Weekly Roundup of History, Archaeology and Writing Wisdom April 30-May 6

 

I’m hosting the Arizona Historical Society meeting today, May 7. It’s the last one until we reconvene in the Fall. We’re talking about Networking for Writers. I’ll put my talk up as a post so look for that in a few days. I think I came up with a good down-to-earth list of best practices. I’m looking forward to getting together with my historical writer friends.

 

The news that seemed most popular this week was the hatching of baby quails in a pot by my front door. I thought I’d drowned the eggs inadvertently while watering the pot. Mama flew into my face and I put an end to watering when I saw she’d laid her future family amidst my plants. Most of the chicks have already left the nest, mom with them. The two that hatched later seem to have been abandoned and I’m not sure they are going to make it. I keep going out and peeking at them. I wish I spoke quail and could tell her she forgot to wait for the late ones…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some posts I enjoyed from around the web:

 

1,300 pounds of Roman coins found buried in 19 amphorae in Spain while construction workers were laying pipes. One of largest such finds ever. The coins were probably stored to pay soldiers. I wonder what happened that they were never used? That’s a lot of coins to lose track of for an empire as efficient and bureaucratically competent as the Romans. Click here for “Park Workers in Spain Discover Huge Roman Coin Trove” on PhysOrg

Why packing heat in a fairy tale ruins the whole thing. Kristen McQuinn in her debut on BookRiot tells it like it is. Click here for Book Riot “Why Putting Guns in Fairy Tales Defeats the Purpose of Fairy Tales” 

I posted an article a while back that I’d found about how much more widespread literacy seems to have been in ancient Judah in 600 BC based on writing samples from a desert fortress. Here’s an analysis of the graffiti in Pompeii that draws a similar conclusion from this later period in the Roman context. Soldiers, and other decidedly non-elite people, could read and write in at least a rudimentary way and even made literary allusions, although those might be picked up from going to the theater. Don’t we all have the apparently erroneous understanding that literacy is an entirely modern thing except for the top layer of society or specialized people? Like rights for women or tolerance for this or that sexual behavior, literacy has not progressed in some linear fashion over time. It’s gone in and out of custom. When a soldier can carry on at length on a wall about his amorous adventures, you gotta figure he can read and write–and he’s not the upper class general. Julius Caesar didn’t write his memoirs on walls, but someone else did. Click here for “How literate (or illiterate) were the people of Pompeii?”