I can't really imagine this being of much interest to many people unless they've already taken at least a passing interest in the period and in that society. As it happens though I found it interesting and informative, thank you.
Really interesting video. Just one question, Were the external facades of the houses often plastered? Were they all lime-white or did they give the city a polychromatic appearance?
Actually, I don't know for certain. I suspect they were in some stage of whiteness depending on how often their owners would clean or white-wash them. White was a fairly easy to obtain and cheap color, and even they knew it reflected sunlight and kept houses cooler inside (doubtless from generations of trial and error). Wealthier households would paint the interior walls of course, the mega-wealthy would pictorial murals, the less wealthy simply in solid colors (red was apparently quite common, as it was another cheap color; the Greeks and Romans also considered Reds, Oranges, and Yellows "hot" colors as they associated them with the colors of the interior walls of their cool houses). I'll note your question and try to answer it in a forthcoming video on Roman and Greek Color choices.
Daub can also be chopped plant material, usually straw, and clay, it doesn’t have to be feces! If a “fat clay”, stickier and more plastic than a “lean clay” is available, that would be the preferred material.
Could be. That's what I always thought it was. I first encountered it being feces with peasant huts for my Medieval Civ. class. Then the next time I taught my Ancient Civ., and then the South Asian Civ., the East Asian Civ., and looked into the original adobe houses in the New World, archaeological, and contemporary observer reports, had feces as the common denominator in the mixture with the clay or mud. I'm not a biologist or physician, but I'm guessing it has some kind of special binding quality---plus there is an endless natural supply of it. Straw would work just as well though. In the Ancient Near East, as mentioned in the Bible with the Israelites in Egypt, they usually mixed straw with clay to make bricks. The ancient Egyptians, however, did not, which puts an interesting spin on that whole Moses and the Israelites suddenly "forced" in bondage to make bricks without straw.
A very interesting video. Incredible amount of factual information. But I am eager for more information as it raises lots of questions. I don’t want to believe that the toilet was a pit that was only emptied once or twice a year - surely the smell would have spread throughout the house - I was expecting it to be a bucket that some slave or poverty stricken individual collected from each house each morning for fertilizer or in the case of urine for the tanning industry (as in India with the untouchables). Also, while I can believe that every house had its own water reservoir/tank (filled by slaves each day from a communal well), I can’t believe every house had its own well as it is asking too much for the water table to be within easy reach of every household and wouldn’t all those excavations have caused subsidence ? But the big question I have is to do with the assumption that the townsfolk were farmers because I can’t help think that by the time a farmer has walked out to his fields with his tools it would be time to come back home again and what would there be to stop some thief from stealing his crop when he wasn’t there. There is so much I don’t understand about life in Ancient Greece that I am avidly awaiting your next batch if videos.
Living in a village or town and walking out to the fields every day was and is common around the world, mostly it was thought just too dangerous to live on your own isolated homestead. The American and Canadian (and a few other places) are real anomalies in that sense. I was like you when I first started looking into ag history, but if you look at where villages are sited, they're pretty close to each other, remarkably so in our terms. As to wells, I think that probably depended on the soil and local water supply, i.e., if the town was foolishly sited on very hard rock, probably no individual wells. Athens, for example, only had one communal well at the base of the acropolis. But if the soil was more amenable to digging (I'm not sure I'd call it "drilling"), they might. As to subsidence, I never thought about that, I'm not an engineer, its a good point. At some point I have to revise all of these, and I'll put that on my list for a revision. As to pit toilets, yes, only once or twice a year. This was and in many places still is quite common. Not that ancient/medieval people, or people living in less developed areas are slobs, or don't care about cleanliness (though generally speaking their ideas of hygiene are a bit different than our own), but smelliness was fairly common. If you're living with farm animals in your compound, and they're shitting all over the place, dogs and horses and donkeys and pigs are roaming the town streets and dropping loads everywhere (not all towns had sewers), people wipe with their left hand, the stench is just omnipresent---but if you're living in it, you probably don't notice it. I don't know where you live, but I have had occasion to live on a farm for a bit, a dairy farm. When you entered the barn area with the cows and cowshit everywhere, the stench was horrendous---but after a few minutes you didn't even notice it anymore. The only way you'd notice it again is when you leave the "zone" for a bit, then come back in.
Wattle and Danube were NOT made including s##t. They were made with a lattice grid of hard wood split branches over which water resistant clay mixed with water and straw was interlaced with the wood and smoothed flat on each side. Panels were protected on both sides so they would dry and set.
Well, that was the thing. The research I relied upon, new findings, are by female archaeologists and historians. Yes, women ("respectable" women anyway, i.e., neither prostitutes nor slaves), were largely confined to their houses (at least in Athens, possibly elsewhere though there is less information about places other than Attica, and Sparta and similar societies in Crete and along the western edge of the Greek mainland, were probably matrifocal), though there were some religious festival and other exceptions. The question was whether there was something like the later "harem"---19th century historians and archaeologists, overwhelmingly male, assumed there was, that if there was an andron, a male-only room, there must have been a female-only room. But the archaeological evidence just doesn't seem to bear that out. Women had the run of the house, including the andron when no non-familial men were present (someone had to clean it, and I doubt very much that the man of the house did that). But there was nothing like a room where the women were normally sequestered, nothing like some of the housing in the Ancient Near East, the medieval Islamic world, or even the houses in South or East Asia. I was surprised too.
I loved this, thank you!
I can't really imagine this being of much interest to many people unless they've already taken at least a passing interest in the period and in that society.
As it happens though I found it interesting and informative, thank you.
I made it for my Ancient Civ. classes, but thought it might be of interest to others.
It’s very interesting to me! Speak for yourself only, not for the rest of us.
OK.
Thanks for the video!
Waddle and dob is like chinkin with Moss and dirt. Love your videos from Appalachia Virginia.❤
Thank you!
Really interesting video. Just one question, Were the external facades of the houses often plastered? Were they all lime-white or did they give the city a polychromatic appearance?
Actually, I don't know for certain. I suspect they were in some stage of whiteness depending on how often their owners would clean or white-wash them. White was a fairly easy to obtain and cheap color, and even they knew it reflected sunlight and kept houses cooler inside (doubtless from generations of trial and error). Wealthier households would paint the interior walls of course, the mega-wealthy would pictorial murals, the less wealthy simply in solid colors (red was apparently quite common, as it was another cheap color; the Greeks and Romans also considered Reds, Oranges, and Yellows "hot" colors as they associated them with the colors of the interior walls of their cool houses). I'll note your question and try to answer it in a forthcoming video on Roman and Greek Color choices.
Daub can also be chopped plant material, usually straw, and clay, it doesn’t have to be feces! If a “fat clay”, stickier and more plastic than a “lean clay” is available, that would be the preferred material.
Could be. That's what I always thought it was. I first encountered it being feces with peasant huts for my Medieval Civ. class. Then the next time I taught my Ancient Civ., and then the South Asian Civ., the East Asian Civ., and looked into the original adobe houses in the New World, archaeological, and contemporary observer reports, had feces as the common denominator in the mixture with the clay or mud. I'm not a biologist or physician, but I'm guessing it has some kind of special binding quality---plus there is an endless natural supply of it. Straw would work just as well though. In the Ancient Near East, as mentioned in the Bible with the Israelites in Egypt, they usually mixed straw with clay to make bricks. The ancient Egyptians, however, did not, which puts an interesting spin on that whole Moses and the Israelites suddenly "forced" in bondage to make bricks without straw.
A very interesting video. Incredible amount of factual information. But I am eager for more information as it raises lots of questions. I don’t want to believe that the toilet was a pit that was only emptied once or twice a year - surely the smell would have spread throughout the house - I was expecting it to be a bucket that some slave or poverty stricken individual collected from each house each morning for fertilizer or in the case of urine for the tanning industry (as in India with the untouchables). Also, while I can believe that every house had its own water reservoir/tank (filled by slaves each day from a communal well), I can’t believe every house had its own well as it is asking too much for the water table to be within easy reach of every household and wouldn’t all those excavations have caused subsidence ? But the big question I have is to do with the assumption that the townsfolk were farmers because I can’t help think that by the time a farmer has walked out to his fields with his tools it would be time to come back home again and what would there be to stop some thief from stealing his crop when he wasn’t there.
There is so much I don’t understand about life in Ancient Greece that I am avidly awaiting your next batch if videos.
Living in a village or town and walking out to the fields every day was and is common around the world, mostly it was thought just too dangerous to live on your own isolated homestead. The American and Canadian (and a few other places) are real anomalies in that sense. I was like you when I first started looking into ag history, but if you look at where villages are sited, they're pretty close to each other, remarkably so in our terms. As to wells, I think that probably depended on the soil and local water supply, i.e., if the town was foolishly sited on very hard rock, probably no individual wells. Athens, for example, only had one communal well at the base of the acropolis. But if the soil was more amenable to digging (I'm not sure I'd call it "drilling"), they might. As to subsidence, I never thought about that, I'm not an engineer, its a good point. At some point I have to revise all of these, and I'll put that on my list for a revision. As to pit toilets, yes, only once or twice a year. This was and in many places still is quite common. Not that ancient/medieval people, or people living in less developed areas are slobs, or don't care about cleanliness (though generally speaking their ideas of hygiene are a bit different than our own), but smelliness was fairly common. If you're living with farm animals in your compound, and they're shitting all over the place, dogs and horses and donkeys and pigs are roaming the town streets and dropping loads everywhere (not all towns had sewers), people wipe with their left hand, the stench is just omnipresent---but if you're living in it, you probably don't notice it. I don't know where you live, but I have had occasion to live on a farm for a bit, a dairy farm. When you entered the barn area with the cows and cowshit everywhere, the stench was horrendous---but after a few minutes you didn't even notice it anymore. The only way you'd notice it again is when you leave the "zone" for a bit, then come back in.
Wattle and Danube were NOT made including s##t. They were made with a lattice grid of hard wood split branches over which water resistant clay mixed with water and straw was interlaced with the wood and smoothed flat on each side. Panels were protected on both sides so they would dry and set.
My sources say differently.
Either or both were always used, the choice depended on availability at the building site.
Why was human and animal waste used for dob?
Apparently it has a wonderful binding quality. Plus there is a never-ending supply of it.
@@historywaitsfornoone2784 I guess, if it works well why not
Well, we know women were sequestered in ancient Greece, and only men had public access, legal rights and status.
Well, that was the thing. The research I relied upon, new findings, are by female archaeologists and historians. Yes, women ("respectable" women anyway, i.e., neither prostitutes nor slaves), were largely confined to their houses (at least in Athens, possibly elsewhere though there is less information about places other than Attica, and Sparta and similar societies in Crete and along the western edge of the Greek mainland, were probably matrifocal), though there were some religious festival and other exceptions. The question was whether there was something like the later "harem"---19th century historians and archaeologists, overwhelmingly male, assumed there was, that if there was an andron, a male-only room, there must have been a female-only room. But the archaeological evidence just doesn't seem to bear that out. Women had the run of the house, including the andron when no non-familial men were present (someone had to clean it, and I doubt very much that the man of the house did that). But there was nothing like a room where the women were normally sequestered, nothing like some of the housing in the Ancient Near East, the medieval Islamic world, or even the houses in South or East Asia. I was surprised too.
Dude, fix the audio, the music booms in between your speaking.
Yes, I have to do that.