Corpuscles wrote:

> Now for at least the tenth time..... what evidence would be indisputable...

And for the tenth time, no one but you and yours is under any obligation whatsoever to divine the evidence that's being relied on to support the claims you are making about Mons Claudianus.

Why are you insisting that I must offer the claimant assistance in defending a claim? When someone is as sure about a claim as you, loveritas, and Thanos are to the point of insisting that it's "indisputable", then it is incumbent on you to provide the evidence that you find so compelling so that the rest of us can assess the basis for the claim. No one else is under any obligation at all to tell you what kind of data you are expected to produce other than when you DO produce it, it had better be bulletproof and not subject to other interpretation that could account for the same evidence in a different paradigm. And I do not believe such evidence has been presented yet since what's been cited in this discussion fits into at least one other hypothesis.

By the way, attempting to settle a debate by putting words in other people's mouth (e.g., your fabrication of my take on Hadrian's life style), often reveals a tenuous position.

But OK, so it sounds like you're saying that the sheer volume of stone thought to have originated from "Mons Claudianus" makes it indisputable that the stone was quarried on demand by the Romans in the 1st c. AD. That would depend on what you mean by "Mons Claudianus"; Bulow-Jacobsen claims that name typically refers to "a whole complex of quarries and structures", so I'm not sure your "unbelievably unsurpassed massive!" temple is a good characterization.

One of the ostraca fragments is a communication between the quarry and the procurator admitting that the column is ready for shipment but the quarry administrator doesn't know what quarry it's from. In another fragment the quarryman asks the procurator for "more iron" to presumably speed up getting a single column ready. What kind of quarry is this that isn't equipped to quarry the stones that are on order?

According to Guiseppe ("Global Convict Labor"; 2015), the ostraca apparently were written long after much of the "quarrying" occurred. How can we rely on a daily journal of "inventories" that was apparently written "in hindsight" about an "actual situation on a given day" that allegedly occurred there years earlier? Why are the quarrymen trying to push damaged, stapled columns onto the procurator for use in new construction? Why are the "blanks" appointed so sharply and with such a smooth finish, despite the fact that the amount of "finished stock" that was damaged is considered inexplicably high by the authors? Contrary to Guiseppe, Bulow-Jacobsen argues that the workers were NOT convicts or slaves but rather consisted of families and skilled workers all of whom were paid well for their labor, and may have even lived in "luxurious" conditions. The so-called "fortress" is on the other side of the hills 1km from the quarries; how does that serve to "protect" the workers? The descriptions I've read about logistics at the Mons C. "quarry" paint an operation that has a disorganized pipeline, does sloppy work, and whose progress was routinely slowed down due to harassment by the locals.

I just don't think the evidence that's been discussed so far renders your claim indisputable, that's all. There's ambiguous evidence that supports more than a single paradigm, and there is significant contradictory evidence that's difficult to reconcile (in my opinion).

I also do NOT believe, at this point in the 21st century, that we have discovered every single civilization that ever existed on planet Earth, that no other civilization remains to be discovered, that we are interpreting the artifacts correctly, and that our timelines are well within a reasonable margin of error.

But that's just my opinion based on the physical evidence. And I'm not going to insult you just because I disagree with your interpretation of the evidence. .