know there are a lot 5.x earthquakes, which do a lot of damage to the old European-style masonry construction which is still common there, but there is some evidence that suggests rare earthquakes are up into the 7.x range. If a 7.x earthquake occurred in New England, it would be devastating given the construction style of older buildings.
Much of the US builds to very high seismic standards by global standards due to lessons paid in blood but there are still unknowns in regions like New England and a lot of construction that is not particularly seismic resistant.
- Boston is mostly built on fill. Terrifying to think of sitting through 7.0 Earthquake. All those brick buildings all along the Merrimack.
- Not only does brick collapse, it tends to flatten people when it collapses.
Wood frame houses, even flimsy ones, are less deadly in an earthquake even if they do collapse.
- What are bricks good at? Are they purely aesthetic?
Structurally speaking, concrete and wood clearly have their place, bricks just seem like a worse concrete to me.
- In the absence of other influences, people tend to build with whatever is both cheaper [to buy and to use] and most-available.
If clay bricks are plentiful and cheaper in an area, then clay bricks tend to be used.
If dimensional lumber is plentiful and cheaper, then dimensional lumber tends to be used.
Same with concrete, or steel, or whatever. It varies regionally because the availability and cost of resources also vary regionally.
- Not purely aesthetic, but they tend to be used for façade (brick veneer) rather than structural purposes these days. I can’t imagine you’d find much new construction that has solid masonry walls anymore.
- They're a lot less ugly than concrete and they don't burn.
- Well, poured concrete is a relatively new technique. Most of the industrial areas in New England were built before that. All the those factory were built when brick was the material to build with.
- Heat retention. You know, kind of important in the winter.
- Brick (r value ~0.80) reflects about as much heat as plywood (r value ~0.68). Alone, they are both terrible insulators, which is why we use air gap and better materials like fiber or vermiculite to fill the walls.
- Where structural bricks are used, they are generally hollow with air cavities of varying sizes. Those types of bricks are very good insulators, pretty much the best insulation we had before modern fibres. Even if we used solid brick, their thermal mass alone would help regulate interior temperatures.
- Hmm. That's not been my experience, both as a factory worker and former materials salesman (most of which were foams used as insulation). In the factories, the walls are typically concrete block with hollows (sometimes called cinder block) and I can tell you first-hand that in our Winters, when the temp hits below 32F consistently, those walls are very, very cold, as is the inside of the shop despite the efforts of our +250kBtuH heaters and keeping the bay doors closed as is common practice in the Winter months.
In my travels to other factories in the Southern parts of the US, we encounter the opposite problem. Brick shops are almost always too hot despite reasonable ventilation and climate control measures. There is definitely something to be said about where the structure in is the world when it comes to choosing appropriate building materials.
- Sawing wood by hand is terribly exhausting work.
- Over at the Mohegan Sun casino, there's an exhibit about Moshup, a giant from Mohegan folklore. Moshup was said to be a friendly giant to the Mohegans, the Wampanoags, and other tribes in the area, protecting them from harm from his home on Martha's Vineyard island. But he could be roused to anger; and his stomping footsteps around the New England countryside were thought to be the cause of Moodus's seismic activity. Certain geological features in Connecticut were of great importance to Mohegans, said to be Moshup's footprints (but called "the devil's footprints" by English colonists because you know, colonialism).
Growing up in Connecticut, you think you're relatively safe from earthquakes... until you read about the folklore around Moodus and other seismic hot sites, from Natives and from colonists, and then you get a little bit scared...
- > called "the devil's footprints" by English colonists because you know, colonialism
Different tribes would call same features by different names, such as the many names for Mt Rainier and Mt Denali. It's not a colonialism thing, it's a people thing.
- Colonization disregarded a lot of native data like this for hundreds of years — it's amazing that it survived through language at all. I always wonder how much we've actually lost... but we'll never really know.
A similar sort of "rediscovery" happened with crop rotation and soil renewal, natives had been using various methods for centuries but they were disregarded by european settlers.
- Crop rotation was the standard method of planting throughout Europe in the middle ages, it certainly wasn't lost by the settlers.
- Most of the first colonists weren't farmers. And I believe some tricks were actually picked up in Europe and end up coming back with former enslave natives.
- most of the early european settlers were awful farmers, if they didn't lose it they were too stupid to use it - this carried on for decades
- Why the vitriol? You don't need to rotate crops for decades with virgin soil.
- what vitriol? they were not smart (especially the english), many of them died because they didn't prepare for winter properly... they had winter where they came from
this is well documented, lots of settlements failed due to very simple mistakes and infighting
at one point an english settlement lead by john smith actually raided natives out of desperation and many starved when they were cut off in response
- I guess it seems like an oversimplification and underestimation of the challenges involved.
- you would imagine, right? but it's worse! many were ill prepared because they were preoccupied with searching for gold!
- Well we have plenty of records of people who did pay attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn't very good at focusing on what will care about in the future.
Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.
- Western disbelief in the veracity of oral traditions isn't confined to cultures outside the West. It's as strongly antagonistic, if not more so, to Western traditions. If it's not written down, it didn't happen; and if it contradicts even one scrap of written literature, it absolutely couldn't have happened, no matter how overwhelming the non-written corpus of evidence. Heck, Europe birthed an entire religion, Protestantism, predicted on "sola scriptura".
OTOH, this insistence on verifiable data that can be easily shared and critiqued undergirds much technological progress. If the price to be paid in its excesses is the loss of historical knowledge, perhaps it's been worth it.
- Yes, like “slash and burn” land management. And the “buffalo jump” method of chasing them off a steep cliff, falling to their death. And internecine tribal warfare, with constant usurpation of good land for farming and grazing.
Good stuff: bring it all back, with the human sacrifices we’ve already renewed?
- Nobody really knows what North American civic life was like before contact. The cities all depopulated before intensive contact due to disease.
What settlers found were post-apocalyptic remnant groups.
- Human sacrifice? ¿Que?
- Great example of how people throw out the good with the bad and are seemingly incapable of navigating nuance.
- Back? This country was built on taking and retaining land with violence. We just call it "property" now and act like everyone thinks this is fine. we now refer to human sacrifices as "essential workers" and "terrorists". Same fundamental dynamic tho—we just replaced the gods with the economy; but either way, people gotta die to keep it running.
- Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the confluence of several empires and other overseas powers which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers, evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it.
And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas.
And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions.
Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
- Well, sure. But it sure as hell aint't diplomacy and peace that built this society we live in now. Or at least, not a good sort of peace. That's especially true for the US and Canada. What went on before europeans made an appearance doesn't change this observation. I'll leave defending that to the people whose world we destroyed.
- And yet, our borders have been peaceful for the most part, as really no foreign army has invaded the United States in a long, long time. There have been two World Wars in Europe, yet our interior has remained sacrosanct for longer than that.
And the United States has established embassies and consulates all over the world. We're founding members of the U.N.; we're on the Security Council. We send humanitarian missions all over the place. Surely you cannot argue, with a straight face, that "peace and diplomacy" have not built the society we enjoy today?
Peace and diplomacy are not in a vacuum for us, certainly -- there have been wars; there has been espionage; there have been terrorist attacks. But peace and diplomacy are the primary way, and a more excellent way, and they are avenues that will always be explored and exhausted before violence takes over.
- The USA has also successfully completed multiple full on genocides rivaling Nazis with their eugenics and "purity" ideals.... You act like all these good Americans blessings came from the upstanding moral character of Americans and not from overwhelming brutality and violence to steal it or have slaves build it. To this very day with prison work and minimum wage indertured servants.
- > the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492
It's a certainty. The tribes were well armed for good reason. The Inca had an army before Pizzaro arrived. Cortez allied with neighboring tribes to go after the Aztecs, as those tribes very much wanted to destroy the Aztecs for their depradations. The warrior culture in N America was very well developed. The Commanche carved out their own empire in the Texas area before the Spanish arrived. They did not learn how to fight from the Spanish, it was the other way around.
- FYI, Aotearoa New Zealand is also a Polynesian archipelago. Bottom of the Polynesian triangle.
- Luckily they encountered a culture with writing, so their knowledge could be preserved for us today.
- Yes, lucky for all of us that the culture that showed up right before they started mysteriously dying by the millions had writing; truly fortunate that culture arrived on their shores, a thing nobody could possibly disagree with.
- The accounts of how the Commanche lived nearly all come from accounts written by white people who lived among them (often taken as slaves by the Commanche).
See "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne. A truly fantastic epic. I'm amazed nobody has made this into a miniseries yet.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
72 points by pseudolus 5 days ago | 44 comments