Speaker 1: I think ex Sideways is not brought to you by
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Speaker 1: there now. It's goods working. Hey there, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I am Steve, as always joined by and
Speaker 1: Joe and this week, as always on Thinking Sideways, We've
Speaker 1: got a mystery for you. It's a historical doozyies. Actually no,
Speaker 1: well okay, but you know the mystery isn't the dead bodies,
Speaker 1: but you're strongly implied. Well there, I mean, if we're
Speaker 1: going to say that, then yes, there's dead bodies everywhere
Speaker 1: all the time around to creep Factor. Hey, high five
Speaker 1: for totally steamrolling him. Already, good job. Okay, Okay, well
Speaker 1: let's go ahead, and now that you two are done
Speaker 1: with that, get into our story because this week we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about vitrified forts, which is a historical mystery,
Speaker 1: and the mystery is kind of twofold, because first off,
Speaker 1: we need to figure out how the sports were made,
Speaker 1: and then the mystery, of course is why were they made.
Speaker 1: So let's start first off, just so we give everybody
Speaker 1: the background of what the heck of vitrified ford is.
Speaker 1: It's not a vitriolic for it. It's a vitrified for it, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: I don't know what either of those things are, so
Speaker 1: I was pretending vitriolic it is like an angry, hysterical
Speaker 1: fort say nasty things about you. Yeah, nobody likes that.
Speaker 1: That's one of those words that I am not realizing.
Speaker 1: I've read like a million times exact definition. No, I
Speaker 1: totally do, but I've just never I don't think I
Speaker 1: ever heard anybody ever say it. So for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: it was different in my brain and I understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there we go. Yeah sweet. Anyway, Okay, for our story today,
Speaker 1: we're talking about vitrified forts. Yeah, vitrified forts or stone walls,
Speaker 1: which are built surrounding some kind of defensible position. So
Speaker 1: most of them are going to be found on the
Speaker 1: tops of high hills. That would be, you know, the
Speaker 1: great place to build your village, your castle, and then
Speaker 1: keep the enemy from being able to easily invade it
Speaker 1: as defend it. Also safe from floods, Yes, but it's
Speaker 1: very true. Insurance salesmen love those places for that reason.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the walls themselves are short spans of distance. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they're long, sometimes they're pretty tall. Sometimes they're actually kind
Speaker 1: of short. Uh. And sometimes there are a series of
Speaker 1: walls that will circle one another. In other words, it's
Speaker 1: almost as if there's walls that are sandwich between walls,
Speaker 1: sandwich between walls. In castles there was an outer an
Speaker 1: inner wall. Yeah, no, it is. It's very traditional in
Speaker 1: that regard. Uh And And sometimes because they were built
Speaker 1: on hills, they could have embankments or they could be
Speaker 1: surrounded by ramparts, you know, from the lower slopes of
Speaker 1: the hills. So these things are going to be in
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of different areas and have a lot
Speaker 1: of different configurations. But part of that variation in terms
Speaker 1: of the size of them is gonna be because of
Speaker 1: the time frame or their age, because vitrified forts, we
Speaker 1: don't exactly know when they were made. It's leaved according
Speaker 1: to the current research that they were made somewhere between
Speaker 1: seven hundred b C and seven hundred so really just
Speaker 1: no time difference at all. And there's lots of them
Speaker 1: when we get into the numbers up, but there's there's
Speaker 1: more than one, obviously enough. But there's lots of these
Speaker 1: things spread over a pretty big geographic area, and it
Speaker 1: seems like actually some of them could actually be older
Speaker 1: than that, So you know, I mean that could be
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know, a thousand, fifty hundred years
Speaker 1: before Christ, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's entirely possible.
Speaker 1: We're really not sure in this one. Yeah, it's really uh,
Speaker 1: you know, as far as what man was mankind was
Speaker 1: up to back in those days, we don't really know.
Speaker 1: I mean, seriously, it's really Yeah. That's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite the big overarching on soft mysteries is like, what
Speaker 1: what did we do before TVO? Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it could be that ten thousand years ago when we
Speaker 1: had some you know in places like Europe or even
Speaker 1: in America and like North America we had like some
Speaker 1: sort of my kind of civilization, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: how they've been, you know, taken over by flooding from
Speaker 1: sea level rises because sea level has been going up.
Speaker 1: It's you know, for eleven thousand years. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: we talked about some of that and who settled the
Speaker 1: New World first? About coastal village is being destroyed by
Speaker 1: rising sea levels? Absolutely so, I mean there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of cool stuff out there that's just been obliterated or else.
Speaker 1: It's just underneath the whole lot of layers of sentiment
Speaker 1: and we get those weird things like GOLDBACKI Tempe that
Speaker 1: we talked about way way, way, way way back in
Speaker 1: the beginning, where it's like these things that are indicative
Speaker 1: of these like larger cultures and more sophistication than we
Speaker 1: give people from that time credit for. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, that's why mysteries like this are always interesting
Speaker 1: to me because it's like, well, in technology, what's what's
Speaker 1: great about a lot of these things? This technology as
Speaker 1: it each advance, and technology seems to spill a little
Speaker 1: more of the information out force You've seen all of
Speaker 1: this stuff now about how they're checking satellite footage and
Speaker 1: they're using the growth patterns of trees and then the
Speaker 1: terrain to be like, oh wait, no, you see that
Speaker 1: there's obviously the foundation of a building there, you just
Speaker 1: can't tell it from being on ground level. Like, there's
Speaker 1: all these algorithms and tricks that they're using that they're
Speaker 1: finding so much so fast now because of that, So
Speaker 1: are never going to know the answer? Maybe will we
Speaker 1: know some of the answers? Probably, So we've just spent
Speaker 1: the last ten minutes talking about why this is a
Speaker 1: really cool mystery and haven't talked about the mystery at all. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's why it's intriguing now, the mysteries. Yeah, okay, So
Speaker 1: here's the thing about vitrified forts. They whoever built these forts,
Speaker 1: and by forts there, they're a wall around a fort,
Speaker 1: is the easiest way to think about it. Whoever did
Speaker 1: this expose them to massive amounts of heat and in
Speaker 1: doing so melted the rocks that the wall was composed of,
Speaker 1: and this would fuse or weld the smaller and larger
Speaker 1: rocks together. So instead of having like a nice stacked
Speaker 1: stone wall, which is Joe's favorite kind of wall, they
Speaker 1: would have one that was literally glued together. And keep
Speaker 1: in mind, as we've been talking about, this is two
Speaker 1: thousand plus years ago, and concrete and mortar were not
Speaker 1: at an available as far as far as we know now. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there, as far as we know, concrete and mortar
Speaker 1: was not around. Concrete and mortars seem to have been
Speaker 1: used by the Romans starting around I want to say,
Speaker 1: five or six hundred CE. But prior to that, oh gosh,
Speaker 1: I can't think of what the other civilization was, but
Speaker 1: they were using bitjamin asphalt. The Egyptians, I think he
Speaker 1: is concrete. I think a lot of some of the
Speaker 1: blocks of the Great Pyramids were actually formed on the
Speaker 1: spot from one well, they know they used some kind Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a gypsum base. They were burning materials at
Speaker 1: a gypsum and ash and creating mortar with that. And
Speaker 1: then the vice starts with them. I can't think of it.
Speaker 1: But Macedonians is that one? Were they before the Romans.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get an email somebody's going to correct us
Speaker 1: because I can't remember. But the point is this was
Speaker 1: this was a technology that wouldn't have been available, so
Speaker 1: to not just stack your rocks there's some some value
Speaker 1: in that. So you're just saying it wasn't just like
Speaker 1: a giant magnifying glass they held up and just walked. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe we might talk about something like that, but
Speaker 1: for most things, we're pretty sure that they weren't doing that. Now,
Speaker 1: the catch with making a vitrified ford is depending on
Speaker 1: who the researcher is, it could strengthen the wall or
Speaker 1: it could weaken the wall. Some sources will say that
Speaker 1: the process of vitrification will weaken the wall because what
Speaker 1: it does is it melts some of the rocks into
Speaker 1: a glass like state, which can make them it all
Speaker 1: and it can crack the larger stones. But on the
Speaker 1: opposite side of the argument, researchers saying, well, yeah, those
Speaker 1: bigger stones, so they're cracking, they're becoming more porous, and
Speaker 1: then the ones that melt into glass like state actually
Speaker 1: melt and go into those pores. So when it hardens
Speaker 1: back up, you've got a super super strong bond between
Speaker 1: these two two stones. So we're saying that the intentional
Speaker 1: difference of stone reaction was intentional, Well, it was. It
Speaker 1: was most likely it was an accidental discovery, like a
Speaker 1: lot of things, but they're like, whoa, this is really
Speaker 1: really strong. And depending on which I'm sure you know,
Speaker 1: as with all things, people experiment, and depending on the
Speaker 1: mix of stones, some are going to inheat, going to
Speaker 1: vitrify in turn to that glass like state, and some
Speaker 1: are just going to crack some because they have higher
Speaker 1: melting points. So if you combine them correctly, you can
Speaker 1: make a super strong wall. Yeah, the argument for that, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and actually not having a wallet. It's all solid and
Speaker 1: just rock solid like that that your enemies can't just
Speaker 1: run up and like you know, like fling a big
Speaker 1: catapult rock at and sort of knocked the top stones
Speaker 1: off the bottom stones and stuff like that. Yeah, you know, absolutely,
Speaker 1: or people you know, there's there's stories of the guy
Speaker 1: who walked by every day and just pulled a stone
Speaker 1: down and nobody realized it was a giant, gaping hole
Speaker 1: in the wall because he did it just so slowly
Speaker 1: and cautiously, Like you can't do that. They're they're welded together.
Speaker 1: So it's got a huge benefit. Um. And there are
Speaker 1: times where it appears that this was very much done
Speaker 1: intentionally or deliberately, because some of these walls are built
Speaker 1: on bedrock, that was would have a really really high
Speaker 1: melting point, so high in fact, that you couldn't vitrify
Speaker 1: the stones to it, that it wasn't going to create
Speaker 1: that porous condition. So people would actually go get large stones,
Speaker 1: sometimes from great distances away, and use them as their foundations,
Speaker 1: so that the rocks above when the melting happened, would
Speaker 1: fuse to it. So the bottom of the wall was
Speaker 1: fused to something large and stable. So there does seem
Speaker 1: to be some very deliberate action that was taken for this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then they were smart enough to figure out that
Speaker 1: having a good solid foundation is key. Oh yeah, there's
Speaker 1: the reason you don't build on sand. Uh yeah, not
Speaker 1: false apart, but well, the other's that vitrified forts. As
Speaker 1: we said, they've been around for thousands of years, but
Speaker 1: officially they weren't noted or discovered until the late seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and at that time it was believed that they were
Speaker 1: pretty well contained to northern Scotland. Uh. Today we know
Speaker 1: that there's about sixty or seventy vitrified forts in Scotland.
Speaker 1: There's a little over two hundred of them total having
Speaker 1: been found, and they're spread across northern and Western Europe.
Speaker 1: So some of the reading has been that probably what
Speaker 1: happened is the folks that knew how to do this
Speaker 1: would then begin to go and share the technology with
Speaker 1: their allies. Oh hey, let me help you out. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got this pact between each other. I'm gonna show
Speaker 1: you how to do this thing I do. And then
Speaker 1: slowly the technology spread, though obviously it didn't go a
Speaker 1: long long time because there's only about two hundred sites
Speaker 1: that we found. I wonder some of it had to
Speaker 1: do with like marriage. Oh, I'm sure that that kind
Speaker 1: of that kind Yeah, I mean, yes, I am. It's
Speaker 1: you know, that sort of that consolidation of power. But
Speaker 1: also because it's like a kind of a small number actually,
Speaker 1: and and kind of an intentional spreading, and either it's
Speaker 1: you know, certain people, we're just building their empire out,
Speaker 1: which is also possible because you know, again we don't
Speaker 1: have very great records from that time, or you know,
Speaker 1: it was I don't even know, somebody married somebody's wife
Speaker 1: and or somebody's brother and said, oh, hey, by the way,
Speaker 1: we've been doing this is how we do it. You
Speaker 1: know where we're from, Let's build something like this. So
Speaker 1: I'm safe some rication. Man. Yeah, it's like a bachelor party.
Speaker 1: But the difficulty is is that we don't we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly which civilization was doing it. And there was
Speaker 1: all kinds of Germanic tribes in the area in the
Speaker 1: northern part of Britannia. I think it was called Britannia
Speaker 1: is what they referred to it at that time. But
Speaker 1: there was the Pics and some other civilizations. But but nobody,
Speaker 1: because obviously there's no written record from that time frame
Speaker 1: that survived, we don't know, so so it's always hard
Speaker 1: to say, well, why did it spread like that? Was
Speaker 1: it through you know, through marriages, or was it through
Speaker 1: military alliances or conquests. A lot more interesting questions for
Speaker 1: me is why did it go out of style? Well,
Speaker 1: I think I have a pretty easy answer to that. Concrete.
Speaker 1: That could be it high Yeah, but actually, um, it
Speaker 1: seemed to go out of style prior to the invention
Speaker 1: of concrete, and according to some of the theories out there,
Speaker 1: it had to do not so much with construction is destruction, yeah,
Speaker 1: and in which case I'm really curious about why I
Speaker 1: went out of style? Well, and that's a that's a
Speaker 1: great segue into theories, because, believe it or not, once again,
Speaker 1: I've done it. We've got a really short story and
Speaker 1: the rest of this episode is all theories. Well you
Speaker 1: have two different theories sections. Yeah, well that's that's how
Speaker 1: I get away with it this time. You two told
Speaker 1: me last time. Don't do that again. Absolutely, it's too short,
Speaker 1: not really okay, So we have two sections of the theories.
Speaker 1: Section one is how was this done? In section two
Speaker 1: is why was it done? We're going to start with
Speaker 1: how and so, yeah, I'm more curious about why. I know,
Speaker 1: that's why. People I so I find the how obscenely
Speaker 1: interesting for some reason interesting. So let's let's get into
Speaker 1: this now. We need to establish a couple of things. First,
Speaker 1: we've talked about the fact that it takes some really
Speaker 1: high heat to vitrify stone. To give you a frame
Speaker 1: of reference, the melting point of the stones that are
Speaker 1: used for this process at this time was somewhere between
Speaker 1: eleven hundred to fifundred degrees celsius, which is two to
Speaker 1: d degrees fahrenheit. What is that in kelvin? You're but
Speaker 1: but if you also need to keep in mind, is
Speaker 1: that's a lot of heat degenerate, and you've got to
Speaker 1: keep it up for a sustained amount of time. It's
Speaker 1: not as if you can just get it to that
Speaker 1: temperature and that it's done. No, it's it has to
Speaker 1: have time to act upon the materials. So you've got
Speaker 1: to be able to maintain that heat for like what
Speaker 1: at least a couple of days, probably right at least
Speaker 1: hours at least you know, I'm not I don't want
Speaker 1: to give a number of hours, but a lot of
Speaker 1: hours longer that takes your beer bottle to meunt in
Speaker 1: the campfire. Absolutely absolutely. You also need to remember, well,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will say, oh, well, humans at
Speaker 1: that time didn't have the technology. And if you think that,
Speaker 1: you're actually wrong, because this falls right in the Bronze
Speaker 1: and the Iron Ages, when man had learned how to
Speaker 1: melt or to make all those fancy tools for killing
Speaker 1: each yes, in a super contained environment, but the technology
Speaker 1: had been figured out that stone or it's out there.
Speaker 1: So so it is something that is available. And I
Speaker 1: was doing some reading and at the time the forges
Speaker 1: of blacksmiths around this time frame, you know, somewhere between
Speaker 1: seven hundred seven hundred, it was not uncommon for them
Speaker 1: to be able to sustain fires of up to so
Speaker 1: they've got the ability again in a small in a
Speaker 1: contained space. I totally understand that, because that's the big
Speaker 1: part of that, right. It's like, you can't get a
Speaker 1: fire like a wood fire, camp fire up to heats
Speaker 1: like that, really no, because it's got a feed off
Speaker 1: itself and be self containing atuff. Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 1: Is it the coke that has to get that? I
Speaker 1: imagine we have a better success using coal and stuff
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, I would think you would. Okay, sure
Speaker 1: we start into now that we're now we've given that
Speaker 1: little baseline. Let's do theory one, which is this was
Speaker 1: done in the initial construction of the wall, and theory
Speaker 1: one subsection A. You're gonna love this episode, Devin. There's
Speaker 1: all kinds of subsections. Yeah, but you didn't use bullet points,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of bumming me out. Well, it's because
Speaker 1: it's too big of areas and it would have taken
Speaker 1: this four page thing into seven. Yeah that's my trick. Oh,
Speaker 1: is that why you do that? Okay, you notice a
Speaker 1: really wide margins, really big friends. Okay, the first theory
Speaker 1: we're gonna discuss, discuss discuss is the kiln method, and
Speaker 1: the idea here is that, yeah, well, the idea here
Speaker 1: is that what the builders would do is they would
Speaker 1: take the larger stones that we're going to be the
Speaker 1: inner and the outer face of the wall, and they
Speaker 1: would lay them out and then they would place smaller
Speaker 1: stones in between them, and then they would take almost
Speaker 1: like gravel or really or even finer stone and pour
Speaker 1: them on top of that. Again, and of course, you
Speaker 1: know you think about it, well, the big ones, then
Speaker 1: the gravel is gonna fall and it's gonna fill in
Speaker 1: all those voids. So it's pretty packed. It's relatively a
Speaker 1: densely filled space. It's kind of like packing peanuts. That's
Speaker 1: you know, it's what packing peanuts are for. They fill
Speaker 1: up all those air voids. Now, all the while that
Speaker 1: this is being done, wooden beams are going to be
Speaker 1: laid across the wall from one face to the next,
Speaker 1: or logs. They don't necessarily have to be beams, but
Speaker 1: logs from the inner to the outer face. And wood
Speaker 1: is also going to be scattered amongst all of the
Speaker 1: stone debris. So we've got now a bunch of varying
Speaker 1: sizes of stone and a whole bunch of fuel that's
Speaker 1: all packed in there, and that's to vitrify the internal
Speaker 1: core between the two outer solid walls, right correct, because
Speaker 1: not all of these walls are super thick. I mean
Speaker 1: some of them are only a couple of feet across sometimes,
Speaker 1: like you know, yeah, so it varies from wall to wall.
Speaker 1: So it's probably it would probably. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it would actually be easier to do a small one
Speaker 1: versus a large one, because it's easier to get more
Speaker 1: fuel in the big one. But the point is there's
Speaker 1: there's tons of fuel, and in this idea of the
Speaker 1: kiln method, you would then take earth and pack it
Speaker 1: around a couple of the sides of the wall so
Speaker 1: that it would then retain what heat is going on.
Speaker 1: You put turf on top to cap the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and then you light the whole thing on fire. And
Speaker 1: from that point, because there is an earthen walls around it,
Speaker 1: the heat's going to be contained. It's gonna radiate within itself,
Speaker 1: and it's good. You're gonna get the maximum usage out
Speaker 1: of that heat from the burning fuel rather than all
Speaker 1: it's like devons and a camp fire, all that heat
Speaker 1: would just go whoosh straight up in the air. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's stuck in there, which is why you know your
Speaker 1: doors and windows seal so well in your house so
Speaker 1: you can retain the heat and get the only problem
Speaker 1: being it's just getting air tier to your fire to
Speaker 1: make it burn is super hot, and you would absolutely
Speaker 1: definitely have to have some kind of arrables because you've
Speaker 1: gotta have you gotta have air flowing through this thing
Speaker 1: in one way or another. But it's it's basically it's
Speaker 1: it turns into a giant furnace. It's gonna melt everything inside.
Speaker 1: And this doesn't necessarily have to have been done when
Speaker 1: the wall was at its full height, and you could
Speaker 1: build several feet of wall and cap it and cook
Speaker 1: it and then dig it out, put the next layer
Speaker 1: of rock and fuel and do it again, and do
Speaker 1: it again, which would help prevent stability issues because if
Speaker 1: you're filling it with wood, then, of course is that
Speaker 1: would burns and turns the carbon and then our charcoal
Speaker 1: and then dissipates. The material is going to want to
Speaker 1: settle in there, and there is obvious, uh, there's obvious
Speaker 1: signs of posts and beams being in these vitrified forts.
Speaker 1: They've actually found the impressions, so we know that they
Speaker 1: were sticking wood inside the wall to some degree at least.
Speaker 1: So I'm sorry, I'm having a really hard time picturing
Speaker 1: the way that you're describing this. Okay, here's here's an idea.
Speaker 1: I mean to use a really dumb analogy. Should what
Speaker 1: I'm having a hard time picture? Yeah, go ahead, having
Speaker 1: a hard time picturing where in the wall the wood is.
Speaker 1: So you've got your wall like this is the wood
Speaker 1: going through horizontally from front to inner, from the outer
Speaker 1: to the interface, and then there would be wood inside
Speaker 1: of it, so running horizontally, they had them. They had
Speaker 1: them like like vertical as far as I not vertical, horizontal,
Speaker 1: longitudinally and then latitude. Yeah, there's there's wood laid all
Speaker 1: in this thing. So so basically they made like a
Speaker 1: Lincoln log frame and then filled stones in. That's an
Speaker 1: easy way to think about it. I don't think of
Speaker 1: it as a Lincoln log as and they built a
Speaker 1: log cabin, but just a framework. Right. But she's she's
Speaker 1: got it right in terms of the way the wood
Speaker 1: would be laid in so that it would get you know,
Speaker 1: would all catch itself on fire, and then you get
Speaker 1: the maximum square footage of wood to or ratio, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're on. Then I don't need a weird, dumb analogy. Okay,
Speaker 1: other theories, and you're probably going to talk about this
Speaker 1: how the wood not being deliberately burned but being part
Speaker 1: of a stabilizing structure between the two outer walls, the
Speaker 1: inner and the outer wall, and being a stabilizing structure
Speaker 1: that kept that whole pile of rubble in between the
Speaker 1: sea walls all kind of I would imagine that would
Speaker 1: be in the killed method. I would imagine that was
Speaker 1: what the earth piled on the outside was meant to
Speaker 1: do rather than wooden structure. The wooden structure would burn up.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying it's like, you know, it's not the
Speaker 1: word was not intended to be burned. Was intended as
Speaker 1: a framework to actually show up the castle walls, got it?
Speaker 1: Got it? Um? Yeah, I don't know. That's hard to say.
Speaker 1: No again, you don't know. I mean, we don't know
Speaker 1: if this was intended to be a framework to make
Speaker 1: it all stronger, or it was intended to be burned
Speaker 1: to create heat. We don't know it. Yeah, which we did?
Speaker 1: Um sumachine, Yeah, I could just picture I'm gonna step
Speaker 1: out of my time my time machine, and I go,
Speaker 1: dude's what you're doing? Who immediately he come from? Why
Speaker 1: did these guys never come back? Um? So really quick,
Speaker 1: let's circle back to something that we talked about as
Speaker 1: we were discussing this method, because will play into everything
Speaker 1: that we talked about later. I talked about the different
Speaker 1: sizes of stone that was going to be thrown into
Speaker 1: the wall for during the construction for the vitrification process.
Speaker 1: Now I had written this down wrong, and thankfully Joe
Speaker 1: caught it. But what it is is the small stones
Speaker 1: have helped me out with what's the proper way to
Speaker 1: put this, Joe. It's to volume ratio, so they're gonna
Speaker 1: melt faster. Yeah, because a big stone is going to
Speaker 1: take a long time to heat all the way through,
Speaker 1: but a small stone is not. So it's it's more
Speaker 1: likely to vitrify. Yeah, because it's like that. You like
Speaker 1: your hands, for example, of a very highest surface to
Speaker 1: volume ratio, which is why you have to wear gloves
Speaker 1: in the wintertime. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, it's exactly right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's totally interrupt you to say the exact same thing.
Speaker 1: You're saying, but the point is that those are the
Speaker 1: ones that are going to vitrify, and they're the ones
Speaker 1: that are gonna end up making fuse everything together to
Speaker 1: make that solid wall kind of makes them into a
Speaker 1: sort of mortar and mortar in themselves. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is a method of making mortar in a rudimentary fashion.
Speaker 1: It was intended by this process. Yeah, we don't know that.
Speaker 1: We don't know that where this theory is presuming that's
Speaker 1: what it's for. Uh, the second part of the how
Speaker 1: it was done. Second theory is the open fire method,
Speaker 1: which I'm a little dubious on. But but we'll go
Speaker 1: ahead and run through this. Well, I mean, you may
Speaker 1: be dubious, but it does take a lot less like
Speaker 1: like this is way easier. We'll well, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that in a second. I don't I don't agree with that,
Speaker 1: but that's okay, because we still don't know. So some
Speaker 1: researchers have said, well, listen, it's obvious that they weren't
Speaker 1: using a killed method, and so what the builders were
Speaker 1: doing is they were piling wood on the outside of
Speaker 1: these walls and then maintaining that fire to get enough
Speaker 1: heat to vitrify it. And the research says that in
Speaker 1: order for this to work, what they would have to
Speaker 1: have done is planned this out for a time when
Speaker 1: they knew the wind was going to be blowing in
Speaker 1: a certain direction, so it would act as a billows
Speaker 1: and it would push all of that heat into the
Speaker 1: wall and help keep maintaining it because it's it's pushing
Speaker 1: oxygen into that fire and it's gonna help burn it hot.
Speaker 1: Obviously would be very helpful. Absolutely, although we are saying,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is Scotland, right, I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: like it's not like they don't ever get windy storms, right.
Speaker 1: My thing is, I'm a little unsure about this because
Speaker 1: I know I sent you guys the link to this,
Speaker 1: but there's more than one person who has tried to
Speaker 1: recreate a vitrified fort, and one of them was a
Speaker 1: guy by the name of Ian Ralston who did it
Speaker 1: back in to You Are Too Young, Devon, Joe, Do
Speaker 1: you remember our c Clark's Mysterious World, the TV show? Vaguely?
Speaker 1: I didn't watch at the time. I mean I read
Speaker 1: all of his books when I was a kid, but
Speaker 1: I never not a lot of them. I don't think
Speaker 1: I ever saw the actual show, though I remember this
Speaker 1: show because it has the crystal skull in the intro
Speaker 1: and I always remember that. But Ralston, he's on an
Speaker 1: episode of that show and he builds a wall, and
Speaker 1: he builds a really big wall. It. I'm guessing this
Speaker 1: dimensions are a guest here, but I think it was
Speaker 1: about eight foot high, about ten foot wide, and somewhere
Speaker 1: between fifteen and twenty ft long. And it was a
Speaker 1: free standing wall. He didn't have anything packed around the
Speaker 1: sides or anything like that, but still had wood running
Speaker 1: horizontally or from front to rear face. And then he
Speaker 1: stacked a bunch of wood on top and they lit
Speaker 1: it on fire. The problem is is that it took
Speaker 1: a bunch of wood to get that thing up to
Speaker 1: heat and keep it up to eat, like six truckloads.
Speaker 1: Like I was laughing, and they had to call in
Speaker 1: a order from the local what did they dustman? And
Speaker 1: they were throwing it took him like all day. This
Speaker 1: is a problem with this thing is that you build
Speaker 1: this elien, all this wood against it, light it on fire,
Speaker 1: and most of the heat just goes straight up and
Speaker 1: past your wall. Yeah, the campfire issue, you know, the
Speaker 1: only way to really do it is to build a
Speaker 1: packet so much would that eventually you get this big,
Speaker 1: huge pile of just coals like embers, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: up against your wall, and then you'll get some juice
Speaker 1: out of it. But yeah, yeah, And he poured wood
Speaker 1: on it for a day constantly, and in the end,
Speaker 1: like I said, it was about it looked like six
Speaker 1: I think they said six truckloads and so well. The
Speaker 1: sad part was watching them demolished the wall with the
Speaker 1: back ho and he didn't vitrify hardly anything. He got
Speaker 1: some small stones to go to a semi glass like
Speaker 1: state and fuse, but that was much. Yeah. I didn't
Speaker 1: get a lot of action out of it. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: should have just left the ruin for somebody a thousand
Speaker 1: years from now to worry about. Well, the hilarity was,
Speaker 1: of course, Arthur C. Clark is you know in in
Speaker 1: the episode the whole way through doing his dialogue, and
Speaker 1: he talks about the fact that for the vitrified Fords
Speaker 1: that we knew of, and I'm sure there's more been
Speaker 1: found since then, they weren't all found at that time.
Speaker 1: It would have taken at least half of the forests
Speaker 1: of Scotland in order to create enough heat to have
Speaker 1: vitrified all of that that that stone. That's one of
Speaker 1: the one of the issues I have with this is
Speaker 1: the you know, the assumption that they used wood when
Speaker 1: I think they should have used coal. And and there's
Speaker 1: lots of coal in Scotland yea, and I you know,
Speaker 1: and it just seems to be coal was a lot
Speaker 1: would be a lot easier when you're thinking about the
Speaker 1: energy that's in a piece of coal versus a commention
Speaker 1: a piece of wood. You know, if if you're gonna
Speaker 1: have your soldiers laboring day after day after day hauling
Speaker 1: logs up the hillside, versus hauling loads of coal, it
Speaker 1: sounds to me like you get a lot more bang
Speaker 1: for your buck having you were you went down the
Speaker 1: coal path, and I didn't even think too did you
Speaker 1: look up anything to see when the earliest mining of
Speaker 1: coal in Scotland was? Uh, it's not recorded really. I
Speaker 1: mean it's like you know, I mean, you can find
Speaker 1: out about like modern more modern like several centuries ago
Speaker 1: or whatever, you know, and there's there's records about that,
Speaker 1: but beyond that, uh, there's nothing but I wonder about
Speaker 1: But it doesn't mean that they weren't using and digging
Speaker 1: it up. I mean, if the somebody dug up a
Speaker 1: massive coal pit back in the day and and then
Speaker 1: just their their civilization goes away, it gets overtaken by nature. Again,
Speaker 1: nobody knows it's a coal pit. Well, I was just saying,
Speaker 1: I wonder about pete, because pete is a huge But
Speaker 1: I think I think the reason everybody focuses on the
Speaker 1: wood is because, like I said, there's you can see
Speaker 1: impressions and voids that they have identified as having had
Speaker 1: to have been from post. Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: do yeah, exactly, because I would think you would need
Speaker 1: an exterior source as well. So you know, maybe it
Speaker 1: is that they, you know, put pete or coal, because
Speaker 1: obviously if they're if their work, if they have forged,
Speaker 1: is they're using coal of some kind, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's pretty I'm pretty sure that's the only way you
Speaker 1: can get things to go that high. But maybe not, um,
Speaker 1: you can go pretty high with I mean a house
Speaker 1: fires get up to say, I've had I've had woodstoves,
Speaker 1: so half it's still not high enough. Yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: I almost wonder if it was like a dual method
Speaker 1: sort of thing, because I mean, for example, it would
Speaker 1: have to be if you're using the logs just to
Speaker 1: stabilize your pile of rocks while you're burning it, and
Speaker 1: then vitrifying it, well, you can't exactly use chunks of
Speaker 1: coal to do that particular function, right, But then bonus
Speaker 1: it burns in like creates more internal heat. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe. Well, And here's the thing is, so
Speaker 1: Ralston wasn't the only guy who's ever tried to vitrify
Speaker 1: a wall. There was, and you will see these referenced everywhere.
Speaker 1: But there was two experiments done, one in four and
Speaker 1: again in ninety seven. And the first experiment was very
Speaker 1: similar to Ralston's. They built the wall, they had wood
Speaker 1: running through it, they had stone in the middle. Although
Speaker 1: these guys they cheated a little bit because they used
Speaker 1: fire clay brick for the outsides of the wall, which
Speaker 1: will stack better and it will be much It has
Speaker 1: a better insulative capacity because there's no gaps in the scenes.
Speaker 1: It's not giant holes from stack rock. They did it.
Speaker 1: It was really funny to get the bellows effect. They
Speaker 1: lit it at the beginning of a snowstorm and the
Speaker 1: wind was raging and the whole thing was burning hot.
Speaker 1: But eventually their wall collapsed, so there was a there
Speaker 1: was a fault there. The next day when they checked
Speaker 1: it out, they did find that some of the material
Speaker 1: inside had vitrified, so they had achieved results, but not
Speaker 1: perfect results. Well it almost, I mean, it does again
Speaker 1: in Scotland, and it makes me think of like the
Speaker 1: kind of wind that blows through right before a rainstorm
Speaker 1: when we get them here. I mean, you know, granted
Speaker 1: rain isn't like great for a fire sustained, but if
Speaker 1: it's a hot fire, the rain doesn't matter. So I almo,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's not that hard to say,
Speaker 1: oh yep, it looks like there's a storm coming. Time
Speaker 1: to light that fire. And there's also nothing to say
Speaker 1: that they didn't have these things set up. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like they were just sitting around thinking okay, I guess
Speaker 1: maybe that you know that they would be like, okay,
Speaker 1: well you know we've got it to the stage and
Speaker 1: you know the wind is blowing. Better go light that thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, you get it ready and when the when
Speaker 1: the weather conditions are right. Yeah, because it probably took
Speaker 1: a long time to set this, I mean an era
Speaker 1: of true manual labor. You want to get that stone
Speaker 1: from here to five miles away, you can start dragging it.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take you a while to get it there,
Speaker 1: or the oxen or the horses or whatever. But yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody's going to drag it exactly. Sorry, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a valid point. And so. But the
Speaker 1: so I talked about, there's also the seven experiment. It
Speaker 1: was actually a heck of a lot more successful. It
Speaker 1: was kind of a hybrid of the stack on the
Speaker 1: outside and the killed method. The same people or another
Speaker 1: group of people, well did this experiment There was they
Speaker 1: had caught into a vitrified wall to excavate it to
Speaker 1: check it out, and then they stacked a bunch of
Speaker 1: material back in that void and they tried the process there.
Speaker 1: So it's capped on the ends. They did manage to
Speaker 1: vitrify a lot of the material. Their wall didn't collapse,
Speaker 1: but it did settle. But in the reading it talks
Speaker 1: about the fact that the way it's settled and how
Speaker 1: and even the top was sort of represents other vitrified walls,
Speaker 1: which again makes sense as things settle and melt and collapse.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get unevennus. I mean what does all that mean.
Speaker 1: It means that I don't know how they did this.
Speaker 1: It's these are the two prevailing methods, pete coal some
Speaker 1: other fuel source. We we really just don't know. I
Speaker 1: really want you guys know that YouTube channel Primitive Technology.
Speaker 1: It's pretty good. Yeah. He it's just this guy that
Speaker 1: goes out into the wilderness and like basically is just
Speaker 1: working his way through primitive technology. I think he's at
Speaker 1: the Stone age. He's making He's got a furnace that
Speaker 1: he's made from clay um that he has like a
Speaker 1: little wind thing and he's making stone. Uh No, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a little fan like a hand row with
Speaker 1: a fan on the bulk of it that's in the
Speaker 1: furnace that like, yeah, basically does a mellow thing. But
Speaker 1: I think he's out he's making stone things now, so
Speaker 1: he's at the stone period. But I really just want
Speaker 1: to tell him, like, hey, next, try to figure this
Speaker 1: thing out, because he is figuring, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: refiguring things out. It's perverse engineering. It's super cool. He
Speaker 1: just like made an entire mud hut in the middle
Speaker 1: of a forest. Who yeah, but that's the only thing
Speaker 1: modern he uses. It's crazy. Well, you guys, you guys
Speaker 1: should watch him sometimes. But I want him to figure
Speaker 1: this out because I'll check that out really interesting. I
Speaker 1: feel like he would be successful. They would be like
Speaker 1: he'd be like, oh yeah, obviously that's how they did it,
Speaker 1: and do it in like two minutes, and everybody should
Speaker 1: be like because I mean, that's we talked about. There's
Speaker 1: so much fuel needed to make this process happen on
Speaker 1: this scale that nobody right. The math doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: add although I will say I feel like none of
Speaker 1: these experiments probably did justice to the amount of time
Speaker 1: and energy that was put into the originals. You know,
Speaker 1: so we say, well, the you know, the the experiments
Speaker 1: fell down, Well, did you spend a month making them?
Speaker 1: Probably not? Right. Did you spend a year and fifty
Speaker 1: people making them? Probably not? But then again that that
Speaker 1: that makes it even more mysterious, because why the hell
Speaker 1: would they take all the time and trouble to do
Speaker 1: this well to be safer in their homes. Maybe we'll
Speaker 1: actually talk about Yeah, we're gonna talk about why probably Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: actually that is aren't we have gone through theory subsection A,
Speaker 1: and we are now about to get into theory subsection B,
Speaker 1: which is why. But first let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: that's just in rich areas. Victoria van Chrest discovered deadnor
Speaker 1: hotel room in Mali while honeymooning. Uh, and of course
Speaker 1: you know gets who the main suspect is. I guess
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Speaker 1: But again, it's about a murder mystery. The heiress who's
Speaker 1: murdered on her honeymoon. Her husband James Smith, has disappeared
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Speaker 1: can't approved and we're back. Theory subsection B why why
Speaker 1: why over EMPHASI. Well, decoration is the first reason that
Speaker 1: people might have been doing this. Some researchers have theorized
Speaker 1: that the reason for the process going through the process
Speaker 1: of vitrifying the stone walls was aesthetic. Is basically, if
Speaker 1: you are so rich and so powerful in this time
Speaker 1: of history that you can exert all of that manpower
Speaker 1: and money onto a wall too, then for just decorative reasons, melted.
Speaker 1: And remember things that are glassy inside of a stone
Speaker 1: wall like that, they look a little weird, and the
Speaker 1: colors can be pretty today, not all of them are,
Speaker 1: you know, some of you can't even tell. But melted
Speaker 1: stone is a very unusual thing, and that could have
Speaker 1: been an expression of your wealth or your power to
Speaker 1: those around you, especially if you're a rich trader or
Speaker 1: a king or whatever. I don't know, I mean maybe,
Speaker 1: but that seems like it seems extravagant. But then I
Speaker 1: think about some of the castles that were built, or
Speaker 1: even things that some of the rich people do these days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just to prove how rich I am. If you look
Speaker 1: at stone work, for example, they want above and beyond
Speaker 1: what they really needed to do. Hey, we're talking above
Speaker 1: and beyond. Let's talk about like the Egyptians who marble
Speaker 1: coated and gold plated their their stone structures to their
Speaker 1: own death. Like what yea, So it's it's not outside
Speaker 1: the realm of possibility. Uh. The next sub theory here
Speaker 1: as to a reason. This is actually one that I
Speaker 1: came up with on my own, and I titled this stability.
Speaker 1: If these walls are a couple of feet thick, if
Speaker 1: We live in Portland where for the last several years
Speaker 1: we've gotten a ton of rain in the wintertime and
Speaker 1: stack stone walls that have been in place for over
Speaker 1: a hundred years have started to blow out because of
Speaker 1: the water pressure. And they're just one layer two layers deep.
Speaker 1: Now imagine what would happen if all of those stones,
Speaker 1: like a concrete or mortared wall, were welded together. They
Speaker 1: would be less likely to bulge out. You wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to build in dead man, which is a you know
Speaker 1: what the dead man is, Okay? It is something that
Speaker 1: penetrates into the embankment of the wall and is like
Speaker 1: a T structure that is tied to the wall. So
Speaker 1: in order from the wall, yeah, it's an anchor for
Speaker 1: the wall to push out that whole T structure that
Speaker 1: dead Man's got to come out. Well, you don't have
Speaker 1: to do that if the entire wall is unified in
Speaker 1: its whole expanse. And Scotland is much like us here
Speaker 1: in terms of they get at least as much, if
Speaker 1: not more rain than we do, so this would be
Speaker 1: a great reason. Take embankments on the hill that your
Speaker 1: villager fort or castle is built on top of and
Speaker 1: vitrify them because the thing is not going to blow
Speaker 1: out from underneath you in giant rain storm or ice. You. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't have nearly the kind of effect that
Speaker 1: they would on just a simple stack wall. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, if you've got you know, water stuck in
Speaker 1: between every single one of those little rocks and it,
Speaker 1: you know, freezes and expands, and you know, it's going
Speaker 1: to be harder for it to destroy it. So I mean, again,
Speaker 1: this is this is what I was thinking of as
Speaker 1: I was doing the reading. It's not any reading. It's
Speaker 1: what I think of two, which is like weird, but
Speaker 1: nobody else thinks that, which makes me think that there's
Speaker 1: that's like I always have this thing when we have
Speaker 1: some so obvious idea, right, we're missing something. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: obviously we're just the idiots. That's a way too easy. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't think stability was really the issue though, because
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of structures that were built
Speaker 1: back in those days that are still around and so
Speaker 1: maybe stability was not that necessary. I think the stability
Speaker 1: ideas for more of the ones that were built as
Speaker 1: kind of ramparts or embankments, because there is there's one
Speaker 1: I can I don't know the name of it because
Speaker 1: there's so many of them and they are impronounceable for me,
Speaker 1: because I cannot do that like the Scottish Gaelic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't do it. But it is a big hill
Speaker 1: top that is nothing but vitrified stone for what looks
Speaker 1: like to be fifty or a hundred feet of the
Speaker 1: top of that that hill. It's yeah, it's pretty another
Speaker 1: way you're talking about, it's like about a hundred about
Speaker 1: two hundred yards. But it makes sense. Why if you
Speaker 1: were trying to keep that thing from washing out from
Speaker 1: underneath you, why I would think you would vitrify it,
Speaker 1: hold it in place a lot in the case of
Speaker 1: a lot of these, correctly if I'm wrong, but don't.
Speaker 1: Isn't there generally a belief that there was an outer
Speaker 1: layer of larger cut stones that were stacked, you know,
Speaker 1: on the outside of that, and now that those have
Speaker 1: been removed to vitrify or not yet put in place
Speaker 1: to vitrify that stone. That does not sound familiar to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most everything I've read about is like, this is the wall,
Speaker 1: and this is what it is, and we're not gonna
Speaker 1: we're not gonna then put a dress layer on. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So in that case, they were just using smaller rocks
Speaker 1: that weren't cut and shaped and everything to stack upon
Speaker 1: one or another. So that's not I guess that would
Speaker 1: be kind of necessary for your stability. Otherwise you're for it.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like an oversized gravel pile. Exactly,
Speaker 1: exactly right. So let's go into the next layer of
Speaker 1: the theory of why this was done. And this this
Speaker 1: section of why is that it was done for intentionally
Speaker 1: destroying the fort or the walls, and there's subsections to this. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it's going to make a little sense, but we're
Speaker 1: going to start with who would have done this in
Speaker 1: order to destroy the walls? And that is the original
Speaker 1: residence of said fort. It's like, I'm sick of this. Look,
Speaker 1: let's yeah, I have been asking you to redecorate for
Speaker 1: years and you just won't do it. No. The theory
Speaker 1: says that the residents were leaving the place that they lived,
Speaker 1: and instead of leaving this nicely made for to vacation
Speaker 1: for the next group to come along and just occupy
Speaker 1: without exerting any effort. They went ahead and decided that
Speaker 1: what they needed to do was burn that mother to
Speaker 1: the ground. And so they pulled parts of the walls
Speaker 1: down through this fuel in there and then lit the
Speaker 1: whole thing on fire in an attempt to destroy it.
Speaker 1: It's an awful lot of work to do to destroy
Speaker 1: a place you lived up because but it's also like
Speaker 1: two hundred of them over the Yeah, that's like a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of them. But that the thing
Speaker 1: about it is is that it would be easier just
Speaker 1: to dismantle it than to card the wood or coal
Speaker 1: or whatever up there. It would be. But the other
Speaker 1: thing about that that I that occurred to me is
Speaker 1: if you think about the times and everything, I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe they did it for say, superstitious reasons, like they've
Speaker 1: been living there and they decided for what whatever reason,
Speaker 1: the place was cursed or haunted and they decided it
Speaker 1: had to be to destroyed. It couldn't just be you know,
Speaker 1: we can't just move out, We've got to burn this
Speaker 1: spirit or whatever. Or it could be that maybe there
Speaker 1: was some sort of a plague thing going on and
Speaker 1: they decided that disease that kind they said, decided to
Speaker 1: burn the thing to kill off disease. My I understand that.
Speaker 1: My my issue with it is that it took so
Speaker 1: much time and effort to get the fuel there that
Speaker 1: usually when when people were leaving the site that they
Speaker 1: had lived on, there was two reasons or meaning impending
Speaker 1: threat of war and I got to get my stuff
Speaker 1: and get out of here or famine. I got no food,
Speaker 1: so I'm I'm weak and I need to go somewhere
Speaker 1: to where I can eat, neither of which I would
Speaker 1: think would encourage people to stick around and that and
Speaker 1: do all that work to light the walls and fire
Speaker 1: to destroy them. They mean, it's literally it's raising your home,
Speaker 1: and that's just so much work. In either of those scenarios,
Speaker 1: it's a good argument for building your house or your
Speaker 1: city out of wood. So it's a lot of you
Speaker 1: just you know, torch it. When your enemies think the
Speaker 1: same thing, I know they like it to but and
Speaker 1: that's that's what why I like my my my ghost
Speaker 1: ghost Castle idea a little better, my ghost Forward idea
Speaker 1: a little bit better. Yeah, because yeah, even though that's lonely,
Speaker 1: it's silly, but you know, hey, you gotta curse. You
Speaker 1: gotta do what it takes to get rid of that curse. Okay, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like the B part of this theory better. Well,
Speaker 1: the B part of this theory is actually pretty robusting,
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. This is where we're gonna have
Speaker 1: the fun tonight. Not not that we haven't been having
Speaker 1: any fun, I promise. Uh. Section B of intentional destruction
Speaker 1: was that the destroyers were the conquerors, the people who
Speaker 1: conquered that place. I mean, it makes more sense, it does,
Speaker 1: And actually that was very common back in the old days.
Speaker 1: It's happened all throughout the world. They took raising your
Speaker 1: enemies home. Yeah, I mean the torch entire I mean
Speaker 1: entire walled town's, entire cities were completely destroyed. Not just torch,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you know, disassembled, sending the message. Because
Speaker 1: what you're doing, you're sending a message to everybody else.
Speaker 1: If you opposed me, this is your fate. So go
Speaker 1: ahead oppose me, and it's your fault. You knew what
Speaker 1: was coming. I still think it was a little wasteful
Speaker 1: when I think about, like when you think about all
Speaker 1: around you know, all across here, like Alexandria, in places
Speaker 1: like that, all these places that were just completely destroyed
Speaker 1: by the invading army, all throughout ancient Greece and everywhere else.
Speaker 1: You know, they'd still be there and they'd be very
Speaker 1: cool archaeological size today, but damn it, some jerk decided
Speaker 1: to be more fun to take them apart. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: was just thinking, I almost wonder if, because I know
Speaker 1: we're going to talk, actually, why don't you talk about
Speaker 1: the thing you're about to talk about and then I'll
Speaker 1: talk about the thing I'm going to talk about. Okay,
Speaker 1: So she's given me my marching order, so I'm just
Speaker 1: going that. Er. So this part of the theory is,
Speaker 1: so this is theory be Subsection one is that it
Speaker 1: was all done by hand, all of the destruct Again,
Speaker 1: I'd see issues with soldiers who were very who have
Speaker 1: just spent all this time and energy conquering somewhere then
Speaker 1: turning around and having to scavenge the landscape for material
Speaker 1: to burn. Yeah. So here's here's my thing is what
Speaker 1: I don't know what there is to say that these
Speaker 1: walls that the stones weren't actually the middle part, or
Speaker 1: actually I thought they could have been the middle part,
Speaker 1: the filler between two larger walls that were stack stone. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: so the reason I'm saying this is it could have
Speaker 1: even earthen walls with wood in the middle, right, and
Speaker 1: that it wasn't that the armies were like, all right,
Speaker 1: was drag a bunch of wood up here to like
Speaker 1: set it on fire, but that they accidentally did the
Speaker 1: kill either of the first methods on how by just
Speaker 1: saying all right, like set the fire, set the fire
Speaker 1: on the wood, just towards the whole thing, and then
Speaker 1: walked away from it. And for whatever reason, by coincidence,
Speaker 1: that the wind was blowing perfectly and there was just
Speaker 1: amount you know, that the conditions were just right for
Speaker 1: it to vitrify the stone walls instead of just you know,
Speaker 1: burning then the stone crumbles and whatever, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, Like I almost wonder if it was just
Speaker 1: like that, because I again, like the two hundred spread
Speaker 1: over this distance, it's not as though it's like every
Speaker 1: fort in a given space, right, So I almost wonder
Speaker 1: if if there's some sort of addition to the like
Speaker 1: joke keeps thinking right that like that, that maybe that
Speaker 1: wasn't the entire wall, that there was some more components
Speaker 1: to the wall, and that we just don't I mean,
Speaker 1: that's lost to history. It's possible, and and so the
Speaker 1: I mean it's because of the heat that it's taken.
Speaker 1: If this was done right, these fires could have literally
Speaker 1: been burning for days. And in a time and era
Speaker 1: where you don't see lights at night, that is going
Speaker 1: to be very frightening to the villages and towns around
Speaker 1: you to see that that this town is torched and
Speaker 1: it is still on fire three days later. Or but
Speaker 1: at the same time to where you're talking about, like
Speaker 1: maybe it had earthen structure and then would there's a well.
Speaker 1: But I'm thinking is that there's a couple of them
Speaker 1: that it doesn't make sense because they're all different shapes
Speaker 1: and sizes. There's like the one that popped in my mind.
Speaker 1: I think it's called uh Mark's Moat or the Moat
Speaker 1: of Mark. I can't remember which one it is, but
Speaker 1: the images I've seen, it's like a space the let's
Speaker 1: say the size of this this building that we're in,
Speaker 1: but it's all flat, it's all in the ground. There's
Speaker 1: no raised wall, so it's almost like the ground was vitrified.
Speaker 1: So I mean, that might lend credence to where you're
Speaker 1: going with it, but I don't know. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's super confusing because because we don't know how it
Speaker 1: was done. That's what's so confusing about the thing about
Speaker 1: it is too, is that maybe you know, if they
Speaker 1: were under siege, for example, which would probably have happened
Speaker 1: before you know, your little fort falls and the then
Speaker 1: vitrified for you. Maybe you know, back in the old
Speaker 1: days of siege warfare, they didn't have siege machines or
Speaker 1: anything else or a huge army. They would just like
Speaker 1: they would just wait them out. Yeah, they would do that,
Speaker 1: and it might have been well, that's that could be
Speaker 1: a long, tedious process sometimes depending on where the water
Speaker 1: supplies inside, how much food they got squirreled away. Maybe
Speaker 1: a more proactive way to do it is to go
Speaker 1: cut down the forest nearby, stack up all those trees
Speaker 1: and lumber all the way around the fort, and just
Speaker 1: light it and just light it and you could basically
Speaker 1: asphixiate probably everybody inside the place. You probably you probably could,
Speaker 1: and your problem is done, and so you're just like, hey,
Speaker 1: that's it. And of course you sort of do a
Speaker 1: little bitrification at the same time, but the purpose is
Speaker 1: really just effect yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's I guess
Speaker 1: that's kind of my thoughts as well as that it's
Speaker 1: you know, there's nothing to say this was intentional, right
Speaker 1: though again we well we're actually gonna get into some
Speaker 1: intentional reasons, so we we destruction. Well, yeah, in the
Speaker 1: in the destruction by the conquerors theory, there are some
Speaker 1: intentional ways that this possibly could have done. Let's let's
Speaker 1: actually those are the next bits that we have. This
Speaker 1: is my original theory. Yes, I know, so this one
Speaker 1: is saying that the conquerors did this, but much like
Speaker 1: Joe said, they did it as a way to burn
Speaker 1: their enemies out. And they did it using archimedes death ray,
Speaker 1: which is really fun. And for those of you who
Speaker 1: have not heard of archimedes death ray, uh, it's an
Speaker 1: invention that he came up with. It's called his death
Speaker 1: ray or his heat ray. Archimedes lived about two hundred
Speaker 1: BC E but he's described in the Siege of Syracuse
Speaker 1: as having destroyed the ships of the Romans using a
Speaker 1: device which was basically a series of giant mirrors that
Speaker 1: focused the sunlight and would catch those ships on fire.
Speaker 1: Then they obviously they burn sinkster did, yes, they did?
Speaker 1: How did it turn out? Not so good? It's actually
Speaker 1: one of my favorite screen caps of all time from
Speaker 1: MythBusters has just got Adams Savage standing in like kind
Speaker 1: of a bright light saying I'm standing right in the
Speaker 1: death Oh no, it's not even Adam, it's Jamie, one
Speaker 1: of them standing in the middle of a bright slightly
Speaker 1: bright spot and saying, as you can see, I'm standing
Speaker 1: right in our death ray and I'm not dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they I mean, yeah, it's certainly they had this
Speaker 1: technology in northern Scotland at the time, and the enemies
Speaker 1: were directing the beams of their death rays on the
Speaker 1: walls of the fort and melting them. It actually is
Speaker 1: a viable technology, but the array of mirrors you would
Speaker 1: have to have it. You've seen that. You've seen that
Speaker 1: solar collector in southern California, right, and one that's got
Speaker 1: the big tower with the bulb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that day is what is that thing like
Speaker 1: a kilometer in diameter or something like that. I have
Speaker 1: no idea. Yeah, I mean, and it made a pretty
Speaker 1: huge array of mirrors first shire, So its great idea,
Speaker 1: but I think it's pretty funny. Okay, We'll go on
Speaker 1: to the next tool that the enemies were using. Uh,
Speaker 1: that is Greek fire, which if you don't know what
Speaker 1: Greek fire is, well nobody else knows. Yeah, so good.
Speaker 1: Any but Greek fire was most likely some form of
Speaker 1: crude petroleum. I just want to point out the number
Speaker 1: of times you use the word crude in this. What's
Speaker 1: because it's crude. It's crude. I can't have to joke
Speaker 1: because it's crude oil. What would happen is, so the
Speaker 1: Romans used this, and they would they used it naval
Speaker 1: battles because it's scared the hell out of their enemies
Speaker 1: because it's petroleum. So it burns while it's on top
Speaker 1: of the water. And what they would do, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they sprayed at their enemies, or they would throw it
Speaker 1: in these kind of rudimentary grenades, yeah, like phases or whatnot,
Speaker 1: and it would hit and it would splatter everywhere, and
Speaker 1: then somehow they would you know, shoot it arrow at
Speaker 1: it that was on fire. You know, the the old
Speaker 1: movie trope of shoot the burning arrow. That's what they
Speaker 1: would do. So the theory goes that the invaders had
Speaker 1: Greek fire and they were throwing it at the wall
Speaker 1: and that was the fuel that then created such intense
Speaker 1: heats that it vitrified the stones. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: I actually would say that if this were true, it
Speaker 1: would I would put this more on me. We did
Speaker 1: it intentionally in the building process, because it would be
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot easier to create the heat
Speaker 1: with this kind of fuel source than it would be
Speaker 1: packing all that would to the site. Yeah, except for
Speaker 1: you know, the people who were building the forts might
Speaker 1: not have had Greek fire slash petroleum. But if they
Speaker 1: had Greek fire, then it would be a hell of
Speaker 1: a lot easier. Agreed. But the isn't this theory that
Speaker 1: the attackers had Greek fire. I feel like it would
Speaker 1: make more sense if it had been the builders had
Speaker 1: the Greek because if Greek fire, if the technology of
Speaker 1: Greek fire existed, then you would think that most everybody
Speaker 1: would know most everybody, I understand, the technology is not
Speaker 1: universally applied. Well, I guess not necessarily, because you you know, petroleum,
Speaker 1: you have to actually like mine, right, he's not mine.
Speaker 1: Theres even in the ancient world in the Middle East
Speaker 1: where it was actually just right, but in the Middle
Speaker 1: East not in Scotland, right, So it was trade going
Speaker 1: on between the Middle East of scott But if we're saying,
Speaker 1: like the Romans of the prehistoric North Scotland to Arabia
Speaker 1: pipeline exactly, it's made out of bamboo. But yeah, it worked. Yea.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that the Romans had a lot of
Speaker 1: control in the Middle East in this time, right, Scotland didn't. Um.
Speaker 1: So if we're saying, you know, it is the Romans
Speaker 1: are coming to invade Scotland, they could have easily had
Speaker 1: access to something that they didn't have in Scotland, which
Speaker 1: is petroleum, which you know, I think this is actually
Speaker 1: one of the better theories somehow. Honestly, it's good to know.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a really crappy theory. Nukes, Yes, there
Speaker 1: is that. It was nuclear weapons. This is the greatest
Speaker 1: thing freaking internets. Somebody on the internet once when hey,
Speaker 1: you know, nuclear blasts or hot enough to melt stone, wait,
Speaker 1: vitrified stones happened in the ancient world. The ancients had
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons. I really, I think that's all the further
Speaker 1: we need to take it, because that would be so
Speaker 1: I mean that that that family guy skit which we've
Speaker 1: talked about before. I don't think this is it. No,
Speaker 1: it's part of the problem is is that you got
Speaker 1: we're talking like, I mean, the temperature is right at
Speaker 1: ground zero and a nuclear blast were like five million
Speaker 1: something ludicrous like that. So this would be way further out,
Speaker 1: and there would be all kinds of vitrified stuff in
Speaker 1: a circle, you know, along with you and a radius,
Speaker 1: and creator would be a creator. I mean, the creator
Speaker 1: could have overgrown, but there would have to be other
Speaker 1: bitrified you find like maybe a cliff or a rock
Speaker 1: face and I've been subbly melted, you know, in the
Speaker 1: area you find all kinds of stuff like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: there would be. But don't you left out my favorite theory,
Speaker 1: which is, according to ancient astronaut theorists, um, ancient alien
Speaker 1: technology could have been employed here. It's such a thing
Speaker 1: even possible. It is. What if they had a battle,
Speaker 1: wasn't invading Aliens and and they got like laser or
Speaker 1: something like that, Scotsman versus Aliens. It's such a thing
Speaker 1: even possible. Yes, why not? It is? Is it irrefutable? No?
Speaker 1: Is it possible? Yes? Actually it is. I think it
Speaker 1: is irrefutable because can you come up with like a
Speaker 1: good way to refute that? Drunk? Yes, are you drunk?
Speaker 1: That's problem? All right, you guys got any other theories
Speaker 1: you want to run through this one? Just a quick question.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not really sure how much archaeology they've
Speaker 1: done around these things. I mean, do they keep calling
Speaker 1: them vitrified forts? Do they? Does anybody actually know if
Speaker 1: they're truly fortu or not. Well, some of the a
Speaker 1: number of them, it is obvious that there was a
Speaker 1: settlement inside of them, Like the one I was talking
Speaker 1: about that looks like it's on the giant embankments. There's
Speaker 1: one where it is um, oh gosh, what is the
Speaker 1: it's two columns with an arch that. Yeah, So like
Speaker 1: that's very intentionally done and somebody lived in that. The
Speaker 1: reason the reason I'm asking is, you know, maybe they
Speaker 1: were not built before its Maybe they were built to
Speaker 1: be ceremonial site and maybe lighting a giant bonfire to
Speaker 1: the gods once a year or once and a once
Speaker 1: in a lifetime or whatever. That's how they broke it in.
Speaker 1: It's like we gotta seremon this mornial site. Now we've
Speaker 1: gotta like, you know, pile of this wood or coal
Speaker 1: or whatever and have this huge fire and because I
Speaker 1: mean they're actually on fires, yeah, or even like funeral fires. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could have been that two sacrifices. But I mean
Speaker 1: there's places like if you look at Sexy Woman in
Speaker 1: in Peru, which looks if you look at it, it
Speaker 1: looks like we're just a huge, freaking three tiered fortress.
Speaker 1: And I said, I said, I've got pictures of it.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you guys have seen pictures of it. It's
Speaker 1: amazingly impressive. And but it's not a fortress at all.
Speaker 1: It was not built to be a fortress. It was
Speaker 1: actually built just as a ceremonial site. And so you know,
Speaker 1: it's entirely possible these things were built as ceremonial sites
Speaker 1: and there was no invader, conquer or whatever. They just
Speaker 1: had a religious ceremony on their hands. Yeah, they had
Speaker 1: too much time on their hands. Well you know, I
Speaker 1: mean people did make the time to do stuff. I
Speaker 1: mean again back to back to Peru and sex type woman.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously that took a massive amount of effort
Speaker 1: to build that thing, and those people did it. And uh,
Speaker 1: and so it could have been just you know, once
Speaker 1: a year or once in a lifetime whatever, we had
Speaker 1: this massive fire and for to a piece of gods
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, I mean I can't see that. That's
Speaker 1: not right, you know, I mean, it's it's entirely possible
Speaker 1: because again, as I've said a jillion times, you have
Speaker 1: no nobody had. We can all speculate or another possibility
Speaker 1: I'm sewing this up for our archaeology like anthropology, major listeners.
Speaker 1: Another possibility is supposing they were ceremonial sites and the
Speaker 1: fires were not not part of the ceremony, but there
Speaker 1: was like you know, it's happened sometimes in human history,
Speaker 1: there was kind of a change of religion and suddenly
Speaker 1: the old stealing it. You almost need to be like
Speaker 1: kind of scoured and done away with. And so you know,
Speaker 1: maybe that's the reason that they were all all flamed,
Speaker 1: because otherwise, when you think about it, if you're the invader,
Speaker 1: and it makes it's less work to just dismantle it
Speaker 1: and sow the stones down the hillside, then the card
Speaker 1: in all that number, it's less work if you're the invader.
Speaker 1: And and also, by the way, some of those stones
Speaker 1: might even be useful. You know, you build your own
Speaker 1: stuff out, but yeah, you can call them a way
Speaker 1: to build your new castle. Yeah you could do that too.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so so to me, it makes utterly no
Speaker 1: sense in terms of destroying just somebody's city to to
Speaker 1: try to burn it like that. It just doesn't. So
Speaker 1: so yeah, if it makes no sense, but let's bring
Speaker 1: in some religion to see if that explains it, or
Speaker 1: superstition or something like that. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe that
Speaker 1: would be because that's not practical. I'm not putting down religion,
Speaker 1: but when you're talking about like, you know, you're an
Speaker 1: invading army, you want to do what's practical. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you've practical. You've already killed everybody. Now how do we
Speaker 1: just mantle this the most efficient way possible? Well, I
Speaker 1: think that's a good a good point to to break
Speaker 1: this off always the best I don't want to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry if anybody's offended by that. And we know
Speaker 1: everybody understands that. Yeah, you're not bashing Joe. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: but I don't know, but I think anything else thought
Speaker 1: that that. Nope, that's about it. Yeah, aliens religion, and
Speaker 1: we really cover the Gama. Yeah, we really pretty hard.
Speaker 1: All right, Well this is a good classic. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: Well let's give you all of the important details about
Speaker 1: the podcast. We've got a website Thinking Sideways Podcast dot Calm,
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Speaker 1: that having been said and all those bases covered, I
Speaker 1: think it's time to rock on. You've been saving that
Speaker 1: one the entire episode, haven't you. Yep. He spends the
Speaker 1: entire the entire week just thinking three weeks. I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure it's a hard job. Oh my god. All right,
Speaker 1: well I'm I'm all burned out, so uh yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna flaming out here. Okay, solid by O