How opening an archive caused consternation in the Netherlands
Reading time: 1 minute Generally speaking, making an archive accessible to the public isn’t...
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Category: Social and Cultural History
Open Letter to the Prime Minister: Restoring Equity in Higher Education
Reading time: 10 minutes The following Open Letter was sent by the Australian Historical...
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A Belgian farmer moved a rock and accidentally annexed France: the weird and wonderful history of man-made borders
Reading time: 5 minutes
Nations establish their borders through treaties. Rivers are sometimes relied on to set boundaries, but even here tensions rise when there are disputes about interpretation. Is the boundary on the river banks, the deepest part of the river, or the very centre of the flow?
Talking heads: what toilets and sewers tell us about ancient Roman sanitation
Reading time: 9 minutes
Focusing on life in ancient Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia, I’m deeply impressed by the brilliant engineers who designed these underground marvels and the magnificent architecture that masks their functional purpose. Sewer galleries didn’t run under every street, nor service every area. But in some cities, including Rome itself, the length and breadth of the main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, rivals the extent of the main sewer lines in many of today’s cities. We shouldn’t assume, though, that Roman toilets, sewers and water systems were constructed with our same modern sanitary goals in mind.
The World’s Sweet Tooth: A Brief History of Chocolate
Reading time: 6 minutes
It’s hard to imagine the modern Western world without chocolate. Whether it’s a treat on the weekend, or as a gift for Christmas or Valentines’, chocolate has become one of those foods that feels like it must’ve been around forever.
Yet the sweet chocolate bars we know and love today are surprisingly new, historically speaking.
Our stone tool discovery pushes back the archaeological record by 700,000 years
Reading time: 8 minutes
We, and the West Turkana Archaeological Project which we co-lead, had discovered the earliest stone artifacts yet found, dating to 3.3 million years ago. The discovery of the site, named Lomekwi 3, instantly pushed back the beginning of the archaeological record by 700,000 years. That’s over a quarter of humanity’s previously known material cultural history. These tools were made as much as a million years before the earliest known fossils attributed to our own genus, Homo.
On a Wing and a Prayer – Vimy to Australia 1919-2019
Reading time: 4 minutes On this day 100 years ago, G-EAOU, a converted World War I...
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Five Conspiracies that shaped our world
Reading time: 7 minutes
The world is a complicated place, and there are a lot of things out of our control. No wonder, then, that conspiracy theories abound, tales where shadowy forces control what happens, when it happens, and to whom. However, not all of these theories are all that theoretical, and there are plenty of examples of conspiracies that went far beyond the drawing board.
Cubism and Colonialism: How African Art Shaped Picasso’s Vision
Reading time: 6 minutes
In the early decades of the 20th century, modernism forever changed artistic representation. Artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose experiments formed the foundations of Cubism, were just some of the many innovators responding to changes in technology and urbanization.
Picasso is possibly one of the most well-known artists today, and much is known about his life and inspirations. However, one influence behind his innovative style is less explored in popular culture—the impact of colonialism. The cubist movement arguably would not be what it became without the legacies of colonialism and imperial conquest.
Vickers’ First Aeroplane and the Mawson Expedition
Reading time: 31 minutes Believed to be the first Vickers-Pelterie REP-type tractor monoplane...
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What stone tools found in southern tip of Africa tell us about the human story
Reading time: 6 minutes
Stone tools. Our ancestors made them, some people still make them, and many species of extinct humans made them too. For more than three million years, fractured pieces of hard rock provided past people with a means to extract their livelihood from the environment. Because stone is plentiful and cheap to acquire, stone tools were made in large numbers. And because it is so durable, it usually outlasts other traces of human activity. With the passing of time, everything from our thoughts and languages to clothes, food waste and even our own bones are inevitably erased. But stone tools have remained.
How historically accurate is the film High Ground? The violence it depicts is uncomfortably close to the truth
Reading time: 8 minutes The Australian film High Ground, set mostly at a mission in Arnhem Land in...
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