And fumigation should really be broken into two separate categories: fumigation for pests, and fumigation for infectious disease. They are very different, as infectious diseases cannot be seen: in a world where no one knows about microbes and viruses, people will do peculiar things based on their theory of disease. History provides many examples of people doing odd things to prevent plagues and disease, many of which are far stranger (and less effective) than "cleanse the buildings with fire".
I think the implied logic is that if you're worried about pests destroying your supplies, it's a pretty crazy move to decide the way to fix the destruction of your supplies by, well, burning the supplies of your entire settlement to the ground.
Regardless, I agree the logic is incomplete as stated. It's entirely possible if there was an easy way to replenish supplies (e.g. conducting such a burning right before harvest time or ample hunting/gathering grounds nearby) that such an approach would make sense.
If you had maggots living in your grain, would it be possible to save parts of the grain with primitive tech? Would it be possible to guarantee that the pest didn’t move from one side of the village to the other.
Maybe they thought the old houses were C and the new ones would be Rust and this was the migration path :)
Why is that crazy? Between eggs and pests "diffusing" into adjacent buildings only to "diffuse" back after a sweep, I can completely understand why a town would opt for the nuclear option after a few failed attempts to get rid of an infestation.
Because without a ready-at-hand large-scale method of restocking (which granted is a very real possibility that such a dismissal of the fumigation theory seems to overlook, see e.g. my comment about harvest time) this is tantamount to suicide.
The difficulty required to sustain the caloric needs of a town and rebuild after complete destruction of food stores and shelter is immense, especially with only the help of pre-Bronze Age technology.
I probably agree with you more than is coming across, but I do think it useful to steelman the fumigation argument.
Burning down entire villages for fumigation even if you have a ready harvest is an extremely risk endeavor. It's no longer outright suicide, but you're still going to cause no shortage of hardship and potentially at least some lost lives.
This is coupled with the fact that pests and parasites were a pretty constant fact of ancient life and so finding, e.g. bed bugs, was kind of just something people dealt with.
Voluntarily and periodically razing entire towns for what amounts to sterilization is practically unheard of outside of the Burned House Horizon. Consider that even during various plague/Black Death breakouts, when disease was thought to be caused by various miasmas rather than infectious agents spread from person to person, and individual homes and personal property was readily burned, towns still were not being wholesale burned to the ground. That is even something as bad as a pestilence that could potentially kill half or more of your entire town's population still didn't warrant utter destruction of the town.
The period between burnings is cited as 75 years. Why would you clean from pests once in a century? It is better correlated with a lifespan of a human* which might suggest that they've considered a house to have the same lifespan.
* the average lifespan was much shorter but it includes children mortality and once above the age of five a human had a good chance to reach retirement.
It could be both. At one point a pest had moved into a settlement that caused them to decide to burn it all down and start over. They then decided to periodically do this in order to prevent the pest from ever being able to come back. Over the years the need for this had gone away but the practice remained and took on a ritualistic meaning more so than a practical one. And as these things go, the original meaning was lost. To me, this seems like the intuitive explanation.
> Because the damage from the fire was almost total for the entire settlement, it would be illogical if fumigation was the only intent
What? If you had pests that were bad enough to warrant burning food stores, why take a risk on the other buildings?