Lack of technological progress in late Roman Empire

[Eleatic Guest]

It is rather odd to disparage someone for adapting a practical mechanism rather than inventing it themselves, when the subject is the use, rather than the appearance of the mechanism.

Agreed. The question is the scale of application, not the invention of water-milling processes, although I still feel that the inventors, that is the ancient Greeks, deserve special credit for that.

Lucas' way of treating number of documented "industrial" wheels in medieval europe is highly contrived. For example, he decides that fulling mills are not examples of medieval industry - despite the fact that the first documented fulling mills appear in the 10th century and that the textile industry always was the most widespread and important industry in medieval and modern times - and the first to gain from the benefits of the real industrial revolution.

I can't follow you here. Lucas specifically includes fulling mills into his count of medieval industrial mills, otherwise it would have been hardly enough material for a survey, because (quote from p.15) by far the most abundant types of industrial mill in the sample for medieval Europe are fulling mills and forge mills, which account for 80 percent of the sample (table 3), with tanning mills, sawmills, and toolsharpening mills contributing another 12 percent of the total.

He also has a serious problem of an apparent lack of access to articles treating the german, scandinavian, eastern european and spanish medieval "industrial" waterpower phenomenon

He certainly has, although I suspect that, while the overall number of medieval European water-mills will certainly rise significantly then, the proportion of industrial mills to agricultural mills may remain similar or could even decline, given the fact that the most advanced regions with presumbly the most industrial mills have already been fairly well researched.

If you have any sources in Spanish or German on watermills, please let me know, I would like to look into the matter further.

This is extremely problematic and a severe methodological flaw - in his comparison, he includes every archaeological and historical (even from poetry and similar sources) record he can get his hands on from the ancient world (including recent enthusiastic but still completely circumstantial articles on roman-era tidal mills and metallurgically related waterpower - it is not that it may not have existed, it is just that under the standards Lucas himself applies to his medieval material, they would have not even been considered for inclusion), without questioning their authenticity the same way he questions the medieval examples.

Did he do that in the book? In his article, he refrained from any attempts at quantifying ancient water mills and restricted himself on pointing out the inventiveness of the ancient world in water power technology.