The Ancient Romans were not shy about generating erotic sex scenes in their art and literature. In the Late Empire of the second and third centuries, so much evidence surrounding the pleasures of sex abounded that it can be easy to imagine the Romans (well, the male citizen Romans) solely as pleasure-seeking sensualists.But we also […]
Ancient Rome and Sexual Restraint Read More »
The 14th-century BCE Pharaoh Tutankhamun’ s burial is the most famous in Egyptian history. Although the tomb was discovered in the early 20th century, it was only in 2016 that a team of scientists demonstrated that the object shown here was made of a substance more valued than gold: it is a dagger with an
My most favorite ghost stories these days come from historian Robin Fleming’s new book, _The Material Fall of Roman Britain_. Nothing captures the immediacy of the disappeared Empire in the hinterlands of Rome’s remote northwest like it. Practically none of the evidence from this time comes from written documents, so Fleming utilizes archaeology to tell
The Complexity of the “Venus Mosaic” Read More »
Where I live in south-central Pennsylvania, farmers and outdoor enthusiasts are well aware of new invasive species posing a threat to our forests and crops, like the Emerald ash borer and the Spotted lanternfly. It is easy to be lured into a myopic idea that the migration of fauna and flora mostly affects humans today
Ancient Roman Farming and Invasive Species Read More »
How you carry and cook your food and water has been the most important question of the day for most humans since Neolithic times. (A quick backpacking trip can serve to remind oneself of this truth.) So when containers change, it means your life does too, and this was certainly the case for the British
Changing Pottery of Ancient Britain Read More »
You know the Biblical saying about beating swords into ploughshares? Well, refashioning iron was a thing throughout history. The best sorts of iron tools were often not just made from steel (you would want that for the sharpest edges) but from a combination of iron alloys. And getting all of this together needed the sort
Refashioning Iron in Ancient Britain Read More »
TW: deceased infants; infant burialThere is so much that archaeology cannot tell us about the dead. We have piles of bones from the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods in Britain, artfully arranged, oddly located, age-specific, and unusually accompanied. But what the internment of the dead actually meant to the living is ultimately inaccessible to
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“Humor is just another defense against the universe,” quipped the great Mel Brooks, and the great comedian’s sentiments extend far back in recorded history. I like thinking about how long humans have been teasing, cracking jokes, and finding play with the absurd. The general scholarly consensus is that the oldest written joke goes back to
First Humor from Hierocles and Philagrius Read More »
The lunar crater you see here is Aristarchus, and we’re not going to be be able to get any closer than that to an accurate portrait of the eponymous Ancient Greek astronomer because most of his writings — as well as any contemporary sculpture or paintings of the man — are lost to the sands
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The northeast part of Africa fascinates me: the history is so rich, but many places I’d like to go aren’t accessible. Take the Kassala region of eastern Sudan, for instance — the first and second images show breathtaking mountains overlooking an off-planet like desert scene. These images also get at the ancient past of the
Beja Nomadic Peoples Burials Read More »
This is a shitty post. Really, because it is about the first flushing toilet, which is one of my favorite human inventions ever and one which should never be taken for granted. You see here the “Queen’s Palace” of the Minoan civilization of ancient Crete (@2000 BCE). The top photo is a very renovated section of
Flushing Toilets of History Read More »
Lots of animals love to play — many of us mammals will forgo food and sleep just to take part in exploratory fun. Humans have excelled at a specific type of play that comes in the form of games.Games are more formal than most types of play. They involve rules and have uncertain outcomes .
Ancient Chinese Board Game “Go” Read More »
These two images reflect the ancient Colorado peoples, who lived as the earliest nomads of the region. Some exciting research from this area is challenging entrenched ideas about how our human ancestors lived.The mammoth skeleton is from the very first peoples, known as the Paleoindians. Dating as far back as 13,000 years ago, archaeologists have
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Most of us cherish the beauty of wilderness, and I venture that a lot of our feelings come from our knowledge that humans have put the environment in great danger — therefore, any non-human engineered landscapes we now consider especially precious.But people have not always looked at the non-human world in the same way: although
The Beauty of Ancient Roman Wilderness Read More »
Everything has a history, including menstruation. Shown here is rock art from Western Australia’s indigenous peoples depicting two women dancing and menstruating.The cultural history of how societies have dealt with women’s menses is fascinating, but so too is the research done by evolutionary biologists. We have not all experienced periods in the same way throughout
Ancient Menstruation History Read More »
Behold the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, yet another place on my travel bucket list and also an archaeological site giving evidence for one of the most important inventions humans ever came up with: cooking.Ashes and bone fragments from Wonderwerk have been found from a million years ago, suggesting that our distant relatives, Homo Erectus,
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One of the best things about studying history is that it has the potential to make one’s day just a little bit better because The Past had so many shitty components. For instance, there’s a fairly good chance that if you are reading this, you are not dealing with head lice.Lice are just enough of
Lice Combs Through History Read More »
Here you see a picture of Achilles making sacrifices to Zeus. It is a unique image, coming from a 5th-century CE manuscript thought to be the only one from Antiquity illustrating Homer’s epic poem _The Illiad_. The scarcity of such depictions belies the importance of Homer on Ancient Roman culture, because all educated people would
Homer and Christianity Read More »
Nine months ago (November 2020), archaeologists excavating a part of the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii found themselves in a rare Indiana Jones-esque situation. In a fancy villa to the north of the city, along this corridor, lay the burnt encasements of these two bodies.Figuring out what these two were doing in that fateful eruption
Pompeii and Social Hierarchy Read More »
The Ancient Romans had a litany of holidays for all sorts of occasions. Every August 23 were the Vulcanalia, festivities honoring the Roman deity Vulcan, featured here in this palm-sized bronze relief from the 2nd or 3rd century CE.Worship of Vulcan shows the way that Romans often bifurcated their attitudes towards their deities. Vulcan was
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