Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
From the CREWS project blog, here's a great new blog post by Pippa Steele. It's the result of an experimental archaeology investigation into the types of styli used for different types of clay tablets around the ancient Mediterranean. I saw Pippa give a paper based on this research in Cambridge a few weeks ago, and... Continue Reading →
The UK (and many other areas of the world) has been experiencing a prolonged heatwave this summer. Some love it, and some hate it, but it's clearly been fantastic for archaeologists. In the dry weather, grass and crops dry out at different rates depending on what the soil underneath is like - where there was... Continue Reading →
The ancient blogosphere has been alive with excellent blog posts this week (is it an end-of-term thing? Must be). Two posts particularly caught my eye for their new perspective on well-known ancient objects. In her post 'A Reversed Perspective: Looking at Greek and Roman Art from Behind(s)', Sarah Bond presents a round-up of some of... Continue Reading →
Here's a lovely post by CREWS Project colleague Philip Boyes on some of the fictional writing systems used in Star Wars. The examples of handwriting are particularly fun ways in which the filmmakers have used writing in very human ways. Philip also has interesting things to say on how useful or 'realistic' these strategies actually... Continue Reading →
This week on the CREWS project blog (which has a lovely redesigned website!), PhD student Natalia has written about the various different Greek and Roman myths relating to the creation of the alphabet. The most famous mythical progenitor of the alphabet is perhaps Cadmus, who is often credited with inventing or popularising the Greek alphabet.... Continue Reading →
The Partial Historians podcast uses Roman historical sources to discuss the founding of Rome and the city's early history. This week, they use accounts by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Livy to talk about the Roman relationship with their Oscan-speaking neighbours in the fifth century BC. I love the style of this podcast - their close... Continue Reading →
This morning the blogosphere has obligingly brought me the answer to a question I couldn't answer yesterday. Natalia Elvira Astoreca, of the CREWS project in Cambridge, has written a blog post on the different ways that people learn the alphabet in modern Europe. A colleague asked me a question about this at my talk yesterday, which I... Continue Reading →
This week I was excited to see the release of the first film by new company Barefaced Greek - and even more excited to see that the film was the opening speech of Aeschylus' Agamemnon. In their own words, Barefaced Greek is "a new initiative to create digital educational resources for the study of Classics and... Continue Reading →
I didn't mean to make this a week of "How-To" blog posts, but somehow it has become one! Soon after I published my post "How I Write a Lecture", Ellie Mackin posted my contribution to her "How I Plan" series of interviews. If you want to know how I plan my research, you can read... Continue Reading →
I'm really pleased that Venetic and the goddess Reitia have been included on the CREWS project blog. Many thanks to Pippa Steele for writing this post, making such good use of my photos (and Anna's delicious cake). As Pippa points out, Venetic gives us lots of important and unparalleled evidence for how people learned to... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 