In the ancient world, politics was often conducted through warfare, and power was expressed through military engineering. Engineers changed geography and the shape of the landscape; heaped things up and dug things away, build roads, water courses, bridges, towns, and forts. While what remains is stone, but most of the past was formed from earth, straw, and the key engineering component of the ancient world, wood.
Political Engineering
It was in wooden ships, built by Celtic shipwrights in Gaul that the Romans, led by Julius Caesar, first arrived in Southern England in 55-54 BC. We know this because in Caesar’s account of his wars in Gaul we get an unprecedented insight into both military engineering and the mechanics of the imperial machine.