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  • Y’all might enjoy Virginia Postrel’s _The Fabric of Civilization_ , which mostly covers the last few thousand years.
    by spenrose
  • Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
    by Aardwolf
  • Something I am interested in is the most ephemeral of technology: maintenance customs. As an example, in my country we have a small number of chalk figures. These are large figures cut in to the landscape, then packed with white chalk to stand out against the grass. Probably the most famous is the White Horse of Uffington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse), but there are a small number of others such as the Cerne Abbas Giant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerne_Abbas_Giant). Dating them is difficult. The only technique I know of that can be used is optically stimulated luminescence, which was used to put the White Horse at 1380 BC and 550 BC, but by its nature this should be interpreted as "no later than", since it relies on finding material which was exposed to sunlight when the figure was cut and has not been exposed since then. (I worked on the early development of OSL dating, so this is a professional opinion).

    The interesting part is that these figures are transitory. If they are not maintained, they disappear - which almost happened to the Long Man of Wilmington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Man_of_Wilmington). Hence at least for the White Horse, we know that there has been at least an intermittent custom of scouring out the figure and replacing the chalk since prehistoric times up to the present. It's not as neat as a village gathering every seven years to do the job, but there is still a continuity of custom.

    by tengwar2
  • Related: "Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age (knowablemagazine.org)" 11.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662246 57 comments
    by HelloUsername
  • It would be in fact quite amusing if the technology the Neolithians were actually most proud of had nothing to do with stone, just didn’t last. Better fabrics? Waterproof clothing? Elaborate wooden tools made using “dumb” stone ones?
    by rich_sasha
  • I had one of the best sleeps of my life on a bed of soft sand, in the curve of a dry creek that I really should not have slept in due to flash flood risk. Since then I've wondered if ancient people might have made mattresses of sand, but they were so simple and evanescent that they left no trace.
    by delichon
  • There is a great quote:

    "The Egyptians built using stone but wrote day to day on papyrus.

    The Sumerians built with mud and wrote on clay tablets.

    This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians."

    by alexpotato
  • If you've never watched Clickspring's Youtube videos you're in for a treat.

    He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc. https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...

    His skeleton clock build is one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, up there with Bartoz's gorgeous webpages: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/

    by MengerSponge

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