modern – Page 2 – Book and Sword

A Letter to the Prime Minister’s Office

I woke up to read the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs on the latest foreign attack on Iran. My response is below the fold.

Cross-Post: Conference on Arms and Armour beyond Christian Europe, 13-14 March, London

The renowned Wallace Collection in London is hosting a hybrid conference. Museums rarely have much of a budget for research, let alone research on arms and armour, so this is a rare opportunity.

Cross-Post: Conference on Living History in Berlin, 12-15 November 2026

c/o ExArch. This is a hybrid event (in person and online).

Cross-Post: Pylos and Sphacteria 2027

A simple grey terracotta oil lamp with a single pinched spout against a neutral grey background — An oil lamp from ancient Cyprus, fourth century BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object 74.51.1992 (dug by Sardinian-American Luigi Palma de Cesnola!)

The next major ancient reenactment in Greece will take place at Gialova, New Pylos, and Sphacteria from 19 to 25 April 2027. This will focus on the Athenian and Spartan struggle to control the area during the Peloponnesian War or Archidamian War. More than a hundred members of groups from all over Europe, the USA, and Canada will attend. This part of the Peloponnese is not good for much except light grazing and summer holidays, so it is an unspoiled rural site. There will be excursions to Olympia, Ancient Pylos, and the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor and perhaps other sites.

Two Battles Among the Piikani

Some of the nations of North America fought with bows, arrows, spears, and shields before the gun. The following is a story from Saukamappee of the Nahathaway Nation (some kind of Cree) who was living with the Peigan or Piikani in the northern Great Plains. He passed it to David Thompson the fur trader and surveyor who wintered in his lodge around 1787/8 (Thompson had lost track of the years by the time he wrote down his memories). Thompson thought that Saukamappee looked 75 or 80 years old, so he would have been sixteen around 1725 or 1730. Saukamappee said that at this time neither his people nor the Snake Indians had horses.

Books Read in 2025

the glass-roofed light well of a long four-storey mall with many Christmas decorations — The Bay Center, Victoria BC, December 2025. The building is misnamed because the Hudson’s Bay Company is bankrupt and seems unlikely to return.

While the cares of the world drew me away from my books, I had some time to read whole books in 2025.

Books vary widely in density and word count (and readers vary in how much attention they pay). I suspect that some people who claim to read very large numbers of books mostly skim them, and some definitely read novels and airport books which are designed for easy reading. Someone who reads a few things intensely is not necessarily reading less than someone with a novel-a-day habit. So I will not make a total, just a subtotal of each category. These posts are to help me remember the books of all sorts which I read in 2025, like Zotero helps me remember the academic articles I found.

I have noticed that in ancient world studies or arms and armour I read more chapters and articles, whereas I am more likely to read a whole book in something further from my areas of expertise.

2025 Year-Ender

a fuzzy black cat sitting on its haunches on an asphalt surface — A James Bay cat! Cats may be the one good thing about the Internet and I saw this one with my own eyes.

Another year is passing, the tenth which I have ended with a blog post. This was a year of transition and activities outside of the history and archaeology I talk about on this blog. So sit down with a mug of something warm (or a glass of something cool for readers in the Antipodes) while I talk about this past year.

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)

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.