OT: Bronze age wheel design

[damduck-egg]

Did Kwik Fit have a branch nearby then? Might have been been them offering a wheel lightening service.

G.Harman

[GB]

You can get a nasty cut from an archaeologist's trowel. :)

[GB]

That's an interesting theory. The part you can see is made out of planks, so I'd expect some planks going at right angles to hold everything together. As you say, they may have been made out of a completely different material - maybe even just straps of leather.

There's a suggestion somewhere that a leather tyre went round the outside, bit I don't know whether that would have provided enough strength to hold the planks together? Nailing some bits of timber across the planks would have done the job nicely, though.

Bronze age go-faster stripes. :)

[ARW]

So gloves or eye protection would be more suitable then than hi viz ;-)?

And thanks for the link. I enjoyed reading that one.

Cheers

[tabbypurr]

Momentum/friction wouldn't be a problem, someone can turn the wheel all the time if necessary. The great big axle poking up through the middle could be though!

NT

[Weatherlawyer]

It's amazing that they don't know what sort of wood it was made from yet th ey can tell what sort of an animal was used to pull it even though the only difference in the choice of horse or ox was in the height of the yoke.

They even knew that the farmers preferred to stab elephants to death rather than permitting them to breed and if they felt like it freely pull along e ven larger wheeled carts capable of raising the beds above the river height .

But obviously that is all one expects from monkeys. How do they even know it was a wheel? Judging by the freehand conclusions the mud scrubbers are guilty of, for al l we really know it was some sort of attachment that went in the roof apex for leaning various assorted elephant sticking pointie-sticks and roofie-br anchy bits against.

You would have thought that a tribe clever enough to live on a river with f loor platforms high enough out of it to allow it to become dry enough to bu rn down would have come up with a way of not having to carry the axle with the wheel when they took it away for repair upon a platform over a river in the days before roads had roadsides.

In answer to the OP's question. The holes in such a wheel would have been u sed to prevent thieves from stealing it. That is obviously why they only to ok the good one. Either that or I am right in my off the roof surmise. In w hich case the holes would have been made from the earliest concepts of a ch andelier; the ones where they were still learning not to burn down their ho uses by using chandeliers in them.

[Weatherlawyer]

Try imagining a bit harder.

A meter is only a little more than an arm length. One would easily reach ac ross it bending at the waist and even a midget would have no difficulty rea ching a pot with a diameter of 4 or more inches as the side he was working on came around in primitive cycles.

But how primitive would one have to be before you could trade with mesopota mians for wheels you were incapable of inventing? I would imagine that trading with primitives who lived far away was the rea son the first messerpottermen invented a wheel.

Actually I bet they mass produced them for trading at a distance. They woul dn't get very far with just the one, would they? Or was it as an earlier poster has said: they only wanted to go round in ci rcles?

Oh, I've just thought: Until they invented quality control they would have had to off set the central holes -just like the ones shown, to cope with di fferent sized wheels, at least until they realised where they were going wr ong and devised a way of coping with nutation.

I wonder how many times they had to cut them down before they realised they were too small. Maybe that is how they invented pointy sticks? I wonder who was the first man to try pushing one into an elephant.

Hey... Maybe that is how they invented the wheel. Pushing it all the way th rough an elephant. No... Unless it rolled downhill when it fell over. That would've been around the time when they first learned to let go of pointy sticky things that go all the way through elephants.*

If so it wouldn't have been all that long before they were inventing writin g for do it yourself manuals and health and safety tips. Do you think they invented training wheels to help them get over difficulti es encountered when standing them up on end? Or would they just have used the tusks for skids, tyre levers and piano key s for singing about hunting for wheels down the pub?

Blimey, do you suppose we invented carryok? It's all go, innit?

• I'm not joking the Germans actually invented the ejector seat for jet fig hters before they invented the idea of letting go. When the British were as tounded by the aeronautical progress the Luftwaffe had made, they were told that using the ejector-seat was ripping the arms off their test pilots and that was probably why they lost the war. The ones that survived a crash we re unable to complete their report.

It is a good job for the Germans that we only invented the dug-out canoe. I f we had been able to carry cartwheels in them we would have been the ones that rolled over Europe.

[whisky-dave]

I've never seen a horse draw a vehicle, I dont think Ive seen any horse draw anything other than if you take it to water :-P

[Chris Hogg]

Oh you have led a sheltered life :-)

and

and

although whether you'd call it drawing is moot. Better than some acclaimed human artists, I dare say.

[michael adams]

- Try imagining a bit harder.

- A meter is only a little more than an arm length. One would easily reach

- across it bending at the waist

Actually we could both be wrong.

a) A potter making pots all day would hardly use a wheel where he had "to reach across it bending at the waist".

b) However all such devices would benefit from a flywheel. Where the larger the circumference of the wheel and the heavier the circumference, the more energy it can store. Something like that. Ideally this will be low down nearest the source of power. I'm sure I've seen an arrangement with a flywheel spinning beneath the potter's feet allowing him to stay close to the work- along with treadle driven efforts.

So if the horse skeleton is discounted - then maybe it was part of a the flywheel on a potters wheel.

michael adams

...

[Chris Hogg]

Did you not see the links on my original post suggesting a potters wheel? They got snipped at some point along the thread.

These wheels are obviously heavy, either solid stone or converted truck wheels by the look of them, to give momentum. But I've seen pictures of wheels continuously spun by a child while the potter threw the pot, so not much momentum needed and a much lighter structure would be perfectly satisfactory. Treadle wheels are popular among the sandal brigade, the classic one being described as a Leach wheel, named after the St. Ives potter, Bernard Leach. See

Simon is BL's grandson.

[michael adams]

The elephants are even better

At first I thought it was someone with an elephants trunk sleeve on; but other videos are shot from a distance. From the comments however, its claimed the elephants are ill treated. But whether that's true, or any different from when they're trained for other tasks such as picking up logs etc. isn't really clear.

michael adams

...

[michael adams]

Thanks.

It was probably the Leach wheel with the big flywheel I was thinking of although I didn't realise they had such a complicated offset crank arrangement.

michael adams

...

michael adams

[Chris Hogg]

Here's a picture of an elderly Vietnamese woman throwing pots on a thin wheel turned by the person standing who kicks it at regular and probably frequent intervals to keep it spinning.

And here's a painting of a child turning a thin wheel by hand for a potter in Travencore, India.

[Tim+]

And very notably it doesn't have a fecking great axle sticking up the middle!

Tim

[Chris Hogg]

Well, no, but who knows how it changed over the intervening few thousand years. For example, those wheels I've linked to spin on a pivot. The Must Farm wheel itself is obviously rotted around the centre, which might have allowed it to drop and make the pivot appear to stick up through the centre, like an axle.

I'm not saying it is a potters wheel, merely that just because it's circular, it shouldn't be assumed immediately that it's a cart wheel. Other explanations should be considered, even if they can eventually be discounted.

[Tim+]

And I'm discounting the potters wheel one. ;-) I'm far more inclined to accept the opinion of archaeologists on site (who hopefully have done this kind of thing before) than accept a suggestion that just doesn't fit the evidence.

Tim

[polygonum]

S'obviously a lazy Susan.

[Chris Hogg]

Well...you're probably right. It was only an idea. I always think, from watching archeology progs on the TV such as Time Team etc., that one of the essential requirements for an archaeologist, almost to the point of having to pass and exam in it, is a vivid and lively imagination! I was just exercising mine!

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is, and it isn't. What is requires for any kind of even remotely scientific conjecture, is the ability to imagine something which is fully consistent with the facts as they are known, and is the simplest and most likely explanation, pending further evidence.

AS opposed to social 'sciences', religion or conspiracy theories, where any explanation, no matter how far fetched that fits the facts is to be preferred, or indeed climate change, where the explanation doesn't even fit the facts (until you 'change' them), but only the commercial and political narrative that you desire people to believe in.

Such conjectures are called respectively, scientific, metaphysical, and marketing bollocks.