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OOPArts: Out Of Place Artefacts & Archaeological Erratics

INT21 said:
So where are the other examples ? ...
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That's like saying you don't believe in the mundane contemporary existence of the Large Hadron Collider because there's only one. The more complex and specialized an artifact is, the less likely it is to be replicated, much less mass-produced.

There's nothing particularly anomalous or out of place about the Antikythera Mechanism, except for the fact that it is the sole specimen of such a sophisticated device to have sunk with a ship and been spared the deterioration / destruction / discarding that undoubtedly befell similar artifacts on land.

Calibrated gearworks can be traced back to the Chinese south-pointing chariot. Aristotle wrote about gears in the 4th century BC - over a century before the earliest defensible date for the Antikythera Mechanism. Ctesibius used gearworks in his water clock devices in the 2nd century BC (the same, or preceding, century relative to the Antikythera Mechanism's estimated timeframe, depending on whose estimate you use). The astronomical observation data reflected in the mechanism's workings was already documented in voluminous detail centuries earlier (especially by the Babylonians).
 
...That's like saying you don't believe in the mundane contemporary existence of the Large Hadron Collider because there's only one...

A really bad analogy.

There have been colliders in various forms for years. Circular and linear. The form they take can be easily traced back from the scientific literature.

The problem with the Anti kythira device it that there are NO contemporary artifacts that show a progression that lead to the thing itself. Nothing of the intricacy and use of miniaturization. No bits of other things.

simple geared mechanisms, yes. But nothing like that device.
Astronomical quadrants eyc, no problem, and they even had the maths to do the job. But it appears to be a stanf-alone object. Doesn't make sense; Unless the chronology is wrong.

It is like finding a Diesel engine in a pyramid. One single engine with no sign of any of the thinking or machinery that went into the manufacture of it.

It is definitely out of place.

INT21
 
INT21 said:
... A really bad analogy. ...
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(With reference to blessmycottonsocks' call for comments about OOParts in general ... )

Precisely ... This is the problem that makes all too many OOPart cases so maddening - they consist of little or nothing more than really bad analogies ...

The basic claim that something's 'out of place' is put forward and attributed weight owing to naive or misdirected analogizing between (e.g.) an apparent form or occurrence and someone's projection of what that form or occurrence insinuates in his / her own frame of reference.

Here are some examples, with the projective interpreter's viewpoint ('as far as I know') denoted with 'AFAIK':

Examples relating to whether a purported OOPart is an artifact at all:

- spherical stones must be artifacts (results of deliberate action / manipulation) because (AFAIK) their shape cannot result from natural processes.

- horizontal / vertical expanses of stone seemingly subdivided into similarly-shaped constituent parts must be engineered roadways or walls because (AFAIK) there's no such thing as (geological) tessellation.

Examples relating to whether an artifact is curiously 'out of place':

- an ancient artifact or graphic rendering resembling a modern airplane / helicopter / canonical UFO must be a faithful representation of such an aircraft observed centuries ago, because (AFAIK) nothing else looks like an aircraft and there's no such thing as figurative symbolism.

- anyone holding their hand up to one ear in an early 20th century photo must be a time traveler using a cellphone, because (AFAIK) nobody ever had to hold their hand up to their ear before and / or there were never any forms of hearing assistance prior to modern hearing aids.
 
INT21 said:
...That's like saying you don't believe in the mundane contemporary existence of the Large Hadron Collider because there's only one...

A really bad analogy.

There have been colliders in various forms for years. Circular and linear. The form they take can be easily traced back from the scientific literature.

The problem with the Anti kythira device it that there are NO contemporary artifacts that show a progression that lead to the thing itself. Nothing of the intricacy and use of miniaturization. No bits of other things.

simple geared mechanisms, yes. But nothing like that device.
Astronomical quadrants eyc, no problem, and they even had the maths to do the job. But it appears to be a stanf-alone object. Doesn't make sense; Unless the chronology is wrong.

It is like finding a Diesel engine in a pyramid. One single engine with no sign of any of the thinking or machinery that went into the manufacture of it.

It is definitely out of place.

INT21
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Isn't another problem that there aren't any records of anything like it either. There doesn't seem to be any written records saying "Bob from Athens makes these really cool geared astronomy things, way more complicated than what others are doing" or appearances of similar things in artwork.

I think it's just some that ancient Greek genius made it (or had it made), but it was more of a one-off manufacture, and it's special interest is how it apparently sprung into being fully formed and without follow up.
 
You are right.

Imagine some ancient trader hearing about this thing and saying to the manufacturer ' Ay bah gum lad, that's cool'
Tell you what, you make me a hundred of them and we'll both be rich. I'll send a boat round in a year. here's a bit of money to help you set up'.

So how would this single thing not draw attention ? After all, I think there was only one Hero's steam turbine. But it was well known.

My best bet is that the thing was actually made later. But there again, the markings on it don't point to that conclusion.

Very strange.

INT21
 
INT21 said:
So how would this single thing not draw attention ? After all, I think there was only one Hero's steam turbine. But it was well known.
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Hero described the construction of the aeolipile (a version of which is known as Hero's engine) which was a rocket-like reaction engine and the first-recorded steam engine (although Vitruvius mentioned the aeolipile in De Architectura some 100 years earlier than Hero). It was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution. Another engine used air from a closed chamber heated by an altar fire to displace water from a sealed vessel; the water was collected and its weight, pulling on a rope, opened temple doors. Some historians have conflated the two inventions to assert that the aeolipile was capable of useful work.
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So...more than one device was built, although (strictly speaking) the second one mentioned did not use steam. It's unlikely that Hero and other inventors of the time would have stopped at building one.
The aeolipile was really just a model, a proof of concept used to demonstrate a technology. There would have been other experimental devices built, but all have vanished from the planet. Smashed to bits under rubble, cannibalised and repurposed for some other thing, etc.
 
kamalktk said:
Isn't another problem that there aren't any records of anything like it either. There doesn't seem to be any written records saying "Bob from Athens makes these really cool geared astronomy things, way more complicated than what others are doing" or appearances of similar things in artwork ...
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There are allusions to such devices from ancient times.

For example, Archimedes was widely cited as having developed some sort of amazing dynamic device that depicted the heavenly bodies and their movements (including the ability to predict future such movements). Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that the Roman general who sacked Syracuse (Marcus Marcellus; 212 BC) took the device as his sole bit of booty from the conquest.

There are also ancient writers' allusions to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus having developed some dynamic device capable of reflecting / leveraging the mathematical models / tables for which he is known.
 
gerhard1 said:
Roman artifacts have been reported in North America
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This is fascinating, but....something that's always concerned me about the discovery of eg Viking or Roman artifacts in the New World.

I don't mean the finding of a whole Mary Rose style trireme, I mean swords/coins/armour.

What is there, in principle, to have stopped Portugese/Spanish/Venetian/French or even British explorers to have taken eg Roman military items to the New World, with them, say, to bribe the natives?

I understand that in the past, people didn't give a stuff about much of the past. The method of building Cairo by stripping the pyramids was logical survival. Roman coins and jewelry were routinely melted-down by artisans in the 1400s to make 'modern' items.

Certain Roman artifacts would've been very common, in the 1400s. Just like contemporary arms deals, selling/trading old captured weapons stock and keeping the best for high-paying host governments, the donating of 'obsolete worthless recycled Roman relics' to the natives is entirely possible.
 
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That's a good point, and one that is often ignored completely by archaeologists.
 
Mythopoeika said:
That's a good point, and one that is often ignored completely by archaeologists.
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Here's the thing: although I can't be sure, I think I've not seen this simple suggestion made by anyone else. Ever.

There is no doubt that when the Europeans traded, as well as glass beads and dirty blankets, they will have swapped/sold/substituted the oldest, rustiest and bluntest of weapons.

Why wouldn't that include medieval and ancient coins & weaponry, dragged to the Americas? I'd apppreciate one reference to this possibility, made by a formal archaeologist/historian.

Xanatic* said:
There are methods to date the soil that artefacts are found in.
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Yes: proper stratum chrono-contextualisation. It's a relatively/very recent technique, that has a number of flaws. My incomplete understanding of it is that it is better-suited to differentiating many millennea, not just a couple. And that ground conditions need to be exactly perfect for it to be viable.

This is not intended to be an absolute hypothesis, merely a valid vector of historical cross-contamination.
 
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rynner2 said:
If a ship off west Africa is blown to the west in a storm, the south Atlantic winds and currents would naturally take it towards Brazil.
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Conceivably, with no crew left (alive or dead) on board. Like a riderless horse winning the race.

If I were an indigenous beachcomber, I certainly would remove all these cracked amphorae containing strainge coins and jewelry gifted by the gods from the Roman empire.
 
EnolaGaia said:
There are allusions to such devices from ancient times.

For example, Archimedes was widely cited as having developed some sort of amazing dynamic device that depicted the heavenly bodies and their movements (including the ability to predict future such movements). Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that the Roman general who sacked Syracuse (Marcus Marcellus; 212 BC) took the device as his sole bit of booty from the conquest.

There are also ancient writers' allusions to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus having developed some dynamic device capable of reflecting / leveraging the mathematical models / tables for which he is known.
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Even taking those allusions into account, plus Aristotles' mentions, the situation remains puzzling. Archimedes has often been refered to as a possible source for the Antikythera mechanism, and certainly it is conceivable that some disciples of his had perfected on at least two centuries one of his inventions, but the lack of any mention of that along a timeframe of those two centuries is amazing. Notably if we take into account that the device was probably not so secret, as its finding in the wreck of a ship seems to indicate. It's equally strange that such an efficient machine was not propagated more and then its knowledge was completely lost, even if we take into account the fact that ancient Greeks did not share our ideology of progress and mercantilism.
 
Analis said:
Even taking those allusions into account, plus Aristotles' mentions, the situation remains puzzling. Archimedes has often been refered to as a possible source for the Antikythera mechanism, and certainly it is conceivable that some disciples of his had perfected on at least two centuries one of his inventions, but the lack of any mention of that along a timeframe of those two centuries is amazing. Notably if we take into account that the device was probably not so secret, as its finding in the wreck of a ship seems to indicate. It's equally strange that such an efficient machine was not propagated more and then its knowledge was completely lost, even if we take into account the fact that ancient Greeks did not share our ideology of progress and mercantilism.
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If we had anything more than the fragmentary documentation base - essentially the random detritus that happened to survive and we've happened to run across - it would indeed be interesting.

For it to be demonstrably amazing references to such devices would need to be notably scarce or missing within some comprehensive set of records spanning centuries, civilizations, and fields of endeavor. The evidence to date indicates no such massive documentation was ever generated except for administrative and historical purposes. You'll note that most of the allusions to such devices came from third-party histories, not from any (e.g., astronomical / scientific) community for whom the devices would have been a huge deal.

Even if there had been records, the most likely final repository for such documentation would have been the Library in Alexandria. The Library itself was reputed to have been destroyed by fire one or more times, and in any case the city suffered war, sacking, and major earthquakes over the centuries.

For all we know the Antikythera Mechanism's blueprints and user manual were among the losses. :evil:
 
EnolaGaia said:
If we had anything more than the fragmentary documentation base - essentially the random detritus that happened to survive and we've happened to run across - it would indeed be interesting.
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But: surely the degree of isolated incomparability associated with the Antikythera Mechanism is what sets it apart?

It's sheer uniqueness (though, I accept, not in terms of those rare co-contemporary written allusions to devices capable of doing what it can) is utterly awe-inspiring for and from that era, in the sense of absent predecessors and period peers.

Just like the looser steer afforded to us by an incomplete fossil record, I struggle not to be drawn into hyperbole by this magnificant outlier. It's nearly as much of a developmental blip as, say, an unpredeceded primate fossil skeleton being found within a pre-Jurassic stratum.

Were this ever to be found (which it won't), I could easily accept it's demise, as a false dawn, born far too long before it's time. But I would puzzle over, and find impossible to accept, it's orphan origins.

Where were, the technological forebearers to The Mechanism? And how far to the left does it push the Gannt point for the earliest lineage of this device? Surely 3-5 generations, say 100 years? Or more? Why did this techical gene-pool not leave us more (or any) comparable proto-Mechanisms?

Am I misconstruing the perspectives on this?

Is the counter-case simply that these preceding technical workpieces did exist, both before and after the Antikythera piece? But the archeological record just fails to yield-up a single other sample?
 
Ermintrude said:
Is the counter-case simply that these preceding technical workpieces did exist, both before and after the Antikythera piece? But the archaeological record just fails to yield-up a single other sample?
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It does seem far fetched but metal was rare and very valuable and re-use was practically mandatory I'd have thought. Also, perhaps this kind of mechanism was rare in itself? There might have been three ever (say). The fact that the one we have comes from a shipwreck might be considered supporting evidence of this line of thinking.

Don't forget that the predominant method of rule in those day was 'right of conquest' whatever we think of Greek democracy. The guy with a sword didn't care much for this kind of stuff unless it help him kill the other guy with the sword. It was just so much scrap metal otherwise and probably not even the sort that made a decent pointy weapon.
 
Ermintrude,

..It's sheer uniqueness (though, I accept, not in terms of those rare co-contemporary written allusions to devices capable of doing what it can) is utterly awe-inspiring for and from that era, in the sense of absent predecessors and period peers...

Yes, one has to be carefull when using ancient sketches as a source.

people have been making drawing of all kinds of fantastical machinery for centuries. many of which never made it to construction.

The Sci-Fi world is a particularly good example with numerous faster than light vehicles flipping between galaxies etc.

It is relatively easy for someone with a good grasp of the current engineering and a visionary imagination to come up wit feasible ideas that simply could not (and in the case of sci-fi still can't) be actually made for a whole range of reasons.

INT21
 
Ermintrude said:
This is fascinating, but....something that's always concerned me about the discovery of eg Viking or Roman artifacts in the New World.

I don't mean the finding of a whole Mary Rose style trireme, I mean swords/coins/armour.

What is there, in principle, to have stopped Portugese/Spanish/Venetian/French or even British explorers to have taken eg Roman military items to the New World, with them, say, to bribe the natives?

I understand that in the past, people didn't give a stuff about much of the past. The method of building Cairo by stripping the pyramids was logical survival. Roman coins and jewelry were routinely melted-down by artisans in the 1400s to make 'modern' items.

Certain Roman artifacts would've been very common, in the 1400s. Just like contemporary arms deals, selling/trading old captured weapons stock and keeping the best for high-paying host governments, the donating of 'obsolete worthless recycled Roman relics' to the natives is entirely possible.
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You raise a very valid point, but does it necessarily argue against Roman (or other ancient Old World cultures) travelling to either North or South America?
 
gerhard1 said:
but does it necessarily argue against Roman (or other ancient Old World cultures) travelling
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No....not in the least:

Ermintrude said:
This is not intended to be an absolute hypothesis, merely a valid vector of historical cross-contamination
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However, as well as observing period siloing (cf Vikings not carrying Roman coins, because that would be...well, entirely-possible. But historically-messy), we're constantly-occcidentalist in our projections as to possible expeditionary imperators. Old World West goes West, finds and wins the New World.

What if the Old World East went East, and found the New World, but never won it?

I now can't remember the details of the Japanese who accidentally-shipwrecked in the Americas during the era of British North America.
 
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Ermintrude said:
But: surely the degree of isolated incomparability associated with the Antikythera Mechanism is what sets it apart
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Is the counter-case simply that these preceding technical workpieces did exist, both before and after the Antikythera piece? But the archeological record just fails to yield-up a single other sample?
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Yes this ^^^^^^^ I would imagine such items were expensive as was the R &D associated with them, so were not everyday items. The records regarding them may have been limited to the original drawings, metal workers and some POs from rich patrons.
When the owner got defeated or the item outlived its novelty or usefulness it got smelted into a more immediately useful knife or axe head etc.
How many Bolton Defiant fighter aircraft are left? Only one just 70 odd years after they were designed and deployed. Lose the last plane and paperwork and there's little evidence they or their pilots ever existed, let alone a glorified clock.
 
Ermintrude said:
... Is the counter-case simply that these preceding technical workpieces did exist, both before and after the Antikythera piece? But the archeological record just fails to yield-up a single other sample?
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The archaeological evidence (to date) fails to yield any other specimen of its type and sophistication. That's the defensible baseline conclusion (at least for the time being).

Whether or not there were other similar devices must remain a subject of speculation.
 
It's not an object but Gobekli Tepe has me intrigued. I don't think we have anything comparable from that era. Perhaps it really was Paradise.
 
Xanatic* said:
It's not an object but Gobekli Tepe has me intrigued. I don't think we have anything comparable from that era. Perhaps it really was Paradise.
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It's an amazing find. Perfectly preserved and architecturally unique (AFAIK).
 
Xanatic* said:
It's not an object but Gobekli Tepe has me intrigued. I don't think we have anything comparable from that era. Perhaps it really was Paradise.
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Not on the scale, there are a few sites from that rough time period in the same area, and a couple of villages that predate it and have similar but smaller t pillars like are found at Göbekli.
It's an amazing site, only a small percent has been excavated yet.
And so far theres been no evidence the site was inhabited.
 
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