Multipurpose candle holder.
Holds candles of different diameters.
It’s so obvious we probably shouldn’t write it down
What is the bowl of wicker balls on the coffee table in every airbnb for?
Just try building your nanomachines without one!
Time Traveler: “Listen, I know it’s weird, but spread making this thing as a tradition, it’ll confuse the fuck out of historians in a couple thousand years.”
It’s an old-school Beanie Baby.
Someone crafted, it looked amazing, everyone wanted one, they probably started calling them good luck charms and sold a bunch more.
It was found in a Roman toilet along with three shells.
It’s for starting a ball of yarn, also drugs
It’s an anomalous object that expands the inside dimensions of a space without altering the outside dimensions. It gets lazy about it after a while though and starts making stuff out of whatever bullshit comes to hand, though. DO NOT leave it outside for prolonged periods of time.
Theory: They were masterpieces, in the old meaning
A masterpiece was an item you would craft or something you would do to earn you the rank of Master in your Guild.
This is easy to describe and judge, but hard to make if you aren’t experienced.
They put them in their gold hoardes as they were basically their version of a degree
(If you’re a metalworker and want to check if you would’ve earned the rank of Master in an ancient Guild, you can try to make one of these)
Psssh, you can CNC that bad boy in an hour with close to no work.
With quite a bit of work. That’s more than one setup and probably a decent amount of time getting the CAM programming right.
That’s unlikely. It seems to have been such a regional thing that I don’t think it’s that. If it were, you expect it to come from a Roman tradition, or at least be adopted by them, yet these aren’t found there.
Nothing like showing off your mastery of the craft by… making the exact same thing everyone else did.
If they’re trying to objectively evaluate someone’s skills that’s exactly what you would want to do. If you have to come up with a different criteria for every submission then it starts to become subjective quickly.
Standardized testing!
That everyone else knows is pain in the dickhole to make? Yeah, works well, actually.
As is tradition!
but… tradition is peer pressure from dead people.
and… dead people turn into zombies.
Ipso facto, you better make it or zombies will take your lunch money.
Logically sound reasoning.
Check out 90% of woodworking posts, logic holds up.
Oh shit, is the epoxy river table our version of the dodecahedron!? 😱
Wait till the wood rots away and all future archaeologists find is the epoxy.
That’s been a common theory for many years but it’s between “eeeh, maybe” and debunked.
Here’s a tip: don’t publicly theorise about things that you have close to no knowledge about. This shouldn’t have to be said.Your tip is actually really bad. Getting opinions from people who aren’t metalworkers or archaeologists or anthropologists is often how answers to these questions are discovered. There are many inventions/discoveries/realizations that are made from people in different trades approaching problems differently.
Here’s a tip: don’t publicly theorise about things that you have close to no knowledge about. This shouldn’t have to be said.
Nothing wrong with discussing shit you’re not an expert on. If it’s not proven, it’s not proven, they’re not hurting anything by suggesting their ideas. You don’t have to be an expert to do that. Maybe someone will come up with something no one has thought of before that could then be investigated by experts.
Do you actually have debunktions for it at hand?
Also, it’s a meme forum. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to spitball here? It’s not like they made some absolute claim to truth.
Isn’t this not likely since it wasn’t just metalworkers that had them?
I honestly wonder if there was just some autistic metalworker who came up with this weird fucking design and made a million of them like a psychotic dwarf, and then people started to get fascinated and wanted their own. A literal thingamajig that just fascinated people because of how complex and specific it was, and it just became a cultural phenomenon.
Most convincing theory I’ve seen is that it’s a cipher tool.
(/srs) my most convincing theory is that it’s for testing smithing skills. Like that one boat on 3D printers.
A Roman benchie?
I mean… Maybe… It would be a tricky make that would require quite a bit of skill to cast or bend, weld and polish.
Not an unreasonable hypothesis all things considered.
This is going to be future archaeologists with all of our electronics.
It’s already difficult to get some 10 year old devices’ documentation or user manual. The company behind it might not even exist anymore so I’m off to digging up the archives or translating chinese OEM’s pdfs.
Fun fact: While these are from the Roman period, they’ve mostly been found in what were then the provinces of Brittania and Gaul, and none have ever been found in Italy. Which tends to suggest that they’re Celtic or Romano-Celtic rather than Roman.
Yeah, in Yorkshire we still make and use them actually, but I’m not allowed to tell thee what they’re for, because of Brexit.
Before someone posts it, no, it’s not for knitting; there are solid ones that would have been useless for that and knitting isn’t known to have been present in the Roman Empire.
What do you mean knitting wasn’t present in the roman empire? That’s slightly less absurd than saying knots didn’t exist in the bronze age! Lack of evidence doesnt mean it’s not present! There’s lots of things we know for sure happened during the roman empire despite no one writing about it, like child baptism in early christianity. We don’t know what it looked like, but we know where it happened and that everyone was in agreement about the method.
Knitting is a technology, and there isn’t evidence it emerged uniformly throughout the world. Think about the environment that Rome is in; what good is something knitted in a hot Mediterranean climate? We have tons of art and literature documenting weaving, which was very important to Romans, but none of knitting. If you have evidence they had it you should publish it.
It’s a cigarette lighter.
When you are feeling under pressure, do something different! Roll up your sleeves or eat an orange.
That feels like a random quote from the “Little Book of Calm”
Can’t remember if it’s the same episode or not, but there’s one where Fran tries to figure out what an object is, and in the end it’s a lighter.
I actually bought the little book of calm because of the show. The lighter is indeed from the same episode, series 1, Episode 1.
