Archaeologists find western world\'s oldest map

[tlclark]

I don't know about the columns, I'll have to dig up his e-mail and ask him. I just did the search on Franklin, the UPenn website and it isn't there.

Yeah, maybe we should start a new thread, but his stuff is just amazing. Now I don't want to give the impression that they were just winging it with no forethought, there's no doubt they were serious builders and professionals, but he showed me a lot of calculations that show the Romans are deliberately avoiding what he called "big math". They chose dimensions and methods that made their calculations easier and relied on a lot of just practical experience, and tight construction discipline to make things work.

up to 40m high, and a regular falling gradient of a couple of tens of centimeters per kilometre length. Surely you must have advanced engineering for that?

Yeah, that's what you would think, but for example, to make a wall straight, you can either use a lot math and surveying, or you can put the first brick down straight and then maintain a lot of discipline in your bricklayers, and every once a while check to make sure your lines are straight.

BTW - That's more or less the way they built the great cathedrals of europe, and that's some serious engineering

But I think we're veering off... would love to get the thesis ref is possible so I can try and be convinced (I may appear narrow minded, but am actually open to new ideas, believe it or not ) Back to maps it is...

My basic issue was not so much the engineering issue, but that I still (sorry ) cannot see how you do large scale centralized topographic planning (as outlined above) without some form of realistic representation of geography...

Well looking back at my brick analogy, you can think of it this way. You have one guy that's the vision guy, he gives the command and then his commanders receive lots of local updates from the field. The guy at the top only needs to know the big issues, all the rest never percolates up. If the locals know their job and are extremely disciplined it should work fine with only a rough outline. Just lay the first brick straight and let the bricklayers do their job, checking in from time to time. It's the same as the price system in a market economy or better yet, Mark Twain's description of river pilots. No one could know the whole route of the missisipi, it was too big, the sand bars shifted too much. The best they could do was know their 5-mile stretch. The guy running the riverboat only had to know his pilots, not the river, however, to be a successful riverboat entrepeneur.

In the same way a commander only had to know his locals and local leaders, not the whole picture. If you've got men in a fort on the frontier, all you have to do is know them, not the local terrain. Knowing the local terrain is the local leaders job. If he screws up and doesn't know it, you replace him with someone who does. There is no over-arching global understanding of the topography, only a system of managing local knowledge.

In fact, if that's true, and here I'm just speculating wildly, maybe this was a big problem for the Romans, cuz when the forts start disappearing in the late period, through atrophy or conquest, maybe they lost a lot of their so-called operational knowledge, making it harder to maintain their control.

That's REALLY an interesting idea!

Hang on, I gotta go write a footnote for the dissertation.

Travis