Will the Internet Create a Universal Writing System?
Andrew Robinson, author of Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction on the internet and language.
Eating Extinct Animals: Feast wins Food Book of the Year
Martin Jones wins Food Book of the Year Award in London
This Day In History: King Tut’s Tomb Opened
A look into ancient Egypt.
Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Ben’s Place of the Week
Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina Coordinates: 43 59 N 18 10 E Population: 15,310 (1991 census) There are plenty of cases where tourists have been lured to destinations to see replicas of ancient architecture, or commercial complexes masquerading as cultural monuments, but how about sites that are arguably hoaxes? Residents of Visoko, a short distance northwest […]
Friday Procrastination: Vacation in Ireland?
Dreaming of Ireland.
A Few Questions for Bart Ehrman
Bart Ehrman answers some questions about his new book.
Finding My Way from Stonehenge to Samarkand
By Brian Fagan When I sat down to compile my latest book From Stonehenge to Samarkand, I found my greatest inspiration in the writings of a virtually forgotten English writer, Rose Macaulay. Her classic book, Pleasure of Ruins, first appeared in the 1950s and was reprinted with evocative photographs by Reny Beloff a decade later. […]
The Fall of Rome – an author dialogue
As promised, here is part 2 of the dialogue between Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, colleagues at Oxford University and the authors of two recent books on the collapse of the Roman Empire; ‘The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization’ and ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians’, respectively. Today they discuss the consequences of ‘the fall’ on western Europe and why they both decided to write about the fall of Rome at the same time.
The Fall of Rome – an author dialogue
Today we present a dialogue between Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather. Ward-Perkins and Heather are colleagues at Oxford University and the authors of ‘The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization’ and ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians’, respectively. Both books were published this fall and offer new explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire.
A Return to Prehistory?
This is the last of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK The economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. What we observe at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or – to […]
The End of Complexity
This is the third of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared. Specialized production and all but the most local distribution became rare, unless for luxury goods; and the impressive […]
A little archeaology link…
There have been some very interesting reviews of The Fall of Rome zipping about the ether lately. Some of it spurred by our excerpt series which began HERE From across the pond, Alun reacts to our post… Troels, a graduate student in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, gives his […]
Monte Testaccio
This is the second of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK “Monte Testaccio” When considering quantities, we would ideally like to have some estimates for overall production from particular potteries, and for overall consumption at specific settlements. Unfortunately, it […]
The Fall of Rome
The Disappearance of Comfort It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially […]
“The Tuniit”
By about 8,000 years ago the Arctic environments of North America were as extensive as they are today, and animal populations had moved northwards to establish themselves on lands and in sea-channels recently freed from glacial ice. Although ancestral Indian groups made summer excursions northwards across the tundra, probably following the caribou as Dene and […]
A Human History of the Arctic World
The passage below is from The Last Imaginary Place by Robert McGhee. Harper’s Magazine accurately describes McGhee’s book as “enthralling.” I once spent a few hours in the Ice Age. It was a brilliant July day, the sun’s heat comfortably tempered by a cool wind sweeping down from the frozen ocean beyond the ranges to […]