The current system of academic training, recruitment and promotion is not well equipped to recognize work that is routinely collaborative, may result in electronic outputs rather than traditional deliverables, and is not overtly focused on the monograph as the basic coin of the realm. All that makes it hard to reconcile with norms and expectations that are deeply entrenched in the academic humanities, most notably in the United States where institutionalized individualism and fetishization of the little-read book rule supreme. Academic incentive structures will need to be tweaked in favor of collaborative and non-traditional work to give simulation studies a chance to flourish.
Some of my gentle readers may not know that in ancient world studies we have a situation where to make a bibliography count for academic promotion, we have to print a few hundred copies and sell them to libraries where they collect dust while researchers check the website with PDFs or a searchable database. Rachel Mairs’ Hellenistic Far East Bibliography faces this barrier, so does the ETCSL. And peer-reviewed publications in ancient history and philology are still expected to be written by one or two authors, whereas in natural science there are often a dozen or more authors who contribute different specialized skills (perhaps one performs a chemical test, another writes the software, a third does most of the writing, and a fourth manages the project). But I see a big problem with pushing to focus on understanding the ancient world through mathematical models.
When I was growing up a fashionable big idea stated that two democracies almost never go to war with one another. The exceptions tend to be very old (like Athens vs. Syracuse or Rome vs. Carthage) or very small (such as the Western Allies v. Finland in 1941-1944 and some armed fishing disputes after 1945). This democratic peace theory fit the mood in the 1990s because it said we could put an end to war just by changing political systems and not tedious negotiations about arms control and international law. My amateur understanding is that its not a bad theory as long as you treat it as a rule of thumb not an absolute (both ‘war’ and ‘democracy’ are vague enough that advocates and critics can interpret things the way they want). But there is another observation that democracies are often more warlike (and put more resources into war) than kingdoms or oligarchies or one-party states or military rule. I was reminded of this by Raimund Schulz’ article on the Persian Wars in the Journal of Ancient Civilizations.
Richard Taylor, The Greek Hoplite Phalanx: The Iconic Heavy Infantry of Classical Greece (Pen & Sword History, 2021) Available on Biblio and Amazon
The Greek Hoplite Phalanx is a survey of warfare on land in Athenian literature. That is both more and less than the title promises. Readers who sit down with it over long winter nights or lazy summer days will find thoughtful comments on many old questions. Readers who want something broad or concise may be less satisfied. In many ways it resembles John Kinloch Anderson’s Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon from 1970.
One of the most frustrating things about Charles Oman is that he ignores when his medieval sources were alluding to famous ancient texts. At the battle of Benevento in 1266, the army of Charles of Anjou crossed the Apennines in February only to find themselves trapped between the mountains and the swollen River Calore with Manfred of Sicily and his army on the other side. Charles’ men were already reduced to eating fallen pack animals, and it was hard to see how they could go forward or back. But then fortune intervened:
Ricordano Malaspina wonders why Manfred crossed the River Calore at all since if he had waited a day or two, King Charles and his people would have been killed without a blow of a sword through lack of vittles (columns 1002, 1003). Oman wonders whether Manfred was worried about treachery or desertion, and asks whether “perhaps in the spirit of the mediaeval knight, he preferred to beat his adversary by the sword rather than hunger.” But any attentive reader in the 13th century would have seen that beating the enemy with hunger rather than the sword is a strategic principle from the third book of Vegetius on military matters. He mentions it three times: 3.3.1, 3.9.8., 3.26.32. It seems to me that Malaspina was just as unimpressed with Manfred’s strategic decisions as Oman was.
snippet cut from a forthcoming piece in Medieval World (Karwansaray Bv)
Before grad school I used to scour databases and the University of Victoria library for things to read on warfare before the 18th century. One of the pieces I noted down for later use goes as follows: In December 1522, some enslaved Africans on Hispaniola killed their overseers and marched on other plantations. The Spaniards... Continue reading: From the Notebook: Cavalry Charging Infantry
From a happier time: Verona Bikeshare in April 2017
Like many bookish people I grew up with books on Oak Island and ghosts and mysterious disappearances. I don’t think any of them covered Somerton Man, who was found dead on a beach in Australia in 1948 with a scrap of the Rubiyat of Umar Khayum in a pocket. Younger me would certainly not have recognized that 1948 was the perfect time, because many of the things which feed paranormal television today were invented between 1945 and 1975 (Bigfoot, flying saucers, and grey aliens for example; D.B. Cooper also hijacked his airplane in 1971). Things stay in this category because they are inherently hard to understand, so mainstream institutions do not take over investigation. Larry Kusche thought he had solved the Bermuda triangle mystery in 1975, but the sea is so wide and unknown that people who want to see mystery in a lost ship or plane can see it. Following these topics can be frustrating because there are many excited cranks for each new tidbit of information. But one of these cases has moved forward!
Dan Gardner’s Future Babble (McClelland and Stewart Ltd.: Toronto, 2010) is a pop book with a structural theory for why so many people get called out to predict the future using methods which fail nine times out of ten, then called back out after one failed prediction to make another. It relies upon earlier trade books (such as Phil Tetlock‘s work on expert judgement and When Prophecy Fails) and the psychology of cognitive biases and heuristics. One of Gardner’s favourite case studies is Paul Ehrlich who like Noam Chomsky spent most of his career repeating ideas he had in the 1960s (but whose ideas were much more easily falsified: the death rate did not rapidly rise from the late 1970s, and people all around the world start having smaller families once women have the ability to chose).
Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, Volume 3: Continental Armour in England, 1435-1500 (Thomas Del Mar Ltd.: Great Britain, 2022) only for sale from the publisher
My copy of Armour of the English Knight, Volume 3 arrived in December 2022. I hope to publish a review somewhere which will count on my CV, so I will be brief here.
The cover of one version of H. Beam PIper’s “The Cosmic Computer” (Ace Books 1963)
People who speculate about artificial minds have a thought experiment: if you lock a superhuman intelligence in a box, with just a way to ask it questions and a way for it to send back the answers, how do you stop it from persuading someone to let it out? Today some people who read the right parts of the Internet ten years ago are afraid that some terrible ideas have escaped geeky online communities and are commanding money and policy in the wider world. Outsiders don’t have the background knowledge to know why this is a bad idea. But a lot of the criticism is hyperbolic, very personal, and mixes unverified claims with matters of public record. Just below the surface are such baroque ideas and cycles of interpersonal relations that it is exhausting to learn what happened, disturbing to think about it, and hard to explain why this matters to anyone but a few very clever, very strange people who spend a lot of time on the Internet (and maybe social media these days). I found one series of essays that may help.
Some people make fun of stories about generation ships because they often follow in the mould of Heinlein’s Universe (1941): if there is a story about a generation ship, it will suffer a disaster while the crew inside descend into barbarism and self-destruction. Sometimes monsters devour the crew, sometimes a plague kills all the adults, and sometimes radiation turns the voyagers into monstrosities. Geneticists would call that a founder effect: the first story (or the first few members of a species to reproduce in an environment) has a disproportionate influence on everything after. Is there a wider context the critics are overlooking?
