Lye: Also known as Caustic Soda |
This is your top-of-the-page reminder that this "Sacred Spring" series started with a Technical Appendix about a new glycerine recovery boiler for soapmaking plant. The salient point being that soda, lye and potash are made from wood ashes and salt, and are, along with lime, the classic basic reagents of pre-modern chemical engineering. Because traditional language hates you, "soda" and "lye" are commonly called by each other's names. (Washing) soda is sodium carbonate (mostly Na2CO3, although natron is Na2CO3-10H2O). (Baking) soda is sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3). (Caustic) soda is NaOH. Clear as glass, I hope.
The basic argument (get it?) is that new technologies of timber removal --that would be your iron axe-- are linked to a new agro-industrial base built up around charcoal production. This much being an established point, the realisation that charcoal production also bears on soap and glassmaking is the point being explored here. I'm not going to push on with silver refining for now, because that stuff's just too weird.
So, what about this new agro-industrial base? Well, it can serve as a weak lead-in to a quote from Niall Sharples, recently appearing in this series as the careful, thoughtful and assiduous excavator of Maiden Castle: "[The technological change from bronze to iron] coincides with, and, indeed, is connected to, a major transformation of society. The principal archaeological change at this time is the transformation from a dispersed society of individual houses, scattered across a landscape of fields, to large densely occupied permanent settlements that are contained by substantial boundaries --hillforts."
My engagement with Sharples' enticingly titled Social Relations in Later Prehistory: Wessex in the First Millennium BC" is ongoing. That's how I say, "I'm still reading it," and manage to look at myself in the mirror. As I dive deeper, I am bearing in mind a noticeable tendency for recent writers on British Iron Age prehistory to namecheck "heterarchy,"a concept I first encountered in Byers' account of Cahokia, in which the prototype American city appears as a spiritual "shopping mall" of competing offers in the fields of cosmology, cosmogony, theogony and other pompous-sounding Grecisms. (Or, as I would prefer, a North American college campus, not that it is always easy to tell one of those from a mall, these days.) If Cahokia is a model for later towns from Kaskaskia down to Prophetstown, which we have accounts in the Jesuit Relations and elsewhere, a heterarchical town would also have offered a range of tribal and linguistic identities to choose from.
Is it at all permissible to compare Maiden Castle with Cahokia? Maybe, maybe not. The walls are a bit of an issue, for one. And is "revival of the state," too bold? (Even after distancing the argument from its origins by moving to an area where the "state" is a pristine creation and arguing by analogy back to the centre, or at least to Golasecca.) I could also ask whether this new agro-industrial base flow from the revival of the state, or leads to it, but it looks as though Sharples is going to engage with the question, and I look forward to see where he goes with that.
For now, I'm going to explore what this blog has to offer about the relationship between technological and population change, with a laser-like focus on grazing land might shed some light on. So, just to be clear, it's about turning grazing land over to industrial production of fats, hide and wool and to production for export, which frees the pastoral base from its implicit, "primitive" base of subsistence --although salt production very definitely comes back to us, there.
My engagement with Sharples' enticingly titled Social Relations in Later Prehistory: Wessex in the First Millennium BC" is ongoing. That's how I say, "I'm still reading it," and manage to look at myself in the mirror. As I dive deeper, I am bearing in mind a noticeable tendency for recent writers on British Iron Age prehistory to namecheck "heterarchy,"a concept I first encountered in Byers' account of Cahokia, in which the prototype American city appears as a spiritual "shopping mall" of competing offers in the fields of cosmology, cosmogony, theogony and other pompous-sounding Grecisms. (Or, as I would prefer, a North American college campus, not that it is always easy to tell one of those from a mall, these days.) If Cahokia is a model for later towns from Kaskaskia down to Prophetstown, which we have accounts in the Jesuit Relations and elsewhere, a heterarchical town would also have offered a range of tribal and linguistic identities to choose from.
Is it at all permissible to compare Maiden Castle with Cahokia? Maybe, maybe not. The walls are a bit of an issue, for one. And is "revival of the state," too bold? (Even after distancing the argument from its origins by moving to an area where the "state" is a pristine creation and arguing by analogy back to the centre, or at least to Golasecca.) I could also ask whether this new agro-industrial base flow from the revival of the state, or leads to it, but it looks as though Sharples is going to engage with the question, and I look forward to see where he goes with that.
For now, I'm going to explore what this blog has to offer about the relationship between technological and population change, with a laser-like focus on grazing land might shed some light on. So, just to be clear, it's about turning grazing land over to industrial production of fats, hide and wool and to production for export, which frees the pastoral base from its implicit, "primitive" base of subsistence --although salt production very definitely comes back to us, there.
Evidence. Livius seems to hold by the old fashioned way of blogging online, where, if you do have a real name, it's hidden somewhere in your blog, and who has time to click around to find it? The photograph is related to ongoing research into the Late Iron Age saltmaking industry of the Seille Valley in Lorraine, although the briquetage is presumably modern, as the salt crystals don't usually last for thousands of years. |