100 Historical Things, Number 44

Quick disclaimer to say aaaargh sorry I've been bad at replying to stuff again - have had critical work and stress build-up. But saw this today and had to post it!You may already have heard about an excavation taking place in a car park in Leicester, where they hoped to find some evidence about Bosworth and post- ( Read more... )

100 Historical Things, Number 42

A while ago I briefly posted a link to a story about Neolithic 'matches' being misinterpreted as phallic symbols with a religious context. It's a fun story,[1] but I also found it interesting because when archaeologists explain an item by way of a religious function, I am always immediately suspicious ( Read more... )

Sorry to be spamming everyone's f'lists with my 100 Historical Things posts - it's a combination of saved up inspiration and cool new stories I found today. Just two more posts, promise.

100 Historical Things, Number 37

A new way of mapping archaeological sites, being tested in PeruThe comment that "Archaeology is a spatial discipline" (see the ( Read more... )

100 Historical Things, Number 35

When the war in Iraq was raging, you'll probably remember that there were reports of damage to historical sites and looting of museums, e.g. what happened to the antiquities in the National Museum of Iraq in BaghdadWith the civil war raging in Syria, there have been similar reports, in particular of historical ( Read more... )

100 Historical Things, Number 34I was thinking: what if I died, and then sometime later there was nobody to question about my life, and some things I left behind had to tell the story of my life? What sort of historical record of me would I leave behind if I died right now ( Read more... )

100 Historical Things, Number 31

Did you know that when Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD, there was a nearby town called Herculaneum, many of whose residents thought they had got away with not being affected by it? It was actually on the second day that Herculaneum was destroyed, and not by lava flow but by a ( Read more... )

100 Historical Things, Number 30

I didn't actually have a plan for a historical post today, but then I saw an interesting article and thought it merited a post of its own:

Britishness and the sharing of common landIt's by a Cambridge archaeologist (not someone I know personally, I'm afraid), and is really about social history - how the sharing of ( Read more... )

100 Historical Things, Number 20

"The past is a foreign country."

That's a famous first line, incidentally - the opening sentence of Hartley's The Go-Between. But I think it's also a nice quote, and at some point in the future I think I might make a post about history as a foreign country. But anyway, for now I thought it made a nice opening for ( Read more... )

Tonight ( Read more... )

Just a very very quick post to say that Neil Oliver's new series (something with History and Britain in the title, and possibly Ancient, I forget), which started last night on BBC2, is completely awesome. He was dealing with 500,000 BC - 6,000 BC last night, and it's not at all my period, and indeed it was part anthropology and part archaeology, ( Read more... )