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On Saturday I went with Ed and his musical friend Steve to Chedworth Roman Villa. It's an amazing place, well-preserved (if rather primitive by Byzantine standards) mosaics, a couple of bath-houses, something that might have been a fish-pond or might have been a shrine to the god of the local spring.
But the most amazing bit is that it was lost from about 450AD until 1864, except for the stones that were left above-ground and taken off to the local lime-kilns at some earlier time. And we don't know whether it was essentially a bath-house, essentially a villa or essentially a shrine.
I don't know how this information was lost. The Romans wrote letters -- letters to the Corinthians, letters to the Galicians, amusingly deferential letters to Tiberius asking him to compliment Pliny the Younger's new fire brigade, pathetic letters home from Hadrian's Wall asking Mater for more, warmer socks. Somebody must have written "Dear Mater, today I went with Flavia to the shrine at Cassius's house near Corinium"; though I don't think we have the name of any owner of the Chedworth villa and there are a dozen near Corinium, so that would be unhelpful even if the letter had survived.
And of course the letter wouldn't have survived: we read the Hadrian's Wall letters as imprints in the oaken backing of the wax tablets they were sent on, the other letters survived as copies of copies of copies, and no ninth-century Arab scribe would have bothered to copy "today I went with Flavia to the shrine".
It makes me wonder how much of current civilisation you could reconstruct if, a million years hence, excavators of the vitrified ruins of Seattle recovered the Livejournal server, fortuitously in the blast-shadow of some great reinforced structure so not irredeemably burnt around the edges; people don't mention addresses, and never mention locations by locators (grid references, longitude-and-latitude) rather than by name. You could see there was a London, that it was a popular place to visit, that it had a Victoria and Albert Museum; but you wouldn't know where it was, or who were Victoria and Albert.
But the most amazing bit is that it was lost from about 450AD until 1864, except for the stones that were left above-ground and taken off to the local lime-kilns at some earlier time. And we don't know whether it was essentially a bath-house, essentially a villa or essentially a shrine.
I don't know how this information was lost. The Romans wrote letters -- letters to the Corinthians, letters to the Galicians, amusingly deferential letters to Tiberius asking him to compliment Pliny the Younger's new fire brigade, pathetic letters home from Hadrian's Wall asking Mater for more, warmer socks. Somebody must have written "Dear Mater, today I went with Flavia to the shrine at Cassius's house near Corinium"; though I don't think we have the name of any owner of the Chedworth villa and there are a dozen near Corinium, so that would be unhelpful even if the letter had survived.
And of course the letter wouldn't have survived: we read the Hadrian's Wall letters as imprints in the oaken backing of the wax tablets they were sent on, the other letters survived as copies of copies of copies, and no ninth-century Arab scribe would have bothered to copy "today I went with Flavia to the shrine".
It makes me wonder how much of current civilisation you could reconstruct if, a million years hence, excavators of the vitrified ruins of Seattle recovered the Livejournal server, fortuitously in the blast-shadow of some great reinforced structure so not irredeemably burnt around the edges; people don't mention addresses, and never mention locations by locators (grid references, longitude-and-latitude) rather than by name. You could see there was a London, that it was a popular place to visit, that it had a Victoria and Albert Museum; but you wouldn't know where it was, or who were Victoria and Albert.
