PG&E is a utility company in Northern California(pacific gas and electric)

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What are PG&E benchmarks?

Lead holds up better in soil than most older ferrous metals. Also, it is easier to inscribe notations on lead plates. IIRC, there was a case years ago in southwestern Pennsylvania where someone dummied up some fake lead plates, "discovered" them, and fooled a local historical society.

It is a self promotion book.
It is the first and only book I have fully read in latin, and I highly recommend reading it.. the self promotion is hilarious, it is unintentionally funny.

Adding on to this I used to live in northern Virginia and had the library archivist look up my neighborhood as far back as he could.

Oh some of the land plots!

"Starting from the blasted oak travel north by north west 300 paces to a burried pipe near the road...."

In my neighborhood today if you look at the sidewalks you can see survey pins embedded in there.

King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway protested to the Swedish King, Charles IX, but his protests over the new route was ignored. Finally, in April 1611, in response to Sweden’s claim of a traditionally Norwegian area in Northern Norway, Denmark-Norway declared war upon Sweden and invaded.

A force of 6,000 Danish troops was sent to Kalmar to lay siege to the city and castle. .

The war was the result of ongoing disputes over trade routes, due to Denmark–Norway controlling a monopoly through the strait between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.

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Pretty much. Unlike the Romans, Gauls didn't have a standing military so the same calculation applies. When you know how many men of fighting age a population has, you know how many soldiers it could field.

And yet one Gaulish village yet remains, holding out against Caesars forces…

Because it is. https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

99.98% fake.

Caesar did get lucky with being able to fight on two fronts. We'd be very close to the Romans losing and us asking whether Caesar was doing the wrong choice staying in enemy territory with another army incoming

I don't know if I agree with the idea that he lost the moment the first palisades were put up. Accounts I've seen tend to make the battle seem like a close run thing at a few different points.

No offence, but this reads like a ChatGPT response

In Seattle, a 100 year old building is a historic landmark.

But is a field army representative of the whole Gaulish population?

There is a neat little trick to get better numbers. Romans liked to include civilians in the number of the enemy to make their victories sound greater.

In a pre-industrial nation you can expect halve the people to be children. Half again for the women, who didn't fight at the time. Take a bit of for the elderly and you land at ~50.000 fighting men. Much more reasonable.

New Mexico is not on the west coast ;)

But yeah those are good additions to the list. I've seen the Pueblo buildings and they're impressive.

Of course if you go further south, there are tons of stone buildings and pyramids in Mexico and Guatemala.

I think the cave dwellings in New Mexico are one of the oldest surviving human habitats in North America.

Maybe some of those mounds in... Kansas? Too

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You can get up to about 250 years old on the west coast, e.g. the California missions. There is literally nothing older than that since AFAIK no indigenous buildings have survived that long.

At least not in California. I wonder if the PNW has some longhouses or something.

Consider them the first professional Combat Engineers.

As another said, every marker has references (other markers) that include exact distances and descriptions. It would be trivial to figure out that someone was lying

For newer developments there's usually a plat map that gives dimensions along the edges of the lot. I think they store those at city hall somewhere. So one stake being out of place or lost wouldn't be a huge problem. And for larger plots all the states not on the east coast follow a fairly standard system. So if your land boundary is on the range line or town line or some quarter section line then that's a known thing and stake position isn't going to matter as much.

With that said, what really matters is whether it's the kind of thing that's worth going to court over or bringing in a surveyor. But even if it isn't right now it could still be a problem in the future. Stuff does get errantly built outside the bounds of peoples' property and that's a legal mess when somebody discovers it.

Doesn't work because every property corner was based on county documents and surveys or plots from established benchmarks. For instance "corner 1 is x.xxx distance at xxx.xx.xx degrees, minutes and seconds from county benchmark 17B located in the middle of y road, x.xxx distance from the northeast corner of y road and z street". Benchmark could be a nail through a washer in the asphalt, a bronze disc set in concrete, and so on. With proper instrumentation and trained surveyors, you get the point down to 1/100 of a foot (yeah, tenths of a foot and tenths of a tenth)

Edit: and we always used county or state benchmarks and NEVER used PG&E benchmarks because for some reason most of them were in the wrong place.