Monthly Archives: June 2020

How to Build Healthy Geeky Communities

20 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Modern, Not an expert

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Buttonholes being sewed with silk to an orange woolen vest lined with black linen

Despite the current situation, one creative project from last fall is finally moving forward! Vest in orange fulled cloth, interlined with linen canvas, lined with black linen, buttonholes in silk thread

Geeky communities attract people who milk them for money, sex, and throngs of adoring flatterers. In the Anglo world I can trace this from New York science-fiction fandom in the 1940s through some of the groups I knew face-to-face in Canada to the Southern California tech world (and the closely related SoCal kink and porn worlds) in the 2010s. There are theories why this happens such as Michael Suileabhain-Wilson’s “Geek Social Fallacies” (2003). But today I would like you to read an essay on how to build a community of plumbers working side by side not rock stars and groupies, a community that the parasites bounce off like a mosquito landing on a buckskin jacket.

No More Rock Stars (2016) by Valerie Aurora, Mary Gardiner, and Leigh Honeywell
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Cross-Post: Some Thoughts on Guy Halsall’s “Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West”

13 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval

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Things in Tirol are almost like they were in the Before Times

Even in this most unusual year, the plants grow and people play volleyball

This week’s blog post is on Ancient World Magazine: a review of Guy Halsall’s “Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West 450-900” (Routledge, 2003).

Halsall is a thoughtful scholar, and when I read his book I was struck that in looking at the end of the ancient world, he faces many of the challenges that we face trying to understand warfare in the earlier parts of ancient history. And thanks to my studies in Victoria, I have some idea of how his book is positioned in some debates, even though my own opinions on those debates are not worth sharing. When academic debates have settled down to two camps sitting down and declaring they have won and the other side should come over and surrender, it can help to look at how people one or two sub-fields over work through similar questions. And its an interesting, affordable book without too much self-indulgence. If you are interested in martial arts or arms and armour, this book’s ideas about how early medieval weapons were used are in line with the ideas of people like Roland Warzecha.

Check it out! (Or just go straight to the book on biblio and bookfinder)

Achaemenid Shields are a Puzzle

06 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Ancient

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Figure 6-2 from my forthcoming book from Franz Steiner Verlag. Some types of gerron (wicker shield) used in the Achaemenid empire in the time of Darius I and Xerxes. Top: peltē and wooden imitation of a sticks-and-leather shield from Tuekta in the Altai (different sections of ‘sticks’ are painted red, white, and black; similar shields appear in Neo-Assyrian art). Middle: rectangular wicker shields. Bottom: violin-shaped or figure-eight shields. Note that they are worn on the arm like a peltē or an Argive shield, not held in the fist like the Tuekta shield. Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu CA, no. 83.AE.247 (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program), State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, no. 2179/96 (photo by author); Gerhard 1847: Taf. CLXVI; western entrance of the Tachara of Darius (sketch by author), Persepolis; two reliefs on the Apadana, Persepolis (photo by author)

If you look at modern paintings and miniatures, you would think we have a good idea of the type of shield used by Achaemenid infantry in the time of Darius and Xerxes. They cite Herodotus book 7 chapter 61 and show the large rectangular kind on the middle row of the picture above. But as I argue in chapter 6.5.2 of my forthcoming book from Franz Steiner Verlag, things are more complicated. These large rectangular shields appear on the doorposts of two buildings at Persepolis and on two or three vases from Athens (out of thousands of soldiers at Persepolis and Susa and thousands of Red Figure vases). The person who published the sketch on the middle left thought it showed a battle against the Phrygian allies of the Amazons. And this type of shield does not agree with Herodotus’ words that quivers were hanging beneath the shields, unless we understand ‘beneath’ quite loosely.
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Cross-Post: Oxbow Books Sale

01 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval, Modern

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Pavel Vaverka reminds me that Oxbow Books has its usual spring sale right now. Here are some of the ones that my gentle readers might be interested in:

  • Thomas Fischer and M. C. Bishop, Army of the Roman Emperors: Archaeology and History (Oxbow Books, 2019) £45 ISBN: 9781789251845
  • Paul R. Sealey, EAA 118: A Late Iron Age Warrior Burial from Kelvedon, Essex (2007) £5 {I have this one, its very good on a grave from roughly the time of Caesar’s invasion of Britain}
  • Rebecca Angharad Dean, Warfare and Weaponry in Dynastic Egypt (Pen & Sword, 2017) {where earlier books on New Kingdom warfare focus on texts and art, this has lots of experiments}
  • Ian Shaw, Ancient Egyptian Warfare: A Brief Introduction (Casemate Publishers, 2019) £10
  • Carolyn Willekes, Greek Warriors: Hoplites and Heroes (Casemate Publishers, 2017) £4
  • Edward Burman, The Terracotta Warriors (Pegasus Books, 2018) £8 {talks about what the ongoing Chinese excavations may uncover}
  • Fernando Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors, and Battle of Ancient Iberia (Pen & Sword, in press) £40 {by an excellent archaeologist of warfare}
  • Sarah E. Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (University of Michigan Press, 2016) £46 {funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and bakers in the Roman imperial period to Justinian}
  • Susan W. Katsev and Laina W. Swiney (eds.),The Kyrenia Ship Final Excavation Report, Volume 1: History of the Excavation, Amphoras, Pottery, and Coins as Evidence for Dating (Oxbow Books, in press) £45 {the best preserved Hellenistic ship, a small roundship from Rhodes with a crew of roughly four sunk off Cyprus c. 294-291 BCE … I am sure Harry Turtledove had fun with the preliminary reports when he was writing his Hellenic Traders novels}
  • Susan Rose, The Wealth of England: The medieval wool trade and its political importance 1100–1600 (Oxbow Books, 2020) £28 {in the year 1500, England and Scotland were places of no significance except that they produced the best wool in the world … if you want to understand medieval and rennaisance England you have to understand wool}

They have the usual load of books on ancient textiles if you want something really estoeric from Oxbow! I had not heard that Quesada Sanz has a big broad book in English with nice drawings coming out.