Category: Deep Dive
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The ‘New Chronology’ – the World’s Craziest Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy Theorists are the bane of the academic. After years of research, experimentation and peer-review, some random person on the internet appears and instantly disregards your work, choosing to accept a sinister cover-up instead. I’ve written before about how these conspiracy theories can often be actively damaging and dangerous, rather than simply laughable. But today,…
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Studying ‘Disability’ in History
Understanding and Framing ‘Disability’ A consistent trend in modern academic history has been to challenge ideas that we have traditionally seen as straight-forwards and monolithic. Real life is rarely this simplistic. Variation across time and space makes clear that many cultural trends of the modern world are cultural creations, and vary substantially across history. Recently,…
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‘New’/Processual Archaeology – an introduction
Although broadly maligned by Hodder and the Post-Processualists in the 1980s, New (or Processual) archaeology is often identified as a substantial shift in both theory and methodology. Led by Binford, Renfrew and Clarke it reacted against the perceived shortcomings of Culture-Historical archaeology, embodied by Childe and (more openly politically) Kossina. Fundamentally, New Archaeology proposed a…
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Viking Lead Trade Weights
Explaining Viking Trade Weights ‘Viking-Age’ trade weights are a widely attested phenomena in Scandinavia, but equally so in England. Manufactured in a broad range of materials and alloys (Maleszka 2003, 286), they are understood to form part of the system of Gewichtsgeldwirtschaft (bullion economy): a process of exchange of precious metal based on weight, common…
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The ‘Viking’ Settlement of Northumbria: Large and Archaeologically Distinctive, or Invisible?
Contrasting views of the Scandinavian settlement of the Northumbrian ‘Danelaw’ have emerged in the historiography of the period. Archaeologically speaking, can we easily identify the presence of these ‘Vikings’, through culturally distinctive material culture? Or, alternatively, is the narrative of invasion and settlement put forward in contemporary sources far less clear in the archaeological record?…
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What Can Nicknames Tell Us About History?
Recently, St Cross College ran their yearly history prize. This involved, among other things, producing a plain English explanation of your current research. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the result, and a little bit more about my research. How can we use nicknames for past societies to ask important questions about the…