The opening keynote at OOPSLA was given by Mark Lehner, in which told us about the building blocks of the ancient Egyptian society from the time the Giza pyramids were constructed.
As it turned out, the Egyptians had discovered modern concepts such as modularity, encapsulation, etc. to gather the army of workers they needed for constructing their massive temples/tombs. It was a very interesting talk, though I did not learn anything w.r.t. software design. I did learn a lot of things about the Egyptians, and that makes attending the talk worthwhile in itself.
Mark explained how they derived the prediction that there should have been a city lodged at the bottom of the Giza plateau, where the workers were lodged and fed. On of the first things they discovered was what seemed to be a bakery – which they replicated into a functional bakery for National Geographic. Soon they excavated more bakeries next to each other, showing the fundamental concept of modularity and the notion of scaling was known to the people living there, so many years ago. Logical deduction led to the belief there should have been a city, because you can hardly expect bakers to bake bread for feeding cattle. So they uncovered the walls of houses – barracks as they turned out – for the workers. The working class was divided into basic groups of about 20-40 people, sleeping in on barrack with their overseer. There were in turn assembled into larger social structures, thus forming a hierarchy. Pretty much the same way software could be built, if one works bottom up. It was quite fascinating to see how they discovered places to house administration, food supplies, etc. Sadly, modern city expansion has caused structures to be built on top of these ancient locations, thus making it impossible to uncover everything.
There was one question raised, that was how the people were made to execute some form of obligatory labour. When I asked Mark after the talk if religion played a role, he admitted as much, but there were many other things, such as the basic unit of the social network at the time: the household, which could be a hierarchic structure, pushing work requirements down the chain.
I doubt actually learning about archaeology is always this fascinating, but this interested me very much. So, in all, a good start of the three remaining days of the conference.