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"Roman" Ruins in Florida and a Bizarre Claim about Stonehenge as a Big Government Make-Work Project

7/2/2014

30 Comments

 
Today I have two topics to discuss: A “Roman” hoax in Florida and an odd claim that Stonehenge was a make-work welfare program for the unemployed.

Earlier this month, South Floridians were excited at the possibility that Roman ruins had been found in Miami. A Facebook post depicting fallen pillars at a construction site in the city quickly went viral. According to the post, “This find will change everything we know about modern history if it can be dated and identified to truly be Roman.” The Our Crave “lifestyle” website ran this picture of the alleged discovery along with the first article about the claim:
Picture
Our Crave asserted that it had contacted the National Archaeological Museum of Perugia and learned from them that many Romans fled the collapse of the Western Empire in the fifth century. The article speculated that the Romans intermarried with local Native Americans.

Internet users were quick to relate the allegedly Roman ruins to claims popularized by an episode of America Unearthed that ran in late December 2013. In that episode, show host Scott Wolter concluded that Alexander Helios, the son of Cleopatra, was buried in Illinois. According to the Miami New Times, one Twitter user said “The Romans were in America... That’s why Caesar is buried in I think it’s Illinois... Huge cover-up. Cleopatra too.” A commenter on Our Crave compared the claims to those of another America Unearthed episode, which asserted that the Phoenicians had colonized New Hampshire.

According to the Times, so many people were interested in the downtown Miami construction site that work crews had to erect opaque tarps to keep the gawkers away.

The story took just minutes for the New Times to debunk. The columns in the photograph belonged to the building that had just been demolished, the historic Urmey Hotel, one of the older buildings in the city. It sported some Neoclassical columns, though the stonework depicted in the photograph appears to be belowground support columns from the foundation.
Picture
The former Urmey Hotel (State Archives of Florida)
The flap is another example of how fringe history claims can spread quickly online and feed into a larger alternative view of history, as the reaction to this story demonstrates.

And now for something completely different…

Will Toren was once a champion on Jeopardy, and his current employer, The Desert Sun newspaper, bills him as the paper’s “resident know-it-all.” In last week’s “Ask Will” column, Toren offered his views on the building of Stonehenge. They were, shall we see, unusual.

He believes that standing stones were the result of later peoples’ jealousy of Neolithic burial mounds. He feels the stones were erected by building a large tumulus, pushing the rocks up the mound, and then removing the dirt from beneath until the rocks settle into place:
It seems to me more than possible that the idea for building Stonehenge evolved over a desire to "top" the mound builders and the realization that if someone (or to be more accurate dozens of someones) were to push a massive rock up to the top of the mound, then dig out the dirt beneath it in a strategic way, it would be possible to produce something marvelous.
He then attributes the building of the site to Druids. John Aubrey proposed that theory in 1640, but scholars rejected it around 1800 when John Lubbock demonstrated that the site had been built during the Bronze Age, much older than the Iron Age Druids.

Many archaeologists believe that the use of circular henges is associated with contact with people from Continental Europe, particularly the so-called Beaker culture.

Toren goes on to discuss the monument as a make-work project designed to prevent idleness among the lazy welfare recipients who were living off of handouts from hardworking job creators:
Civilization itself is said to begin when the number of people a society can feed begins to far outstrip the number of people needed to work to feed them. But since "idle hands are the devil's workshop" (again with the supernatural) people have to be given something to do, lest they get rowdy.

Given the advanced workforce coordination even a simplified Stonehenge construction technique would require, one can guess that idle hands were no less frowned upon in those days as in ours.

I'm not saying Stonehenge is a prehistoric "train to nowhere" boondoggle, it's more like a Hubble Telescope that provides a greater role for manual laborers, but I think it is evidence that keeping the unemployment rate down has been an issue for a long, long time.

But aren't we lucky to live in an age when telemarketers are hiring more than stone-raisers?
Yes, Stonehenge was a “big government” project in an age that didn’t have big government, or much of one at all. Toren has a very deterministic view of civilization, and it’s rather hard to imagine how he sees there being a lazy class of unemployed freeloaders in British early Bronze Age society, when the only people who (may have) lacked an occupation were the families of the elites. The rural poor did not have the luxury of sitting around waiting for the rich to give them stuff.

Archaeologists believe that the people who built Stonehenge lived in an agricultural society, with most farming crops and raising livestock, primarily pigs and sheep.

The economy of the Bronze Age in Britain wasn’t defined by official employment statistics. Almost everybody farmed, and the only way not to be a farmer was to have a skill you could trade for food or to be a member of the elite (who, in many cultures, owned lands that others farmed, and collected a percentage of the yield). How else does Toren imagine this surplus farm yield was being distributed? As far as archaeology knows, there wasn’t a Bronze Age welfare office where freeloaders could cash in hand-carved food stamps, at least not until Rome instituted free grain distribution to the urban poor several thousand years later. (The situation was different in the Ancient Near East, where large cities necessitated more complex economic and social relationships.)

But this isn’t an isolated opinion. Consider Toren’s views on zombies, published a couple of weeks earlier. He explained that zombie movies represent the triumph of economic determinism, for they are cheaper (!) than training stunt people for ninja movies. (He may want to check the CGI and makeup budget for a zombie movie.) He also claims that zombies serve as political allegories for the job creators and the mindless takers sponging off of them:
Those who identify with the so-called "1 percent" can see themselves in the rugged heroes, forced to rely on their own craftiness to stand up to the mindless masses concerned only with filling their bellies. Those more in step with the "occupy" movement movement (sic) can identify with the struggle to remain an individual against an overwhelming tide of conformity.
Indeed, those mindless welfare hordes are coming for your brains, or money, or both; in this analogy brains and money are interchangeable, and only certain people have them. Even Toren’s “opposing” view from the “Occupy” perspective (because we are apparently living in 2011) is really the same one: that there are a brave few übermenschen defined by superior individual willpower and character but who are constantly threatened by a soul-sapping, society of moochers trying to destroy their power.

Stonehenge, zombies… It’s all about protecting the hardworking makers from those lazy takers. No wonder he dismisses the bloodsucking aristocratic vampires (like, say, Lord Ruthven, Sir Francis Varney, Countess Carmilla, Count Dracula, Edward Cullen, etc.) not as wealthy leeches living large off of non-elite society but rather as amoral sex fiends who cannot control their “carnal desire and sexuality.” You know: liberals.
30 Comments
An Over-Educated Grunt
7/2/2014 04:44:49 am

Two things here. First, soon as I saw the excavation site, it looked a whole lot more like drilled piers or footings to me than Classical columns. The concrete work is just too rough, there's no evidence of fluting, they're all graded level with the surrounding sitework, and the idea that Romans did it ignores all we know of Roman maritime technology.

Second, Toren sort of has a point. We know that at least some large-scale public works projects in the ancient world were built by agricultural laborers during the off-season (Giza, parts of the Great Wall, much of Mesopotamia's brickwork). Most of that is almost certainly due to the fact that you work when the workers are available, but it's plausible that some of it is that people who are working are too busy to wonder why Pharaoh gets to sit on a throne and supervise. In the specific case of Stonehenge, we lack enough information to say what the builders really were doing, or even how their society was organized. It's possible, albeit unlikely, that a pay-to-play system existed and some sort of community labor on the project was required to draw from the granary or the smokehouse. You yourself are just as guilty of guessing and inferring when you say that "in many cultures" the landed gentry had tenant farmers; we can't even be that certain about Bronze Age Britain.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 05:11:10 am

That's why I said "in many cultures" ... I have no way to know how Bronze Age British farms were organized. It's possible that large projects were used to prevent dissent, but your examples were all from state-level societies. I don't think we have nearly enough information to say that Stonehenge operated with the same level of social complexity. It might have been more similar to Gobekli Tepe, where the evidence seems to indicate more of a cooperative project, rather than one imposed from above by a controlling authority.

Reply
EP
7/6/2014 10:34:40 am

I wonder what happens to the discussion if we replace the word 'unemployed' with the word 'idle'... This way, we get rid of some anachronistic and political implications...

Gregor
7/2/2014 05:40:47 am

1, as Jason said, your examples are all of entrenched, well-documented governmental systems (monarchies) that had currencies, established trade routes, intricate governance and class (if not caste) systems. The fallacy is that you seem to assume all cultures develop at the same rate, and therefore every civilization that was present in age _____ was of roughly the same capability. The counterpoint is in "odd item" #1: Rome was a massive, far-flung empire with a complex economy and culture when the British isles were a collection of Celtic tribes and thatch-hut villages. So, at best you are positing an unnamed, undocumented unified Celtic nation-state that thrived enough to build a large, rough-hewn stone structure as a "keep them happy" project, then collapsed into abject poverty and relative simplicity in time to be discovered by the Romans (while leaving absolutely no traces behind, including tools, coinage, solid-structure ruins, etc.).

2. I think you posit a kind of "free-thinker" spirit in ancient peoples that simply wasn't there (or, at least, not nearly as blunt as you put it). We're familiar with the dry, insightful remarks of people like Socrates or Cicero, establishing a tradition of questioning one's government...but those were societies that functioned differently than many of their counterparts...and even they weren't above a good old-fashioned execution. How's that for "why does the Pharaoh get to sit around?" ? I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the Great Pyramid was built "to keep the simpletons busy", as it undercuts the pervasive nature of ancient Egypt's religious practices, as well as the documented evidence that the pyramids were built by skilled masons and architects (not a gaggle of untrained farmers who needed something to do)...and while that *may* tie in with a potential impetus for Stonehenge, it doesn't tie in with the Great Wall or brickwork. That is, I imagine the Chinese Emperor cared more about keeping rampaging packs of Mongols out of his lands than whether or not the average peasant was content. But hey, if this giant wall keeps them out AND peasants are happy...well, why the hell not?

Honestly, Toren is just reading what he wants into the works of the past, same as any other self-aggrandizing mouthpiece. There's a long tradition of positing modern ideas and practices into the "ancient" past as a method of obtaining legitimacy, and this former-gameshow-winner is no different.

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
7/2/2014 06:29:13 am

1. No, I don't posit anything of the kind, and no, I don't suggest that there's a massive missing Celtic nation-state with no legacy to confirm its existence. My point is that similar public works projects, using large-scale unskilled labor forces, did exist elsewhere, that they were at least to some extent social binding forces (see "It's possible, albeit unlikely, that a pay-to-play system existed and some sort of community labor on the project was required to draw from the granary or the smokehouse"), and that they existed in everything from city-states on up. What I was trying to suggest, apparently badly, since neither of you got that impression, was something more like John Smith's dictum to the Virginia colony: "He that does not work shall not eat." In a small enough society, you don't even need food stamps, chits, or any equivalent, you just need to have been seen on the job site that day.

2. Large construction projects aren't built by skilled masons and architects, whether they're the Pyramids, the Great Wall, or a Wal-Mart. They're designed and supervised by skilled masons and architects, but I guarantee you the people doing most of the actual hauling, installation, and labor aren't supervisors at any point in history. Saqqara may have been Imhotep's idea, but he didn't lay every stone, and the level of effort required to build ANY monument of that type, including Stonehenge, pretty much dictates a large, and therefore mostly unskilled, labor force.

One other point, related to Toren's original idea, that the trilithons were raised and then mounded over - last I checked, the archaeological evidence was that they were essentially very early tilt-up construction, where they were raised over their foundation holes, the toe of the uprights put in place, and the uprights levered over. His proposed construction method also doesn't address the lintels, which are socketed, and would require the lintels to be raised, then positioned over the protrusions on the uprights (which, back to my second point - the surveyor/architect/priest would certainly be watching those sockets, but he's not hauling on the stones while he does so).

Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 06:37:24 am

No, I understand the pay-to-play idea, but in a place where land is plentiful, there would seem to be too many options to make extreme manual labor an attractive alternative to either hunting and gathering or farming, absent other motivations (such as religion). It would seem like you'd have to have land ownership and artificial restrictions on who can use the land before you'd get a critical mass of people unable to feed themselves without selling labor.

An Over-Educated Grunt
7/2/2014 06:56:51 am

It depends (and I feel like I should add, before I get one of our friendly locals jumping down my throat, this is ALL speculation, on all our parts). I generally agree with your Gobekli Tepe example, but I'm assuming that we're talking about a fairly "flat" society. There may be elites, but there's not enough distance from straight subsistence for much of an upper class, and most sustenance-related tasks are going to be communal. Land is held in common, labor required for meat preservation through the winter is done in common, and so forth. I don't have the slightest clue whose idea it was to build Stonehenge, other than that it happened in stages (wooden posts, outer ditch, stone works, in increasing degrees of permanence); for the purposes of this discussion all I need to know is that there was some sort of British Imhotep or Frank Lloyd Wright. I just think that, in a small, tightly knit society where everyone knows everyone else, there's no need to resort to religion as a motivator for the labor force where simple ostracism will do just as well. Once the decision is made to build it, during the construction season, you don't work on it, you don't get to draw from the common stores. Developing a reputation as a shirker has its own complications in a fairly closed society, even if you can go "eh, no thanks, rather catch my own rabbits."

Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 07:37:05 am

I completely take your point, and I think we can both agree that this is quite different from the claim that the project existed in order to make work for the unemployed.

An Over-Educated Grunt
7/2/2014 07:39:24 am

Absolutely. That would require a concept of "employment."

Gregor
7/2/2014 05:14:26 am

A leap of faith fit to make Indiana Jones blush. "Hey, remember me? That one guy who won a popular trivia game show back when? Right! Now listen to my uninformed opinions on things I never studied and don't understand, followed by generic asshattery!"

I wonder what kind of readership this column even has, given that "google it" would do just as well (and even give you the weird, conspiratorial b.s. to boot!).

Reply
Walt
7/2/2014 08:35:06 am

It's ironic that you can see how his conservatism has shaped his views, but can never see how your own liberalism has similarly tainted your own views.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 10:31:35 am

You mean like the way conservatism "shapes" but liberalism "taints"?

Reply
Walt
7/2/2014 11:33:30 am

How convenient of you to leave out the word "similarly".

I'm more liberal than liberals. That was just a poor choice of words.

Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 12:47:01 pm

Walt, no one is required to be 100% neutral on every issue, nor would it be useful. Let me quote Charles Darwin: "How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!" I won't apologize for not being a robot.

Walt
7/2/2014 01:47:16 pm

You don't have to be a robot to divorce your personal feelings from your work. You can still think like a liberal or conservative about an issue while writing that "a liberal or conservative would likely feel" a certain way.

I just think your work will be less likely to be considered dated and quaint in the future if you wrote as an observer of modern times as you seem to do for ancient times. I often think your writing lacks perspective.

Opinion seems to sell much better than scientific writing though, so maybe that's bad advice economically. But, I'd be more likely to buy one of your books if I saw that you were able to analyze modern times, and your place within it, as well as you do ancient times.

EP
7/2/2014 01:56:27 pm

Jason, I'd be even more likely to buy your books if you did turn out to be a robot! How cool would that be?!

Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 02:11:39 pm

My blog contains my views, and I won't apologize for that. If you don't like it, you're welcome to read my published articles instead, which are much closer to your preferred stance. My books are even more so; critics of "Knowing Fear" complained that it had too few opinions and conclusions. Obviously, I can't win. My blogging is for views, reactions, and opinions; and my articles and books are for more academic work.

EP
7/2/2014 03:21:29 pm

"I just think your work will be less likely to be considered dated and quaint in the future if you wrote as an observer of modern times as you seem to do for ancient times. I often think your writing lacks perspective."

This remark strikes me as misguided for a number of reasons. First, our modern times won't be the future's modern times. The worst mistake a historian can do, if he cares about the staying power of his work, is make it more about his present at the expense of his past.

Second, while it would be nice to be all things to all people, it's better to concentrate on whatever one's best at and/or most passionate about. Who would want Jason to divert time and effort away from his areas of strength toward half-hearted efforts to make strained socio-cultural commentary? (OK, maybe Walt would - if that really is his thing...)

What I'm saying is, don't let the haters get you down, Jason!

EP
7/2/2014 09:10:31 am

Will Toren is what happens when trivial learning is substituted for intellectual development.

Reply
Dave Lewis
7/2/2014 12:48:26 pm

Well spoken!

Reply
charlie
7/2/2014 01:55:05 pm

Absolutely!

Reply
gdave
7/2/2014 10:52:22 am

Jason,

First of all, I'd like to state that I really enjoy your blog, and read it pretty much every day. I generally find your posts to be insightful, and often ridiculously well-researched. But...

After reading the Will Toren post you linked to, I'm struggling to understand the interpretation you've given it.

To begin with, Toren explicitly states that he is presenting his "preferred theory on how they raised the stones...." He never states that the theory he presents is definitely the correct one, only that it is the one he prefers. Throughout, he seems to me to present this as a tentative idea, entirely conditional on the evidence - not nearly the strong statements of belief that your presentation implies he made.

You also state that Toren "attributes the building of the site to Druids". What he actually writes is, "It may well be that the druids (or whomever) who built Stonehenge..." You may well be right that the Druids have been strongly ruled out by modern scholarship as possible builders (that's my understanding, as well), and, given that, it's probably valid to criticize Tolen for even bringing them up, but he doesn't make the strong statement of attribution you imply he made.

Finally, we get to the bit about "a make-work project designed to prevent idleness among the lazy welfare recipients who were living off of handouts from hardworking job creators." That's where you completely lose me. Tolen writes absolutely nothing about the workers employed on the project being lazy, or welfare recipients, or living of of handouts, nor does he mention anything about hardworking job creators. Look again at the quote you pulled - which is the entirety of what he wrote in that section.

He very clearly states that "people have to be given something to do, lest they get rowdy." What he seems to me to be implying is not about making lazy welfare recipients work, but rather making sure all of those peasants are kept occupied during the agricultural off-season, rather than, say, rebelling.

He also seems to me to be clear that he thinks this was one possible motivation among several, subsidiary to his proposal of "one-upping" the mound builders and supplanting their cosmology.

As my fellow over-educated grunt indicates above, this is entirely consistent with what we know of any number of ancient civilizations, including Egypt and China. And, of course, we have no evidence that the culture that built Stonehenge actually thought along those lines, but, again, Tolen's presentation seems to be tentative and conditional ("My preferred theory...", "It seems to me...", "it could be...", "one can guess").

Oh, and by the way, his line about about the unemployment rate I took to be metaphorical, not that he is proposing that the culture responsible for Stonehenge literally had a concept of an unemployment rate.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
7/2/2014 12:44:44 pm

Yes, Tolen's presentation is tentative and involves presenting his "preferred" theory. That isn't any different than what ancient astronaut theorists do ("I'm just asking questions!"), and yes I took the opportunity to draw conclusions from Tolen's premises. His premises imply the existence of a controlling governmental authority, their desire to prevent rowdiness (as well as to stop, in his own words, "idle hands"), and he compares the building (in a confused way) to the so-called bridge to nowhere. That he uses rhetorical language to do so ("I'm not saying...") doesn't make it any less so. Cicero taught that rhetorical strategy. The premises and the analogies he used are the same used by conservative politicians in their rhetoric about the poor, and I picked up on the echoes. And like those politicians, there is a disconnect between the literal meaning of the words and what the audience can take from them.

Reply
666
7/2/2014 12:55:23 pm

I didn't see any worthwhile credibility in Tolen's argument worthy enough of all the monumental discussion that was devoted to him here

EP
7/2/2014 01:51:13 pm

Not to mention that one's "preferred theory" is the theory to which one assigns at least plurality credence and considers better supported or more believable than any other single theory. Heliocentrism is the preferred theory or model of the solar system among contemporary scientists, etc., etc...

Besides, Jason never suggested that Tolen would bet the farm on his Stonehenge theory. One doesn't get to publicly defend or andvance ridiculous theories and then get off the hook of criticism be cause one supposedly qualified one's commitment by describing one's ridiculous proposals as one's "preferred theory".

gdave
7/3/2014 01:01:06 am

666's comment below is well taken, and Jason, I'm sure you've got a lot of more interesting things to do, but if you don't mind continuing the conversation a bit:

When Tolent wrote "My preferred theory is..." I took him to mean that of the theories advanced by experimental archaeologists over the last few decades, what followed was the one he preferred. I have only a passing familiarity with the current scholarship on Stonehenge, so that may be my own ignorance showing. If what he presents is simply his own idle armchair speculation, particularly if it is contradicted by the best available current evidence, then I entirely concede the point.

As to the part about his conservative rhetoric, I still don't see what you're seeing there.

Varika
7/2/2014 06:32:26 pm

"He very clearly states that "people have to be given something to do, lest they get rowdy." What he seems to me to be implying is not about making lazy welfare recipients work, but rather making sure all of those peasants are kept occupied during the agricultural off-season, rather than, say, rebelling."

First of all, the "agricultural off-season" in Britain is NOT the season to be trying to build ANYTHING. The ground is rock-solid in winter, it's very cold, and food supplies are much more limited. It's not like Egypt, where it's warm year round and you actually can engage in large-scale building. That means that Stonehenge would have been worked on during the spring and summer, during the "agricultural BUSY season," which means taking people AWAY from other, vital tasks.

Second of all, who were they rebelling against, again? And rebel WHY? What archeology we have from the time period has no evidence whatever of any great have/have-not divide; that didn't come in pretty much until the Romans did. Now if you'd said "to keep them from making war upon their ancient and terrible enemy, other stone-age Britons," you might have gotten my support.

And a third thing that I take issue with in Tolen's premise: the barrows are pretty much concurrent with Stonehenge, so how could jealousy or one-upsmanship play the role he claims it did? The SAME PEOPLE were building Stonehenge AND the barrows. How could they usurp themselves?

Reply
EP
7/3/2014 05:52:33 pm

The climate of the British Isles has changed a great deal over the last few millenia, I believe...

666
7/2/2014 11:45:38 pm

All messages, including forthcoming messages, however scientifically and technically presented with highbrow syntax, are pure 200% speculation. All common sense authors and television presenters on bonafide documentaries like "Timewatch" always point this out when trying out their own possible explanations

Reply
Don
7/4/2014 02:59:04 pm

Ancient public works projects:
Don't forget that people who worked in these societies, which while we poorly understand them, did not have factory jobs or work long hours in offices. That close to the land, that close to agriculture, there is much hard work and manual labor, but it's not the grind yourself down work sixty hours a week year round we often imagine, there are periods during the year when you have to put a lot of effort into it, and periods when you don't. Given the large family sizes at least in some cases, there's more available labor at certain times of the year. Even today our overworked family farmer, if he doesn't have a dairy, has significant periods of what is basically down time. (Most work during this period due to the economic reality of their situation.) But for the few who can still make that their year round only job, there are significant periods before harvest, and then after, given the right weather that they could spend time working on something like this. Or at least some of them did, I imagine, based on nothing but my imagination, that for several weeks a year these people could send at least some of their men to work on stonehenge and probably have some sort of party, like summer camp, or post harvest camp, while some of the sons and the women stayed behind and did the day to day work. We probably imagine projects like this to take far more hours than they actually did. There was some guy in the bronze age, or the stone age, smarter than you or I, and often times he would end up in charge, and with hands on, and a lifetime of expertise they got more done in less time than we can imagine.

I used to watch how it's made with my father, we'd see the item, guess how they made it basically, then often be amazed at how much better, quicker fast and easier the process actually used turned out to be. He built special machinery and automation equipment for a living, and so do I, both toolmakers first.
But with no idea about how you actually, in practice make a fork, or an umbrella, Anthropologists, archaeologists are at a much greater disadvantage when imagining how people they know much less about built something they don't entirely understand than we were in that situation.

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