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Date: | Tue, 14 Nov 2006 19:50:01 -0500 |
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I second Ian Evans suggestion the wooden tongs might have been a concealment
feature, although the function of the object being concealed is part of why
it was concealed. For example, cats and chickens were concealed to keep down
vermin; bent coins were to hold in wealth; broken or bent knives and scissors
were to keep out evil; bottles of pins in urine were to keep out evil
spirits or magic; bottles of mercury were to keep out "witches"; shoes and boots
were to grow mirror spirits of the original wearer to protect future residents
in their sleep. Thus, you have to ask what laundry tongs would have done for
the future residents? A more simple possibility is that some drudge stashed
the hated tongs in the hopes of getting reassigned to a less oppressing task.
In case someone comes up with the burial pits or bottles in foundations or
coins between the bricks to explain the tongs, those features were vestigial
"appeasement" features to the spirits (formerly gods in pre-Christian times)
of the earth. Roman belief followed that before people arrived, gods owned
trees, earth, boulders, and streams and humans needed to intercede for
permission to use said resources. Burial pits full of coins, precious metals, or
inverted bottles of wine were sacrificed before construction of Roman houses. In
later centuries, people simply poured wine or beer in the foundation and left
the bottle. by the end of the 19th century and really up to the present,
builders and masons will insert a coin in the walls of a house "to keep with
custom." In Wales and some parts of Ireland, horse skulls were buried under
floors of houses and barns to appease earth spirits and protect the occupants.
Skeptics (ie. archaeologists and historians) of these practices need only
inquire of Welsh museums to find there is an active program of recording
discoveries of horse skulls, pots of coins, and bottles in foundations as
archaeological features. In all probability, those hoards of coins found in agricultural
fields we keep hearing about over in England were probably once underneath
Roman houses that have long disintegrated.
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.
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