Shackled Skeletons Discovered in Ancient Roman Burial Ground

[Angela]

This is the link to the article:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...nt-roman-burial-ground-in-france-9907291.html

Although these deaths in the arena originally arose out of the custom of animal, and human, sacrifice as part of the funeral of notable men, it rapidly lost some of its sacrificial and religious aspect, I think, and just became a particularly bloody and vicious sport for many, a sport on which fortunes were made, and lost.

It just goes to show that however civilized the Empire was in certain ways, it was also a part of its era, with the brutality typical of that time. Although, then again, the horrors of World War II are not even a century in the past, so who are we to be so smug?

I wish the papers upon which these articles were based stayed on the radar screen for a while. I usually can't do any follow up on them.

I also wish there was some sort of mobile "Genetics Busters" or "Genetics Swat Team" that could swoop down when these ancient remains are found, prevent contamination, and get them to a lab for genetic analysis.

In this case, it would be interesting to know the origin and make up of these poor people. Were they slaves imported from the latest conquest, locals who had committed crimes or perhaps sold themselves into slavery to pay their debts? So much of history could be illuminated if they would just do the analyses.

Oops! Maybe this is the wrong section. If the moderators feel it would fit better in another section, please move it.

 

[LeBrok]

I also wish there was some sort of mobile "Genetics Busters" or "Genetics Swat Team" that could swoop down when these ancient remains are found, prevent contamination, and get them to a lab for genetic analysis.
.

Fantastic Idea Angela. I wish you were a minister of "History and Archeology", or whatever the proper department is for it, in European Union.

 

[motzart]

This is the link to the article:

I also wish there was some sort of mobile "Genetics Busters" or "Genetics Swat Team" that could swoop down when these ancient remains are found, prevent contamination, and get them to a lab for genetic analysis.

create a kickstarter! I pledge $500 CAD

 

[hope]

I read the skeletons are to be examined to ascertain how they died and if they are related in any way.
Not wishing to state the obvious but I think in the meantime, we can safely say how ever they died, it wont have been pleasant. Horrible.

 

[Krefter14]

Developed, intelligent, and advanced doesn't necessarily mean peaceful and reasonable. Rome killed 1,000,000's of men, women and children, for their own ambition. Personally I don't like the ancient Romans very much, people put them in to high of esteem, and tend to ignore the evil things they did. Getting stabbed and sliced to death is worse than the instant deaths some modern weaponry can cause. Not all death is the same.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/romestat.htm

 

[Angela]

Developed, intelligent, and advanced doesn't necessarily mean peaceful and reasonable. Rome killed 1,000,000's of men, women and children, for their own ambition. Personally I don't like the ancient Romans very much, people put them in to high of esteem, and tend to ignore the evil things they did. Getting stabbed and sliced to death is worse than the instant deaths some modern weaponry can cause. Not all death is the same.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/romestat.htm

Perhaps when you have some more years under your belt, and have read a couple of hundred more history books you'll look back and see that this analysis is flawed.* Man is man, "fallen" if you understand that terminology, and brutality and inhumanity to other men has been the hallmark of not only most empires of the past, but of ones within living memory. To try to place them on a scale to determine which was more brutal trivializes the suffering and reveals biases that have no place in historical analysis.

In order to broaden your understanding, perhaps you might consider reading some histories of past empires, and modern ones for that matter.

Start with the Indo-Europeans. Some internet "experts" have waxed quite poetic about how they butchered all the men of Neolithic Europe. The Huns are always good too...mountains of skulls and all that, and half of Asia depopulated. Then, Alexander was no piker either, and the Persians, and on and on. The Hundred Years War in France is also a good one. I've been thinking about that lately because of the news of Richard III. Some of the military commanders had quite a penchant for murdering every man, woman, and child in the cities that resisted them, sometimes by burning them all alive.

You're an American I believe, so some reading about the "white" settlers and government agents giving measles and mumps infected blankets to the Indians might make interesting reading. Now there's a painless death for you.

I also don't know where you get the idea that modern weaponry causes such a "clean" death, if there is such a thing. Perhaps you should do some reading about the suffering and death caused by the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; many of those people lingered for weeks. Or perhaps you want to ask the Kurds what it's like to get gassed, or read some memoirs of soldiers during World War I whose lungs were also burnt out with it. Only the lucky ones died.

Most of all, perhaps you should read a couple of dozen histories of World War II. Or maybe you think all the Jews died a "painless" death in the gas chambers? (I'm paying you the complement of not believing you're one of the insane and racist Holocaust deniers.) There's a "modern" form of weaponry if ever there was one, chosen not because it was less painful of, of course, but because it could get the job of extermination done more quickly and efficiently. We mustn't forget the others, though, the ones kept alive for slave labor, or starved and allowed to die from pneumonia, and typhus and TB in the ghettos, or experimented upon by educated, "civilized" doctors, men who listed to Motzart as they operated on unanesthetized human beings. Be sure to add those books to your reading list.

I'll give you a short list to start you off:
Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
Evans, Richard. The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
Grunberger, Richard. The 12-year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.
Fischer, Klaus. Nazi Germany: A New History. New York: Continuum, 1995.
Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham, editors. Nazism, 1919-1945. Exeter [UK]: University of Exeter Press, 1998-2001.
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

Give some thought to paying a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington as well. I think you might gain a broader perspective on human nature.

Ed. In deference to Kepfer's feelings, I have rephrased this sentence.

 

[Krefter14]

Angela, you can correct someone with out sarcastically insulting them and coming off as arrogant.

 

[Angela]

Angela, you can correct someone with out sarcastically insulting them and coming off as arrogant.

Krefter, I didn't intend to insult you. I am, in fact, impressed with the intelligence, reasoning, and balance you are showing in most of your posts. I'm just older than you are, and have thought about, and read about these things for a lot longer than you have. I'm sorry if it came off as arrogant. Think of it as a Socratic dialogue. That's how I was trained, and it does wonders for the ability to reason. They are questions and suggestions designed to provoke thought, that's all. Tone is notoriously difficult to convey at a distance.

 

[Sile]

. Personally I don't like the ancient Romans very much,

from a famous line................who does, what have the Romans ever given us..........err, the aqueduct etc etc