Connecting China to Europe in the Bronze Age

November 1, 2013

How evidence of wheat, copper and broomcorn millet gives some clues to the first connections between West and East and the routes that were taken. A current best guess is for a steppe connection at the beginning of the third millennium BC and a ‘silk road’ connection at the end of the 3rd millennium. However, […]

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Water at Avebury

February 10, 2013

Was the water supply of Avebury as patchy in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic as it is now? It’s been a wet winter at Avebury. My recent attempts to visit Windmill Mill and West Kennet Long Barrow have resulted in wading through rivers where normally there’s no water at all. And it got me thinking maybe […]

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‘Why Nations Fail’ and the fate of Lele and Bushong

June 29, 2012

Acemoğlu and Robinson rightly argue in ‘Why Nations Fail’ that chance decisions by leaders play a big part in economic success, but using the Congo Basin’s Lele and Bushong as an example of this may be a mistake. One significant argument in Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson’s fascinating and highly informative recent book ‘Why Nations Fail’ […]

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Çatalhöyük and the loss of the hunting rite

June 13, 2012

Discussing whether the abundance of strange wildlife memorabilia in a place like Çatalhöyük happens when settled people kill all the local big game and become gradually disconnected from their hunting roots. In a nearby country town there is an old hotel. On its wood-panelled walls are images of red coated ‘gentlemen’ on horses, and their […]

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Risk and ‘gifts’: surviving the Neolithic by mutual insurance

June 1, 2012

Why pioneers of Neolithic agriculture needed to be linked in to the wider Neolithic world, and what they did with ‘gifts’ “a neolithic economy offers no material inducement to the peasant to produce more than he needs to support himself and his family and provide for the next harvest. If each household does that, the […]

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The sarsens of Salisbury Plain – A conversation with David Field

May 22, 2012

Apart from the obvious ones at Stonehenge, are there many sarsens on Salisbury Plain? David Field thinks there are. I went to see a talk before Christmas at the Devizes Museum, Wiltshire, England. It was given by David Field of English Heritage, and was all about the development of the landscape around Stonehenge through the […]

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Bronze Age Egypt or the Levant – which was the greater economic power?

May 18, 2012

A think piece for my own benefit on whether the Bronze Age Levant’s innovation is a better indicator of economic success than Egypt’s monumentality. I suspect not but I think it could be close. Consider the glories of ancient Egypt for a moment, whether it’s Karnak, Luxor, or Memphis, and it’s difficult to not be […]

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Indo-European, Atkinson & Gray and the culture fitting game

May 15, 2012

This post is now obsolete, as I believe (I’m possibly the last person to do so) that the authors are wrong in their conclusions, particularly on timing of the splits of languages. However, if you enjoy seeing how false ‘data’ can allow you to create false pasts then read on. Atkinson and Gray’s soon to […]

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Ness of Brodgar stories

March 9, 2012

The Ness of Brodgar site on Mainland, Orkney is amazing and the BBC programme is fantastic. I recently (well, about two months ago) watched “A History of Ancient Britain: Orkney’s Stone Age Temple”, a “History of Ancient Britain” special. This was on the Ness of Brodgar site on Mainland, Orkney. Funnily enough, I found myself […]

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What is the Avebury landscape?

November 14, 2011

Does Avebury’s collection of vast monuments represent ritual space, a failed civilisation or cosmic ordering? A few months ago I was asked by my old FE College boss to give a talk to the Swindon Philosophical Society about the origins of civilisation. I spent the next few months obsessing over something I discovered I didn’t […]

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