[DougN7]

As an American, where we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!) visiting Rome is almost mind blowing to see SO MUCH ancient history right there, and almost everywhere. So cool!

[stephenhuey]

Comparatively few historical ruins built out of materials that would have lasted this long, but a long history, actually, and some you can still see...

Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.

I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.

[viciousvoxel]

Nitpick but we do know who built Teotihuacan -- it was the Teotihuacanos! Unfortunately it's true that we know relatively little about them.

[K0balt]

We know who robbed the bank, it was clearly the bank robbers!

Archeology is my fav.

[rsynnott]

This feels kind of tautological. We know who built Teotihuacan, it was the Teotihuacanos! What do we know about them? Well, they built Teotihuacan...

(Seriously, though, _is_ anything much known about them beyond that?)

[thaumasiotes]

The general term for this type of argument is "dormitive potency".

https://brucebyfield.com/2012/07/11/recognizing-dormitive-ex...

[stephenhuey]

It was a carefully planned large city with the road along the main axis pointed at 15 degrees east of north, and the large pyramids were integrated into the city's design, but we definitely don't know who did that planning. Hundreds of apartment compounds were standardized. Tens of cubic meters of earth were moved and they had to quarry lots of basalt and other stone.

There is strong evidence it was a multi-ethnic city, especially since there are distinct ethnic neighborhoods based on artifacts such as pottery. No trace of writing or how the city and government were organized, and whether a ruling elite called the shots or if there were ruling families from different ethnic groups working together.

[alsetmusic]

I see someone who might really enjoy the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Check it out. I love it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.

...so what? Why would you compare "the size of Teotihuacan" to "the area enclosed in the Aurelian Walls"? Why not compare it to "the size of Rome"?

I can think of one reason you'd do this...

[quadrifoliate]

Huh?

Not the OP, but I have heard that Rome is defined by the seven hills, so I thought the Aurelian Wall definition was excluding a hill or something. The Wikipedia article says the walls cover all seven hills and the Campus Martius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian_Walls

Are you saying you'd include even more in "the size of Rome (the city)"? If so, what?

[stephenhuey]

There were some people living outside that perimeter, but I just included the Seven Hills and the Campus Martius because it was a typical border for the city and was densely packed with maybe a million people. Teotihuacan possibly had up to 200,000 people, so a bit more breathing room.

[thaumasiotes]

You'd include the entire city. That's what people will take you to mean when you refer to a city.

[NetMageSCW]

And the OP did.

[cableshaft]

There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/

Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.

[contingencies]

A few years ago I made a graphic showing the years before present dates of some of the earliest archaeological sites across the Americas for Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_the_Clovis_Fir...

[stephenhuey]

I've been to Cahokia, and look forward to revisiting it in future decades since only 10% has been excavated so far!

[cableshaft]

Same!

[rigonkulous]

Narwala Gabarnmang says hi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung

44,000 years of continuous human occupation. (Except for a brief period during the 20th century ..)

[jghn]

Also if one expands it to the Americas more broadly it goes back pretty far. Earlier this year on a trip to Central America I stayed in a home that dated to the mid-16th century. Still not as impressive as what Europe has, but was neat!

[DougN7]

Those are very cool. Worth a visit if you’re ever in the St Louis, Missouri area.

[Swizec]

> (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!)

We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).

The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.

[kakacik]

Stuff built long time ago still serves its purpose - the people.

Anyway yes we have some comparatively old stuff here, you get used to it quickly. Colleague lives in cca 400 years old house, nothing special. Just more building restrictions, not because its somehow protected but simply due to meter-thick stone walls and corresponding architecture, statics and so on. One couldn't tell if its 100 years old or 400 from outside. After renovation even less (it was a farm house before, so french state doesn't feel the urge to interfere with his property).

[alsetmusic]

> meter-thick stone walls

Wifi must be a nightmare. Very interesting to think about. Every building I've lived in is plaster and wood beams and I get annoyed when audio starts dropping / distorting on BT earbuds at a distance.

[gambiting]

I was in Pompeii just 2 weeks ago, the thing that absolutely blew my mind was that there is a section where archeologists are working _right now_ still uncovering more buildings, and you can see them exactly as they are coming out of the ground - I think with the rest of the ruins I've had this feeling that you know, it got somehow cleaned up and repaired a bit for tourists, but nope, you can see in that section of active excavation works that these 2000 years old structures are really coming out of the dirt with the frescoes and mosaics still intact.

And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).

[projektfu]

The crazy thing is that Pompeii's art was so well preserved by the ash but now it is exposed to the elements and will degrade.

[derdi]

There's almost no original art in Pompeii, it's all in the archeological museum in Naples. There are some reproductions in place in Pompeii, but mostly it's bare brick walls that the art has been scraped from. You need to see the brick walls, then see the art in the museum, then compose the two in your head.

[projektfu]

Yes, it will still degrade in the museum, is all I mean.

[derdi]

250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not start with the founding of your country.

[inigyou]

Really? My history class taught me that before the Europeans arrived there were only the native americans, so nothing of historical value.

[dqv]

I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.

Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it.

The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?

[alsetmusic]

> I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.

I had an early-midlife crisis where I considered moving to another profession. After a great deal of thought, I determined that the profession that I would find most rewarding would be as a professor of history for university students. If I could share my passion for history in such a way as to inspire one student per semester, I'd have achieved something great.

It makes me sad that history is taught in such boring terms in high school. It's endlessly interesting. I hated school far too much to realistically believe I'd earn the required accreditation, hence I remained a tech guy.

Check out "Lies My Teachers Told Me." A university professor wrote it after becoming frustrated at how much deprogramming had to be done with incoming college students. I saw it in a used book store and immediately bought it. I liked it.

[WalterBright]

Unfortunately, the American Indians did not have writing, and so the histories of the tribes is pretty murky.

For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them.

See "Empire of the Summer Moon" by Gwynne.

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

It's a fantastic account, and I'm amazed nobody has made an epic miniseries about it.

[AlotOfReading]

"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former.

On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.

[WalterBright]

I ordered the book, thank you!

As evidence of the paucity of historical knowledge of the Indian peoples, estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary from 10 million to 100 million.

I know about the various rock paintings with symbols, but there isn't enough of that to represent much of anything.

[mothballed]

The adobe structures of the American southwest, and mounds in many other areas survived, but for the most part there was not much left of historical value in terms of ruins of structures of the native americans. Europeans more often build with stones, rock, brick, etc and more regularly other more survivable building materials.

[inigyou]

You might have missed the sarcasm

[alsetmusic]

> You might have missed the sarcasm

I didn't. It's pretty frustrating how many people on the internet can't infer intent. I upvoted your clearly absurdist statement because I got it.

Sadly, that's the modern internet. Enough people are incurious and bigoted so as to make absurd statements appear genuine.

On an up-note: at least one person understood your snark and appreciated it for what it was.

[K0balt]

Europeans are the descendants of the third little pig?

[quadrifoliate]

> we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years)

You didn't exactly say this, but I'd stop short of defining history around the existence of the current US government and structure. Ironically 250 years is probably longer than any continental European government has been around in its present state.

In terms of history as such, we have just as much history in the US as Europe does. Just ask the Native Americans / First People. There are lots of examples elsewhere in the conversation.

[mr_toad]

There are several levels of understanding of your history. Firstly, you have none. At the second level you suffer the misapprehension that your country has been there forever (which is the level that most nationalists get stuck at).

After that it starts to get complicated.

[mothballed]

Early settlement of Europeans into present-day USA started in earnest in the early 1600s.

[mikestew]

some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!

TBF, so do some folks in the U. S.; though in most cases, just barely.

[trueno]

we have some omega ancient history here in america like possibly 13,000-16,000+ year old history, we just don't have structures that stood the test of time mostly stone crafted tools and hunting weapons and such. but first peoples history goes way back mindblowingly far

[boogieknite]

some folks in USA have houses older than that too