The Essays on Geology, History, and People, which I quoted the other day on iron weapons, is really exciting. Covers such a range of history ( Read more... )

I was going through my bookmarks the other day and came across a site with a number of "Essays on Geology, History, and People". I read through some of the Iron essay, and came across a fascinating claim/conclusion (emphasis mine):

Ancient smiths had to learn the metallurgy of iron and its alloys, which again is non-intuitive, much more difficult ( Read more... )

I've got a project going at http://www.sedesdraconis.com/index.php/Currency_Names where I'm collecting names of coins and currencies from around the world, and classifying them by the origin of the name, and finding common types ( Read more... )

The other day, Making Light linked a video of Clay Shirky's talk at Web2Expo SF 2008 (my brother presented a paper at that expo too ( Read more... )

About.com:Medieval History has an interesting piece about about feudalism. Turns out feudalism was a complete flight of fancy on the part of 16th and 17th century historians looking at a 12th century legal text that was more theoretical than descriptive ( Read more... )

I've sort of started reading my new book: Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. It's a sort of ethnoecology* of California. I'm very interested in ethnoecology at the moment, in semi-agriculture, as it were ( Read more... )

Just read a really interesting article that starts with the information that very rich woman in the Oseberg ship burial (in Norway) is not genetically Scandinavian, but appears to come from the Black Sea area ( Read more... )

Well, I took the historical lunatics test. Damn but it was hard to answer truthfully. I mean with questions like these ( Read more... )