Take a moment to ingest the various components of this Late Roman artistic scene, because they’re really weird. This is just one small part of an enormous (36’x23′) floor mosaic discovered just last year during the COVID lockdowns on an English farm in Rutland. The discovery is quite the find: first, the enormous room […]
Mosaic of Roman Britain Read More »
History geek that I am, I unsurprisingly find athletic activities with antique lineages highly compelling. But getting a handle on what many early sports were like is difficult because evidence is lacking, and this is certainly the case with capoeira. The painting you see here is “Capoeira or the Dance of War,” by Johann
Capoeira or the Dance of War Read More »
This painting documents one of the oldest stories ever recorded, and it’s all about how evil entered the world. And the blame goes straight onto women, and frankly it’s exhausting. _Eva Prima Pandora_, or “Eve the First Pandora”, done by Jean Cousins around 1550, conflates the stories of the Ancient Greek first mortal woman,
“The pishtacos would kidnap people and change them into tallow to sell them for soap,” reads this ghastly modern cartoon. Legends about the pishtacos as boogeymen have been around the Andean cultures of Peru and Bolivia since the 1600s. Traditionally depicted as a white man with a beard and blue or green eyes, the pishtaco
Yup, you are seeing what you think you are seeing: it’s a sex scene, and it comes from the Lupanar of Pompeii, the largest brothel discovered in the famous Ancient Roman city. “Lupanar” translates both as “brothel” and “wolf-den,” and another name for a prostitute is “lupa”. Calling a sex worker a wolf is
The Brothels of Pompeii Read More »
These rocks from the northern shore of Lake Superior are from the dullest period in our planet’s history, apparently. Most of us humans of the early twenty-first millennium do not do well with being bored. Imagine, then, one billion years of it. From 1.8 to 800 million years ago, Earth’s life forms remained relatively
The Boring Billion Read More »
Yesterday I did a post about the “boring billion”: a period of Earth’s history when very little changed. Today I offer the exact opposite, which is the most exciting two minutes in all of existence. And those in fact were the first two minutes of everything, at the start of the Big Bang. We
This is the skeleton of 4926, who is the star subject of a recent excavation by Albion Archaeology in in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, UK. You see him here, laid out as he was in his burial, a man between 25-35 years old. He was part of a small village in Late Roman Britain, and
Roman Crucifixion in Britain Read More »
It’s my tradition each year to celebrate the season with historically themed Christmas carols — and so here you go: “Baldwin, it’s cold outside!” Set to the tune of “Baby it’s cold outside,” by Frank Loesser, this cover deals with the first super bad Viking raid in Western Europe. In 793, the pagan Norsemen attacked
Baldwin It’s Cold Outside Read More »
The Pantheon of Ancient Rome is one of my favorite buildings because its architecture is so distinct. The late second-century historian Cassius Dio attributed the dedication of the temple to “all the Gods,” but he was speculating — ‘pantheus” might have referred to one deity (albeit a superlative one). Why is that important? Well,
The Pantheon of Ancient Rome Read More »
The Ancient Greek art that most of us know features able-bodied people up-front: athletes with six-pack abs and fit and trim muscular physiques. But these images skew what we know to be the reality for many Ancient Greeks, and recent work by Dr. Debby Sneed aims to show that disabled people were not only commonplace,
The Bodies of Ancient Greeks Read More »
No, this isn’t what you think it is, readers: I know it *looks* like a penis, but really it’s not. Rather, what you see is a 16th-century woodcut illustration of the dissected genitals of a woman. Er, if that’s not obvious to you, don’t worry. Commissioned for Andreus Vesalius’s famous _De humani corporis fabrica_
De humani corporis fabrica Read More »
What could be more fun on a Friday than stories about travel and tawdry Popes? How about the Baroque-era Vatican in 17th-century Rome and a pope from the ridiculously wealthy Italian family, who went to war for Papal territory and drove the apostolic see into great debt? Pictured here is the Baldacchino, the enormous
Bernini’s Baldacchino Read More »
The magnificent ruins shown here are only some of the thousands of Ancient Puebloan structures found in southwestern Colorado’s Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. This particular site, found along the 6.5 mile Sand Canyon (loop) Trail, is similar to many of the region, with remarkable masonry that includes cliff dwellings, towers, public roofed
The Ancient Pueblos Read More »
This is Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, ending the childhood disease that had killed or crippled so many Americans — especially children — in the mid-20th century. But Salk was important for other reasons. His approach to designing the vaccine was innovative, using a denatured version of the virus rather than
History crosses the discipline of Political Science in the figure of John Rawls (1921-2002), arguably the most important American political philosopher of the 20th century. His book, _A Theory of Justice_, has ideas about how to structure society which have been of immeasurable importance far outside the towers of academia, ideas worth knowing about.
The Veil of Ignorance Read More »
Non-verbal communication is a scholarly subject usually studied by academics looking at modern human behavior. Physical gestures of course existed in past times too, but often there is little written evidence — whole catalogues of affective conversations that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone are closed off to historians, because they were so rarely
Communication Through Portraiture Read More »
Many of us have had need to wrap presents in the last few weeks, but maybe only some of us waited until early this morning on December 25 to start wrapping their children’s gifts. (Yours truly, ahem). The discipline of intentionally folding paper into different shapes is known as origami because this practiced flourished
We take for granted the ways we exchange greetings, but these ways are laden with hidden meanings that tell a lot about the culture they develop in. And when greetings change, something about the culture changes too. This is the Chinese character for “li,” an ancient concept developed in some of the oldest Confucian
Here are four different species of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Although they look similar, their differences include their beaks — each one takes advantage of a different type of seed. Natural selection shaped the trajectory of these birds’ appearance, and one of the scientists who first figured out how this worked passed away yesterday
Edward Osborne Wilson Read More »
