An archaelogical point ...

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Andy in Sig

Vice President in Exile
I went shopping today to Ulm and parked about about 30ft under street level. Some old buildings are on display behind glass another 20 or so feet down. I can understand that people might reuse foundations over the centuries but how on earth is it that especially on a continuously inhabited site, that effectively one city can be built on top of another. What I mean is, the streets is Ulm must be 50 ft higher now than they used to be when the place first started!!! How does this happen?
 

Gerry Attrick

Lincolnshire Mountain Rescue Consultant
Yeah I've noticed similar. In Leicester there is a roman forum ten or fifteen feet below the level of the street. Maybe the romans had tube stations.
 

domtyler

Über Member
There are lots of this kind of thing in London too, some just across the road from where I work near the new Spitalfields development.

I assumed that the layering just came from a build up of general crap between developments and this seems to be born out by this extract from a Canterbury website:


http://www.canterburytrust.co.uk/schools/gallery/gall15notes.htm
How do the layers build up?

Roman layers lie between red lines in the picture. Beneath the Roman are older (earlier) remains. Above are more recent (later) remains. From prehistoric times, people have been putting up and knocking down or abandoning buildings. They often just spread out the rubble (making a construction layer) and built on top. They made track ways and roads and dumped rubbish – and a whole lot more. These activities result in layers building up.

How far down the Roman remains are depends on what has happened on a piece of land since the Roman period. If the area was not occupied again until recently, the remains will not be far below modern ground surface. But if many generations have occupied the land (Anglo-Saxon, medieval etc.), then Roman remains may be as much as 2 or 3 metres down.
'Jigsaw' evidence: Notice how the medieval pit has destroyed part of the Roman road beneath. Many deep rubbish pits and cess pits were dug in back yards in medieval times. They damaged any Roman evidence beneath, leaving only fragmentary remains. Archaeologists plot and draw all of these fragments in both vertical and horizontal planes. They can then try to recreate on paper what was once there. It’s like filling in the gaps of a jigsaw.
 
sometimes the build up is deliberate. a village may have been built in an area prone to flooding, there'd be no point building at the same level, so build on top.

parts of london have been built over rivers, even the Thames, carrying on from earlier building work as the city was developed.

If you ever go to Seattle you can see the original city. It was on different levels due to geography, but after it burnt down they rebuilt it and made the steps of the old town into hills by filling in and building on the old remains, the old stores are still there, trapped beneath the new. that's happened in 100 years, so it's easy to see how it can happen over a bigger time scale.
 

Keith Oates

Janner
Location
Penarth, Wales
You need a very understanding wife who will let you get away with that, Dave!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

longers

Legendary Member
Keith Oates said:
You need a very understanding wife who will let you get away with that, Dave!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or a lazy one. Could she not do it herself?
 

Arch

Married to Night Train
Location
Salford, UK
only just spotted this...

*bustles in with professional knowledge*

Er.. Laurence is right...

Build up of stuff happens for various reasons. Between Roman York and Viking York, there's a layer called the Dark Earth layer, and the evidence suggests that the city was almost abandoned, and the ground used for farming by the rather more dispersed Anglian people, before it revived when the Vikings came - the gap between the two being a couple of hundred years. Imagine a couple of hundred years of build up of manure, general rubbish, windblown dust, flood silt, old Roman buildings falling or burning down... Bearing in mind that one flood of the Ouse these days can leave a cm of mud over the riverside roads in a day or so...
 

Pete

Guest
Just out of interest, I remember learning about exactly the opposite phenomenon. Anyone who has cycled in the Surrey Hills will be familiar with the numerous narrow lanes set in deep cuttings, with reddish sandy banks rising steeply on either side. They were not made this way intentionally, like railway cuttings, a geologist once told me. These lanes cut across the lower Greensand, a fairly soft sandstone, and follow the lines of ancient trackways. Before the days of tarmac, for centuries passing carts used to gouge deep ruts in these tracks, throwing the spoil to either side. So the lanes simply dug themselves deeper and deeper into the rock. And no-one bothered to fill them in.

Whether these deep-cutting lanes are a good thing, is debatable. Certainly, if you're zipping down one of these lanes at 30mph plus, you want to be very sure where you'll be able to go if you meet a van, just narrower than the cutting, coming the other way....
 
pete.... there's one that i went up - because it was a double chevron - it heads due south and ends up in Friday Street (or, just above it to the north). it's incredible as you approach it down a one chevron, it's just wider than a car, with two lines of clean tarmac, the rest if dirt from the banks. you come around a corner and hit the climb, the trees form a tunnel and, with the sun coming through them at the end, it felt like 'A Matter Of Life And Death' climbing it.
 

HJ

Cycling in Scotland
Location
Auld Reekie
Arch said:
Imagine a couple of hundred years of build up of manure, general rubbish, windblown dust, flood silt, old Roman buildings falling or burning down...

No need to imagine just visit London:evil:
 
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