not_an_expert
Exegi Monumentum Vitro Fragilius
The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Cities
My visits to Heuneburg and Haithabu/Hedeby reminded me that I don’t know enough about one of the great puzzles in world history: why cities spread so slowly, with frequent retreats and abandonments. There were towns in the Balkans before the Indo-Europeans came, but it was almost the year 1,000 before there was a single town on the Baltic, and that was burned and abandoned. Why did it take 5,000 years for cities to spread from Mesopotamia to Denmark, when other innovations spread in a few centuries? And why did many societies which once had prosperous cities give them up?
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When the Bronze is Like a Mirror
In April I participated in a prehistoric bronze-casting workshop with Dr. Bastian Asmus at the open air museum at Heuneburg (near Herbertingen, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany). I believe that it is helpful for historians to understand the world of things and skills in which their subjects lived. Like any other art, imitating historical bronze-casting requires a range of skills and is best learned by practice.
Funding Canadian Universities
Alex Usher of the Higher Education Strategy Associates has posted a series of comments on the operating budgets of Canadian colleges and universities since 1992 (first second third fourth and fifth). In a comment he explains that his source is the Financial Information for Universities and Colleges survey by Statistics Canada (here). I have some... Continue reading: Funding Canadian Universities
The Race to the End of the Earth
I recently visited the Royal British Columbia Museum for their exhibit on the British and Norwegian South Pole expeditions of 1911/1912 (no permanent URL: temporary one at http://explore.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/ ). The basic story is well known in Canada: how two expeditions both arrived in Antarctica in hope of being the first to the South Pole, how... Continue reading: The Race to the End of the Earth
