What type of grass are you on, Jared?

July 5, 2017

Does agriculture start with lucky grass, as Jared Diamond says, or does lucky grass start with agriculture. I’ve been sitting enjoying the weather in my garden in Swindon, England. It’s a mess, full of random weeds and overgrown grass. But who cares? The Sun’s out. And there is a particularly fine, architectural grass growing just […]

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Violence in the Near East at the dawn of agriculture: conflict vs co-operation

December 22, 2016

Small population size and little need for competition is an excellent explanation for the lack of conflict during the transition to agriculture. However, there’s also another possible explanation – co-operation. In my previous post I tried to gather together the evidence for violence in the transition from foraging to farming across the Near East. Much […]

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Violence in the Near East at the dawn of agriculture: the evidence

December 10, 2016

Does farming lead to violence, violence lead to farming, or was the period during and after the invention of farming in the Near East as peaceful as it gets? You’ll find many opinions on the role of farming on the origins of violence and of violence on the origins of farming in human history. I’m […]

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Fatal Epidemics of the Bronze Age

October 25, 2016

Fatal epidemics in the Eastern Mediterranean have been going on since at least the start of the Bronze Age. However, the best evidence for big outbreaks is in 18th century and 14th century BC. After about 500 BC historians occasionally took the trouble to chronicle the fatal epidemics they experienced. However, due to a lack of historians […]

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Third Century Rome’s inflation crisis: ‘bad’ leaders or plague?

October 12, 2016

Is the massive inflation seen in the third century Roman Empire a result of reckless spending by megalomaniac emperors, plague or loss of faith? Take your pick. Is late Rome like the modern US? Probably not. There has been a general (though not universal) assumption in studies of the later Roman Empire that increasing militarisation […]

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The Late Bronze age: A ‘pleasant’ collapse?

June 25, 2016

I listened to ‘In Our Time’ the other day, as they discussed the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was nice to hear about something so dear to my heart as they rambled through the usual stuff and some stuff I didn’t know. It was a shame that they didn’t spend a […]

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The Greek Early Neolithic: following the ophiolite trail west?

November 2, 2015

Does the peculiar tendency of the first farmers in Greece to settle near certain bands of ophiolitic rocks hint at the strange fascination Early Neolithic farmers had for copper. Farming first appeared in Greece in the first half of the seventh millennium BC, around the time of the discovery of pottery in Western Eurasia. Although […]

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A primer on old-world metals before the Copper age (revised)

August 30, 2015

A discussion of copper, lead, gold and silver artefacts in the Old World, their origins and distribution from the Neolithic up to the time of the earliest smelting in the Chalcolithic or Copper age… and a discussion of where copper and lead smelting originated. (originally written mid 2010 – completely revised August 29th 2015) While […]

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Trying to date Avebury with the help of Stonehenge

December 4, 2013

This post gives me a chance to compare the radiocarbon dating of Avebury with the dating of Stonehenge and to see if Stonehenge’s new dates can help solve the dating mystery of Avebury. Stonehenge – current radiocarbon dating results So as far as anyone can tell, the ages of the stone circles and earthworks at Stonehenge are […]

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‘Plague’, language change and ‘dark ages’ – a general link?

November 1, 2013

Pandemics may have caused the collapse of the Roman Empire, the last European ‘dark age’ and the resulting changes of languages across North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. As wild speculation, could they have done the same in earlier dark ages? Recent work has been starting to fill in an old story about a […]

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