November 2025 – Book and Sword

Cross-Post: Publications by Non-Tenure-Track Historians

Contingent magazine in the USA seeks a list of (academic?) books and articles by historians without tenure-track jobs with a publication date in 2025. The online form is here. (scheduled 25 November 2025)

Ancient Greek Kit is Hard to Make

a tall narrow jar with no handles with a red surface with black images on it — A Red Figure lekythos (oil flask) with crouched warriors with shields and helmets from around 500 BCE. Image c/o https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/252540 (Object Number: 26.60.76)

Bret Devereaux has published his second essay about the debate about early Greek warfare with some back and forth from Richard Taylor and Hergrim. This week I will follow up on one of the questions which newcomers to the debate often have, namely why until around 2015 researchers rarely obtained replica kit and tried it out. There are many reasons, but the biggest reason is that ancient kit is hard to make.

CFP: Food, Logistics, and Power in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity

From Sebastian Fink (taking place in Rome, April 2026)

Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars

a black and white photo of a painted pot with a small round base and swollen body similar to a wine glass. The pot was broken and large gaps towards the top are filled in with something pale — Fragment of an Attic Black Figure pot with a duel, painted around 550-545 BCE. Getty Museum, Malibu, object 86.AE.112 under a Creative Commons license.

Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.

Comments on the Djurhamn Sword

The hilt of the Djurhamn sword care of Christer Åhlin, Christer, Swedish Historical Museum (CC BY 4.0) https://samlingar.shm.se/object/A854574B-07FD-4550-87E8-891C6B3EF89D

(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)

A complex-hilted sword was found in 2007 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.

Substack is a Greenhouse

a colour photo of a large greenhouse with glass panels and rows of plants and bushes — Easton Greenhouse in the Uk, Creative Commons Source: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.¹ Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.

Month: November 2025