Speaker 1: Have you ever had that feeling, that really strange, almost
uncanny feeling of walking down into history.
Speaker 2: I know exactly what you mean.
Speaker 1: I mean, literally, you're walking down a set of stairs, four, five,
maybe even six steps, just to get to what you
know was the original ground floor of an ancient church somewhere,
or you know, a historic building in London.
Speaker 2: It's a physical paradox, isn't it. You're standing there on
modern asphalt and you're looking down at what should be
the entrance level of a structure that was built centuries ago.
Speaker 1: And you just realized that multiple feet of solid earth
have somehow accumulated all around it. We hear about places
like Seattle or London where entire city blocks exist now
just as subterranean basements beneath the current street level, the
whole world down there exactly. And you stand there and
you think, wait a second. This building was supposedly built
on the surface, you know, hundreds of years ago. Where
on Earth did all this material, all this dirt and
rock and rubble, Where did it come from to bury
it by several meters?
Speaker 2: That is the core question.
Speaker 1: That's the question we're unlocking today, and it's a question
that is launched, I mean countless archaeological digs and as
we're about to see countless conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: Our mission today is well, it's intrinsically layered, which feels appropriate.
It mirrors the very history we're about to discuss. We
are setting out on a three part journey.
Speaker 1: Okay, So first.
Speaker 2: We'll explore the factual, often mundane, but really immensely powerful
mechanisms that literally bury our past. We're talking about the
slow creep of geology, the accumulation of waste, and the intentional,
hard decisions of city engineers.
Speaker 1: And then we're going to jump head first right into
the deep end of internet lore. We're going to analyze
this pervasive yet completely debunked pseudohistory known as the mud flood.
Speaker 2: And the bizarre but very appealing myth of Tartaria, which
tries to explain all these buried buildings through one single, sudden,
global catastrophic event.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's part two.
Speaker 2: And then finally we are to connect this whole theme
of forgotten history and a race memory to a verified, massive,
yet tragically overlooked, real world catastrophe from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: And that will allow us to draw a pretty stark
and necessary contrast, I think between the fabricated history people
seem to be seeking and the real, devastating history that
we so often ignore.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Our stack of sources for this deep dive is as
diverse as the layers of history were digging through. We've
got well everything, a really lively, very pragmatic Reddit thread
discussing the physics of city burial all.
Speaker 2: The way up to academic research on the chronological evolution
of historical foundation engineering.
Speaker 1: We've also drawn on a library of Congress deep dive
on historical cartography, which is fascinating, analyzes of the Tartaria
Conspiracy from both the British Columbia Storical Federation and Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: And crucially research on the nineteenth century global famine from
Columbia University's Lamont Door Already Earth Observatory.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty wide range it is.
Speaker 2: This is truly an exploration that forces us to reconcile
what the ground is telling us, layer by layer, with
what are often incomplete or sometimes you know, deliberately filtered
historical records actually claim we have to look down, deep
down to really understand the past.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's untack this starting with the cold, hard, accumulating facts.
I guess we can call this section death by a
thousand cuts, or maybe death by a billion dropped pieces
of litter.
Speaker 2: That's probably more accurate.
Speaker 1: So when people look at an archway or you know,
a basement window that's clearly buried two meters deep, their
minds immediately jump to these huge conclusions massive floods, earthquakes.
Speaker 2: They dramatic events, right, But.
Speaker 1: The sources are really clear on this. The primary mechanisms
are actually incredibly mundane, gradual, and most importantly constant.
Speaker 2: That's the key distinction, isn't it. It's this idea of
constant deposition versus deterioration. For an elevation to rise, material
has to accumulate fast than it's removed by erosion or
you know, human intervention.
Speaker 1: So the simple math problem really more stuff coming in
than going.
Speaker 2: Out, basically. Yeah, And archaeologists, especially those working in the
Middle East and Anatolia, they have a specific term for
the small hills created by centuries of this accumulated settlement material.
They call it a tell.
Speaker 1: A tell and a tel is essentially a mound that's
built entirely of human history. It's broken pottery collapsed walls,
centuries of refuse.
Speaker 2: It's history literally piling up on itself.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And what's really interesting is that it doesn't even need
human activity to get started. I mean, we're talking about
just organic debris.
Speaker 1: And neglect, so just nature taking over exactly.
Speaker 2: One of the sources was an anecdote from a Reddit
user mentioned to video showing a modern driveway that was
eventually just lost. It disappeared under simple overgrowth and fallen leaves.
Speaker 1: I can believe that.
Speaker 2: Constant cycle of growth, death and decomposition of organic matter
over time, it just turns into new fertile soil. It
builds up.
Speaker 1: I think we all have a garden sheder. You a
corner of the yard where we've ignored leaf build up
for a season or two, and you realize how quickly
a little depression can fill in head. So multiply that
by a thousand years, and suddenly the logic just clicks
into place.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And the natural analogy is so powerful here. If
you abandon a site long enough, sooner or later, as
one source put it, your machi pichi is covered in jungle.
Speaker 1: That doesn't require some catastrophic mudwight.
Speaker 2: No, it just requires a lack of constant, dedicated maintenance
over centuries. If humans step away, nature starts that burial
process almost immediately.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now let's bring humans back into the picture,
because this is where it gets pretty visceral, especially in
the context of ancient and medieval European cities. We have
to talk about the role of waste. Yes, when we
discuss urban centers that don't have modern sewer systems, which
was the standard in antiquity all the way through the
early modern period, that waste had to go somewhere.
Speaker 2: And that somewhere was nine times out of ten, the street.
We are talking about everything animal droppings from livestock and.
Speaker 1: Transport horses, oxen, everything.
Speaker 2: Human waste from chamber pots, kitchen rubbish, food scraps, break
in ceramics, you name it. This organic and inorganic material
just decayed, mixed with dust and it accumulated, literally creating
new layers of dirt.
Speaker 1: And I imagine it just compounded the problem of already
terrible roads.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, when the streets became these deeply rudded muddy
measures during rainy seasons, especially with all that organic slot
mixed in city planners or just you know, regular property owners.
They didn't dig the sludge out.
Speaker 1: That would be way too much work.
Speaker 2: It was too much effort, so they took the path
of least resistance. They just threw down more earth, more
sand or gravel right on top to make the roads
less muddy and more passable.
Speaker 1: So it's this continuous incremental infrastructure driven process. Yeah, every
single time they fixed the road, they were actually just
adding to the layer cake.
Speaker 2: Of history, which means a ground level entrance that was
perfectly fine in say fourteen, by seventeen fifty one or
two steps under the new street level.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And one source put it really bluntly, the accumulation is
literally just people dropping litter or similar because systematic city
wide waste disposal was simply not a priority compared to
the immediate need to move goods and people.
Speaker 1: Right, survival and commerce first. Cleanliness much later, much later, and.
Speaker 2: This accumulation factor goes up significantly when we factor in demolition.
When a building was destroyed, say by one of the
frequent medieval city fires, or it just collapsed due to
poor foundational work.
Speaker 1: It was far easier and cheaper to just level the
rubble right, push it into the street, or a neighboring
vacant lot and then build the news structure right on
top of the old foundation.
Speaker 2: Much easier than paying for the labor and transport required
to haul all that debris out of the city gates.
Speaker 1: So villages and cities literally grew upwards, fueled by their
own garbage and the ruins of previous jets.
Speaker 2: We have some fantastic, relatable anecdotal evidence for this from
the sources in the UK. There's a specific church that
was mentioned that has been in continuous use and maintained
for approximately one thousand years.
Speaker 1: One thousand years, so they have been taken care of constantly.
Speaker 2: But despite all that dedication, visitors today still have to
descend four or five steps from the modern street level
just to get to the churchyard.
Speaker 1: So even with maintenance, the world rowse up around it.
Speaker 2: Exactly That telltale accumulation happens around even the most actively
preserved sites. It's the surrounding infrastructure, the street that defines
the new elevation.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if gradual accumulation is this slow, almost geological process,
then intentional raising is the sudden surgical procedure where an
entire urban area just decided okay, everyone we are all
going up together.
Speaker 2: And these intentional efforts they usually occurred when basic infrastructure,
particularly sanitation, reached a critical breaking point. The most famous
example in American history is, of course, should Cago in
the eighteen fifties and sixties.
Speaker 1: Tell us about the scale of that. It's just mind boggling,
it really is.
Speaker 2: Chicago was built on swampy ground and it had terrible
natural drainage. So after repeated epidemics and the realization that
their water table and their sewage were mixing not a
good combination, a very bad combination, they decided to implement
a full sewer system. But this required the streets to
be raised dramatically by as much as fourteen feet in
some areas fourteen feet. But they didn't demolish the city.
This is the amazing part. They used thousands of jackscrews
to literally raise hundreds of building, shops, hotels, entire blocks
up to the new street grid.
Speaker 1: It just lifted them.
Speaker 2: It lifted them. Sometimes they'd even put them on wheels
and relocate them. It was a massive, documented engineering feet
driven entirely by the need for sanitation.
Speaker 1: And fourteen feet is more than enough to completely bury
a ground floor and turn it into a sub basement. Absolutely,
and Seattle has a similar story, but for in even
more let's say immediate reason, their famous underground.
Speaker 2: Seattle's history is wonderfully visceral. The original downtown camps were
built right on the tidal plane, and the plumbing systems
were well rudimentary is a kind word.
Speaker 1: So what happened when the pie.
Speaker 2: Came in the lower level toilets or literally just the
sewage and the pipes would flood, it would back up
into the buildings. It was a sanitation nightmare, driven entirely
by geography.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful motivator for change, tidal backflow into your
living room.
Speaker 2: Indeed, it is. The solution was to move the entire
city one floor higher. They've built these huge retaining walls,
filled the streets in with earth, and elevated the.
Speaker 1: Sidewalks, and today you can take a tour through that
entire original city.
Speaker 2: You can. It's now the underground level, complete with original
shopfronts and walkways, all sitting two meters beneath modern day
Pioneer Square.
Speaker 1: So we've got slow waste build up, we have rapid
infrastructure overhaul, but geography itself is often the culprit right.
We have to consider environmental factors likes and sediment deposition absolutely.
Speaker 2: Think about how cities historically chose their locations. They always
needed easy access to.
Speaker 1: Water, right for drinking, for transport, for.
Speaker 2: Everything, which often meant building on soft round wetlands, river floodplains,
or areas above shallow aquifers over centuries. Especially when that
soil is saturated, it compresses it subsides, so the buildings.
Speaker 1: Are literally sinking over long periods of time.
Speaker 2: Yes, parts of Chicago still deal with this. Mexico City
is a famous modern example. The ground is just compacting
under the weight.
Speaker 1: And then there are cities that are just naturally situated
in what the source is call depositional zones.
Speaker 2: This is critical for places like Rome. Cities near rivers
or their deltas naturally accumulate sediment when those rivers flood.
Speaker 1: It's just what rivers do, They carry silts exactly.
Speaker 2: The Tiber in Rome, which was notorious for flooding, could
dump a meter of sediment in certain areas during a
major inundation. So faced with perpetual mud and rise and
ground levels, people had no choice. They had to repeatedly
build up their entrances in their ground floors. Every flood
added a new, often thick layer to the historical record.
Speaker 1: And finally, of course, we can't forget the impact of rapid,
large scale destruction. Catastrophic events massive fires, repeated earthquakes or
war resulted in tons and tons.
Speaker 2: Of rubble, and as we noted, when you're rebuilding, it
was often just simplest to flatten the rubble and start
the new foundation right on top of the old flattened ruins.
Speaker 1: That's the most straightforward way an old ground floor becomes
a modern cellar.
Speaker 2: It's the most direct path.
Speaker 1: So okay, cities get buried through decay, bad infrastructure, or
local disasters. That seems to cover the vast majority of
the buried buildings we see worldwide. But here's the extraordinary quest.
Sometimes history isn't just passively buried, it's actively deliberately concealed.
Speaker 2: This brings us to Goubuckley Tepe in Turkey. This is
the ultimate example of a pel but one that was
created not by passive accumulation, but by conscious human effort,
and it.
Speaker 1: Fundamentally challenges our deepest assumptions about the earliest human civilizations completely.
Speaker 2: For listeners who may not be familiar. Go Beckley Tepe
is an archaeological site that's dated to around twelve thousand BCE.
That's the pre Pottery Neolithic.
Speaker 1: A period so incredibly ancient, incredibly.
Speaker 2: Before its discovery, the accepted academic narrative held that humans
at that time were nomadic hunter gatherers. They were organized
simply and thought to be incapable of large scale complex construction.
Speaker 1: And Go Beckley Tappy just shatters that picture.
Speaker 2: It does. It is enormous. It features these megalithic ornate
granite structures, massive carved t shaped pillars arranged in perfect circles.
These were cathedrals, possibly dedicated to astronomical phenomena.
Speaker 1: And build with a precision that's just stunning, a.
Speaker 2: Precision in measuring true north that astounded researchers. It was
built by people we thought were still just chasing wild
game with spears.
Speaker 1: The structures predate Stonehenge by six thousand years, They predate
the Egyptian Pyramids by seven thousand years. It forced archaeologists
to completely rewrite the timeline of civilization.
Speaker 2: It suggests that complex religion and monumental architecture may have
actually predated agriculture. Not followed it, which turns the whole
story on its head.
Speaker 1: And here is the profound mystery at the heart of
it all. After thousands of years of use, the people
who built it did something unprecedented.
Speaker 2: He intentionally buried the entire site.
Speaker 1: They just covered it up completely.
Speaker 2: They concealed the ornate stonework, the pillars, the hieroglyphics beneath
tons and tons of earth. This wasn't decay or a flood.
It was a deliberate act of cultural erasure, and it
resulted in a hill that was later mistaken for a
natural geological formation for millennia.
Speaker 1: Do we know why.
Speaker 2: The specific reason for the burial remains unknown, and that
just adds to the mystery. Perhaps it was a shift
in religious practice, a desire to sanctify the area, or
maybe maybe they needed to hide powerful knowledge. We just
don't know.
Speaker 1: Regardless of the motive that intentional burial, it bays a
massive question about the fragility of history, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It absolutely does.
Speaker 1: If a technologically sophisticated culture by twelve thousand BCE standards
at least, could completely conceal their most important cultural center,
how many other secrets, how many other sophisticated civilizations like
deliberately buried beneath the surface of our planet and beneath
the surface of our historical records.
Speaker 2: That precise lack of certainty, that possibility of a massive
hidden past is the psychological and historical void that gives
irresistible rise to the theories we're about to discuss.
Speaker 1: All right, let's pivot now from verified archaeology and known
geological processes to the vast, sprawling and sometimes I have
to say, beautiful counter narrative found on the Internet, Because
when people find a buried building and they reject the
idea of gradual accumulation, the question they ask is, if
it wasn't slow dirt, what was it?
Speaker 2: And the Internet delivers an answer. Tartaria.
Speaker 1: Tartaria.
Speaker 2: This pseudohistory, which has been called the QAnon architecture by Bloomberg,
is a conspiracy theory that's gained significant traction online precisely
because it offers a single dramatic explanation for those partially
buried buildings.
Speaker 1: What's the core claim? What is the story of Tartaria?
Speaker 2: The core claim is that the Tartarian Empire was a lost,
technologically advanced global civilization, often characterized by free energy and
magnificent architecture that built these incredible structures worldwide, Okay, only
to be wiped out by a massive sudden mud flood
sometime between the eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds,
A single event, a single global event. Adherents use the
very evidence we examined in Section one, the partially buried buildings,
the sealed doors, arches, windows, several meters below modern ground level,
and they claim these must have been the original ground
floors of Tartarian structures and that they were buried by
this cataclysm.
Speaker 1: And the focus is heavily on the elaborate nineteenth and
early twentieth century architectural styles. Right, Yeah, neoclassical Bozart's Second Empire.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. They claim iconic structures like the original New
York Penn Station, massive government buildings, and especially the temporary
structures of the nineteen fifteen Panama Pacific International Exposition were
actually Dartarnian and that.
Speaker 1: Their real history was suppressed and replaced with these fabricated
construction timelines.
Speaker 2: Right. The mechanism of erasure is critical to the theory.
It's either a global mud flood that covered vast swaths
of the planet, or it's a human led conspiracy.
Speaker 1: And who is usually blamed In that version.
Speaker 2: It often points the finger at secretive elites, sometimes including
the British Empire or other specific groups, who were supposedly
jealous of Tartaria's peaceful, advanced society and therefore erased it
from the history books after the disaster. They argue that
basically all post sixteen hundred's history was fabricated to cover
up this massive global cataclysm.
Speaker 1: That is an enormous historical revision. To claim that all cartography,
all architectural records, all civil engineering history is essentially a
modern lie. But if the goal was complete e rasure,
why does the name Tartari actually appear on so many
historical maps.
Speaker 2: That's the perfect question. We have to start with the
historical cartography, because it actually provides the clearest debunking. The
name Tartary or Tartaria was never historically the political designation
for a unified, technologically advanced global empire, So what was it?
The sources, including detailed analyzes from the Library of Congress,
confirmed that Tartari was a geographical convention. It was a
term used by Europeans from the thirteenth to the nineteenth
century to vaguely refer to the massive, poorly mapped and
poorly understood regions of Central Asia and Siberia.
Speaker 1: So it was a label for here be dragons.
Speaker 2: Essentially, it was a cartographic placeholder exactly. The term lingered
long after the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire because European
cartographers just lacked reliable data for the interior of Eurasia,
so they used tartary as a catch all label. It
wasn't a political recognition.
Speaker 1: And the word choice itself is fascinating.
Speaker 2: It is the English term Tartary spelled with that extra R,
is a deliberate conflation. The Turkic group is the Tatar
with one R. European writers intentionally confused this with the
ancient Greek underworld Tartarus.
Speaker 1: So they were basically calling it hell on Earth.
Speaker 2: That confusion immediately added an ominous, uncivilized and savage connotation
to the region in the European mind. This single spelling
choice imbued the name with centuries of negative association, which
completely undermines the conspiracy theories premise of some peaceful, advanced
utopian empire.
Speaker 1: And if you look at the actual historical maps the
boundaries of Tartary are I mean, they're ridiculously inconsistent.
Speaker 2: All over the place. Ortelius in fifteen seventy showed it
as a single, massive region, but by seventeen fifty seven
Guillomdedel's map had broken it down into these fragmented regions
like Muscovite Tartary, Chinese Tartary, and Independent Tartary.
Speaker 1: That ambiguity is proof against a unified empire, not for
it exactly.
Speaker 2: You don't label a centralized government with such inconsistent, fragmented,
and geographically motivated names. And the actual Tatars are Turkic peoples,
descendants of the Golden Horde, who still live across Eastern
Europe and Russia today. They are a cultural group, not
the ruling class of a lost global superpower.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get back to the physical evidence, the alleged
proof of this sudden global mud flood catastrophe in the
eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Geologically, this is where the theory just completely collapses. A
global mud catastrophe on the scale required to bury buildings
across continents in the eighteen hundreds would leave clear, unambiguous
and uniform geological.
Speaker 1: Signatures worldwide, and we just don't see them.
Speaker 2: We don't, there's nothing. What we see is exactly what
we established in Section one local gradual processes of accumulations,
subsidence and purposeful reaising.
Speaker 1: So what about the alleged buried ground floors, the windows
and doors that are half submerged. That's the visual proof
that people point to.
Speaker 2: They are overwhelmingly basements, specifically what architects refer to as
daylight basements or English backyards. This is a crucial detail
that the conspiracy theory completely misinterprets.
Speaker 1: Can you elaborate on that? What does a daylight basement
actually look like? And why would it have windows if
it's underground?
Speaker 2: Certainly, in nineteenth century architecture, these floors were designed to
be partially below grade but still very functional. They weren't
intended for.
Speaker 1: Living quarters, so what were they for?
Speaker 2: They were for service access, the laundry, the kitchen, coal delivery, servants, entrances, storage,
and all of these functions required light and air. So
small windows, often high up on the wall and sometimes
surrounded by small excavated wells or areas, were included in
the design.
Speaker 1: So they weren't trying to hide the floor. They were
using it for service access, which just needed ventilation and
natural light.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the original intention was for that small window to
allow light in while still keeping the main public entrance
a few steps above street level for esthetic reasons.
Speaker 1: Right. And when the street level outside gradually rose over
fifty or one hundred years, yeah, due to garbage and
street leveling.
Speaker 2: As happened in every major city.
Speaker 1: Those small windows and service entrances became partially or completely buried.
It's localized, common architectural history, not a global catastrophe.
Speaker 2: It's as simple as that.
Speaker 1: Now, I have to admit one element of the Tartaria
theory is genuinely thought provoking, and this is what some
people call the infrastructure paradox. The adherents ask why would
early American or Australian settlers, who supposedly lacked basic infrastructure,
build these enormous, lavish, highly detailed buildings like the massive
six hundred and six acre Chicago World's Fair structures and
have them surrounded by nothing but unpaved dirt roads.
Speaker 2: It's a legitimate question why the immense investment in architectural
spectacle without a corresponding investment in public works like sewage,
roads and utilities.
Speaker 1: So what's the real answer If it's not they found them.
Speaker 2: There, The answer provided by historians speaks to the early
realities of capitalism and rapid industrialization. How so, well, this
is classic evidence of the prioritization of individual projects over
public infrastructure. If you are a wealthy merchant, a powerful bank,
or a major institution, you invest heavily in the most extravagant,
massive structure in town to project power and maximize your profit.
You prioritize that spectacular architecture.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, investing in comprehensive, expensive public works like paved roads
and sewage systems.
Speaker 2: It benefits everyone equally, which means the powerful institutions often
skimp on those taxes and investments. It's the prioritization of
the private spectacle over public comfort.
Speaker 1: And what about the speed of construction. Adherents claim settlers
couldn't possibly build something like the Chicago World Fare in
less than two years.
Speaker 2: And history shows that when societies prioritize an intense, large
scale project, often using massive labor forces and importantly cheap
temporary materials like plaster and wood for those exposition structures,
they can accomplish staggering feats very rapidly, so.
Speaker 1: They weren't built to last forever exactly.
Speaker 2: The existence of photographs and detailed historical records confirms this
construction happened exactly when and how our history books say
it did.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, these theories spread because they rely on this concept
of stigmatized knowledge. They appeal to a listener's skepticism about
the official narrative.
Speaker 2: Yes, the belief that the true history has been intentionally
suppressed by some elite cabal becomes for adherence, proof of
the theory's validity. If the establishment dismisses it, while they
must be hiding something. It creates a feedback loop that
protects the theory from facts.
Speaker 1: And this is where the danger lies, isn't it. While
Tartaria starts as an architectural curiosity, this reliance on an
omin present secretive elite can lead followers to connect the
theory to far more harmful narratives.
Speaker 2: Yes, often anti Semitic ones like the Great Replacement theory
or claims about wealthy families being responsible for historical cover up.
That connection is heavily documented in the source material.
Speaker 1: It highlights why active counter strategies are so important.
Speaker 2: It does because these theories appeal to emotion and traditional
debunking just stating the facts often doesn't work. We should
be focused more on pre bunking. What's that, preemptively teaching
critical thinking skills and building resistance to disinformation before a
person encounters the specific conspiracy.
Speaker 1: So we've established that the ground accumulates material, sometimes intentionally,
and that the fantasy of a mud flood relies on
misinterpreting common architectural elements. Now let's go back to the
world of concrete piles and human ingenuity and see how
real engineers fought the slow, relentless sink of history.
Speaker 2: A crucial pivot.
Speaker 1: Yes, we focused on why cities get buried. Now we
examine how builders and engineers, starting six thousand years ago
tried to prevent their structures from sinking, tilting, or collapsing
in the first place. This is a chronological evolution of
structural thinking.
Speaker 2: And it's an exploration of the fundamental distinction that early
builders had to slowly learn, the difference between a foundation
with a compositional function and one with a mechanical function.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2: Early on foundations were mostly about getting things level and
looking right. It was about esthetics. Only much much later
did they become about resisting geological forces and spreading the
load of the building.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's start at the very beginning, the first
shallow foundations or footings.
Speaker 2: The origin of these foundations coincides with the erection of
the first megalithic structures around four thousand BC. The embedded
block of stone was the initial breakthrough. Belders realized that
by excavating a pit they could use leverage to tip
a heavy stone block from horizontal to vertical.
Speaker 1: So digging a hole wasn't initially a structural requirement. It
was a construction method, a way to stabilize and set.
Speaker 2: The stone exactly. The excavation served a compositional function. It
allowed them to achieve stability and crucially, to establish a level,
horizontal plane at the top of the stone. This was
essential for the origin of post and lenttal architecture. It
was all about leveling the base, not necessarily finding bedrock.
Speaker 1: And then next we see stone pedestals, which coincide with
the appearance of true columns.
Speaker 2: These pedestals served a dual role. They were constructionally useful
for fixing the column's position and ensuring horizontal alignment across
a series of columns. And they were visually important, adding
scale and dignity. But they weren't mechanical foundations in the
modern sense. Why not because they were typically small in
surface area and insufficient in depth. They didn't effectively spread
the load over a wider area of soil, nor did
they transmit that load deep into the ground. Similarly, early
trench foundations under walls were often just used for setting
out and leveling the walls, especially if the ground was
already firm or rocky.
Speaker 1: So the mechanical function, the ability to resist sheer force
or settlement, was often ignored or just secondary.
Speaker 2: It was an afterthought, if it was a thought at all.
Speaker 1: It seems like it's the constant presence of soft soil
and water that forces engineers to stop worrying about composition
and start thinking mechanically.
Speaker 2: That's the driver of innovation. It leads to the development
of rafts and.
Speaker 1: Deep foundations, So tell me about rafts.
Speaker 2: The first signs of raft foundations emerged from what were
called elevated plints. Initially, these plints were purely compositional, a
raised platform to emphasize a building's importance like a temple.
Speaker 1: They were just showing off the building stature, putting it
on a tetestyl right.
Speaker 2: But around eight hundred BC these evolved to incorporate real stonemasonry,
creating true mechanical foundation structures. This created a solid, continuous
base that spread the load of the entire building over
a wider surface area of weak soil, which helped resist
differential settlement.
Speaker 1: And when the ground was truly swampy or a water
logged like in bog lands, that's where we see the
timber solutions, right, the grillages and the piles.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the antecedents of timber grillages are fascinating. They
come from the primitive lake dwellings in the Danubian region
during the Neolithic period. Initially, builders use log plints for
insulation and reinforcement against dampness, just making the floor walkable
in a wet environment, so.
Speaker 1: They were utilitarian at first, just keeping the floor dry, But.
Speaker 2: By three thousand BC these had evolved into true timber
grillages supporting vertical elements. These were placed directly on the
soft ground were supported over piles in the water, demonstrating
a clear evolution from a simple protective layer to a
real load bearing foundation designed explicitly for difficult wet geotechnical.
Speaker 1: Conditions, and the piles themselves became incredibly sophisticated for their time.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely. The sources show that by thirteen hundred BC,
the need to support these lake dwellings on soft ground
had fostered accurate knowledge of deep pile foundations. We see
the use of composite piles, sometimes reaching twelve or thirteen
meters in length, and specific treatments for the wood. They
would carve the tips of the piles to penetrate the
lake bed more easily, and they often hardened those tips
by fire, making them more resistant to rot and impact.
Speaker 1: So the Romans they were faced with the u unique problem.
These massive heavy building projects often required an unsuitable ground,
especially as they expanded into places like northern Italy and
Gaul where they couldn't find a solid bottom or bedrock
at a reasonable depth.
Speaker 2: This is a scenario where the previous methods would just fail,
and it prompted one of their great constructional successes, what's
called the stake solution.
Speaker 1: The spake solution.
Speaker 2: They developed this widespread technique of driving closely packed timber
stakes deep into the soft, wet soil before laying any
masonry or concrete foundations.
Speaker 1: What was the engineering brilliance of that method? What did
it achieve?
Speaker 2: It achieved three things at once, all without extensive, expensive
excavation where water was present. One, the close driving of
the stakes aggressively compacted the soil. Two it inserted high
resistance material, the durable wood, deep into the ground. And
three it greatly increased the depth of support.
Speaker 1: So the steaks acted as friction piles basically.
Speaker 2: Yes relying on the grip of the soil along their
length to carry the load, or they transferred the load
to a deeper, firmer stratum. It was a rapid, efficient
and highly effective solution for challenging sites.
Speaker 1: And it proved so successful that it spread throughout the
entire Roman Empire and.
Speaker 2: Became foundational knowledge. We see its application much later in
history too. Cities built on marshy land, famously Venice and
particularly Amsterdam, rely heavily on similar systems of deeply driven
timber piles to support their heavy historic architecture.
Speaker 1: The Romans also brought material innovation to the table with
plain concrete.
Speaker 2: They did they introduced plain concrete made on site with
local mortar and stones for foundation structures. Initially, this was
an economic decision. It offered significant savings and materials in
labor compared to quarrying and setting massive stone or brick blocks,
especially for deep foundations. It allowed them to build bigger, deeper,
and faster.
Speaker 1: Now let's turn to the medieval period, which it seems
was a period of forgotten lessons.
Speaker 2: It really was a step backward in terms of theoretical rigor.
From the fall of Rome until the fifteenth century, foundation
construction slowed significantly, resources were scarce, the means were simpler,
and crucially, medieval builders often ignored the mechanical problems, specifically
the actual magnitude of the load they were imposing or
the specific nature of the soil beneath the footing.
Speaker 1: They reverted to that compositional mindset of the ancients.
Speaker 2: It just had to look right, they did, and this
care free attitude, as one source called it, was the
principal cause of the frequent movements, cracks, and collapses we
see in so many tall medieval buildings, like the great
towers and cathedrals that leaned and failed across Europe.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until the Renaissance around the fifteenth century that
we saw the first written rules for foundation sizing appear
in architectural treatises.
Speaker 2: But even those rules, while a step forward, were based
on assumption, not measurement. Until the eighteenth century, the foundational
flaw remained the inability to accurately avowuate the actual load
of the structure and the critical soil parameters. Builders would
base footing sizes exclusively on the width of the wall
being supported, not the load being born or the soil quality.
Speaker 1: So these rules were more like declarations of intent rather
than practical engineering rooted in physics.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect description. The real, profound shift toward modern
geotechnical engineering finally arrived in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: This is the critical turning point in the history of
fighting the sink.
Speaker 2: It is this is when site investigation transforms from guesswork
into science. The introduction of the first known dynamic penetrometer,
invented by Nicholas Goldman in the seventeenth century and constructed
by others in sixteen ninety nine, was revolutionary. Why was
this instrument so crucial because it allowed engineers for the
first time to measure the ground's resistance to penetration at depth.
Before this, you could only judge soil quality by digging
and looking, or by trial and error. But the penetrometer
provided actual, quantitative, repeatable data on the ground's resistance.
Speaker 1: So you had numbers, you had data, you had data.
Speaker 2: This measurement the ground's actual strength became the essential verifiable
data point for evaluating soil quality, especially for major buildings
near water. It was the moment foundation design became a
fully fledged field of engineering built on measurement, not just tradition.
Speaker 1: We've now covered the gradual, factual reasons for city burial.
We've debunked the fantasy of the mud flood, and we've
explored the long, hard effort by engineers to build structures
that resist that sink. Now we turn to something that
is arguably more catastrophic, yet equally buried in memory.
Speaker 2: And that's a very important shift.
Speaker 1: We've spent a lot of time discussing how conspiracy theories
claim a massive fictional catastrophe the mud flood erased history.
We're now going to take that concept of a raised
memory and anchor it to a massive, verified, real world
event that is often stunningly overlooked by Western historical narratives
the global famine of eighteen seventy six eighteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: The scale of this disaster just demand's attention because it's
so frequently omitted from our collective historical timeline. The research
from Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory frames this famine
as one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recorded history.
Speaker 1: The numbers are just staggering. The sources estimate that this
event killed up to fifty million people worldwide.
Speaker 2: Fifty million.
Speaker 1: To put that in perspective, that death toll rivals the
entirety of World War II or the nineteen eighteen nineteen
nineteen influenza epidemic. It is a calamity of immense proportions.
Yet if you ask most people about the great disasters
of the eighteen seventies, they would likely draw a blank.
Speaker 2: And this wasn't a localized event like the Irish potato famine.
It was truly global. There were widespread synchronous crop failures
and droughts across Asia, Africa, and Brazil.
Speaker 1: A global cascade.
Speaker 2: The event often called the Great Drought, was actually a
sequence of linked droughts. It started with the catastrophic failure
of India's eighteen seventy five monsoon season, and then it
spread rapidly to East Asia, South Africa, Northern Africa, and
northeastern Brazil.
Speaker 1: The fact that a catastrophe of this magnitude fifty million
lives lost can be so thoroughly neglected by global memory
is profound. It demonstrates that history can be actively ignored,
not intentionally suppressed by some cabal but just overlooked when
it happens to the populations that the ruling powers deem
less important. That's a crucial point. So what triggered this
enormous and synchronous global climate collapse.
Speaker 2: The immediate trigger was a drought link to arguably the
most extreme manifestation of the al Nino climate cycle ever recorded.
El Nino is a recurring warming pattern in the tropical Pacific,
but this specific event was just extraordinarily intense, causing widespread
weather disruption, and the.
Speaker 1: Climate effects didn't stay contained in the Pacific. They cascaded
across the globe.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, The extreme El Nino event triggered a
domino effect across other oceanic climate systems. It led to
the warmest known North Atlantic temperatures and critically the strongest
known Indian Ocean dipole.
Speaker 1: We have to pause there because the term Indian ocean
dipole is highly technical. What does that mean in simple
terms and why was it so devastating?
Speaker 2: Think of it as a huge seesaw effect in the
Indian Ocean. The dipole is the extreme temperature difference between
the western and eastern sides of the ocean basin Okay.
When the dipole is strong, the western side of the
Indian Ocean gets very warm water, leading to intense rainfall there. Conversely,
the eastern side, which affects India, Indonesia and Australia, experiences
massive cooling and devastating drought conditions. This violent opposition of
ocean temperatures is what compounded the Il Ninu, leading to
droughts in Brazil and Australia, all happening at the same
time as the Indian disaster.
Speaker 1: So climate was the trigger, a natural phenomenon but amplified.
But as we know, natural disasters don't automatically create famines.
Political structures do.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and this is the crucial finding of the Columbia
University research. The death toll was severely amplified by this
soci year economic conditions of the Victorian colonial world. The
climate provided the trigger, but colonialism provided the vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Can we get into the specifics of how the policies
amplified the death toll drawing on the.
Speaker 2: Sources absolutely, The research highlights the stark reality of British
colonial governance in India at the time. Despite massive crop
failure and starvation across the subcontinent, the colonial administration implemented
strict less affair economic.
Speaker 1: Policies, so they just let the market handle it.
Speaker 2: They did. They were hoarding and exporting millions of tons
of grains, specifically wheat, which was seen as necessary for
the maintenance of the British economy and military supplies out
of India, even while the population was starving.
Speaker 1: So the food was physically present, but it was being extracted,
not distributed.
Speaker 2: It was a failure driven by a market ideology that
was prioritized over human life. This massive colonial extraction not
only starved millions, but also severely weakened the remaining population,
making them highly susceptible to epidemic diseases like cholera and smallpox,
which swept through the vulnerable communities afterward, the vulnerability was
man made.
Speaker 1: It's a powerful argument that the real, unacknowledged catastrophe wasn't
just the al Nino, it was the political structure that
dictated who lived and who died.
Speaker 2: Indeed, Mike Davis, who was a co author of the study,
noted that the al nino and climate events of eighteen
seventy six seventy eight helped create the global inequalities that
would later be characterized as First and Third worlds.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: The trauma of this period and the resulting economic subjugation
essentially cemented the unequal global order that persisted throughout the
twentieth century. The famine wasn't just a historical event, it
was a foundational moment of geopolitical stratification.
Speaker 1: The historical findings about the eighteen seventy six seventy eight
famine carry an incredibly urgent warning for the modern world.
Speaker 2: They do because the initial cause, the extreme al Nino
and its global knock on effects, arose from natural climate variability.
A similar global scale event could happen again. We are
not immune to the cyclical forces that caused this disaster, and.
Speaker 1: That warning is severely intensified by human driven climate change.
Speaker 2: Yes, the scientists worn that rising greenhouse gas concentrations and
global warming are projected to intensify al Nino events. This
means that such widespread, simultaneous droughts could become even more
severe in the future. We are building a world where
the trigger is more likely and more potent.
Speaker 1: And while we no longer live under the exact socio
political structure of Victorian colonialism, our modern global food network
presents a different kind of vulnerability.
Speaker 2: That high connectivity is a double edged sword, isn't it.
While it allows for rapid distribution, it also means that
a failure in one region, especially simultaneous failures across multiple
major food baskets like Asia, Brazil and Australia, would cause
severe shocks and economic curmoil across the entire global system.
Speaker 1: It would amplify local food and security in already vulnerable countries.
Speaker 2: Leading to scarcity, conflict, and migration. The lessons of the
eighteen seventies about synchronized climate disaster are more relevant now
than ever before.
Speaker 1: This deep dive has truly taken us into the ground
and through the layers of history. We started with the slow,
factual burial of our ancient cities caused by everything from
dumped rubbish and rising street levels to intentional urban elevation
projects in Chicago and Seattle.
Speaker 2: We contrasted that reality with the fast, fantastical explanation of
the mud flood and the Tartaria conspiracy, noting how the
appeal of a hidden history often masks a simply reality
of misinterpreting architectural function and poor historical cartography.
Speaker 1: And we connect to that fantasy to the real historical
ingenuity demonstrated by engineers who since four thousand BC strove
to overcome the challenges of soft ground with everything from
Roman friction stakes to the revolutionary eighteenth century dynamic penetrometer.
Speaker 2: Finally, we ended by reflecting on the massive, verified historical
catastrophe of the Global famine, and this demonstrates that real
history can be far more catastrophic, claiming fifty fifty million
lives and fundamentally shaping global inequality, yet be equally forgotten
and omitted from our collective cultural memory than any conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: This contrast between the history that is physically buried and
the history that is culturally erased, it raises a crucial
point about where we direct our attention. Gubigly Tepe was
intentionally buried and forgotten by its own builders. The Global
famine was largely overlooked by Western historians, despite its immense
global impact.
Speaker 2: So we have to ask ourselves, if we know that
historical records are fragile and that people often forget the
worst global events quickly, should our energy be focused on
debunking sensationalized hidden histories, or should we be working harder
to preserve the memory and the lessons of the real
catastrophic events that fundamentally shape the modern world we live
in today.
Speaker 1: It's a profound question about historical accountability and collective memory.
Speaker 2: Indeed, it forces us to examine our priorities regarding the past.
Speaker 1: So here is our final question for you, the listener.
What current global issue or disaster, whether it's an ongoing
slow motion crisis or a sudden massive event, do you
think future generations might struggle to believe or remember accurately?
And why let us know what you think of the comments.
We want to hear your thoughts on what history we
might be actively forgetting right now.