Category: Social and Cultural History

Ammonite: the remarkable real science of Mary Anning and her fossils

Ammonite: the remarkable real science of Mary Anning and her fossils

by | Mar 23, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Palaeontologist Mary Anning is known for discovering a multitude of Jurassic fossils from Lyme Regis on England’s Dorset Coast from the age of ten in 1809.

Her discoveries included the first complete Icthyosaurus (although it was her little brother who first stumbled across the skull, Anning spent the next year excavating and preparing the rest of the fossil), the first complete Plesiosaurus and subsequent plesiosaur species, a perfectly preserved belemnite complete with anterior sheath and inkbag, and the first pterodactyl Dimorphodon.

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The Philadelphia zebras … and six great animal escapes of the Victorian era

The Philadelphia zebras … and six great animal escapes of the Victorian era

by | Mar 13, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Exotic animal escapes are relatively rare today, and usually end reasonably happily. But in the 19th century, when travelling menageries and circuses traversed Britain and the US, such break-outs were far more common. Menageries toured widely from the late 18th century, bringing exotic animals within reach of even the poorest members of society. Health and safety was not a priority for exhibitors, and it wasn’t unheard of to find an orangutan in your bedroom or a tiger loose in the street.

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Hidden women of history: Maria Sibylla Merian, 17th-century entomologist and scientific adventurer

Hidden women of history: Maria Sibylla Merian, 17th-century entomologist and scientific adventurer

by | Mar 8, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
Most school kids can describe in detail the life cycle of butterflies: eggs hatch into caterpillars, caterpillars turn into cocoons and cocoons hatch. This seemingly basic bit of biology was once hotly debated. It was a pioneering naturalist, Maria Sibylla Merian, whose meticulous observations conclusively linked caterpillars to butterflies, laying the groundwork for the fields of entomology, animal behaviour and ecology.

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Why archaeology is so much more than just digging

Why archaeology is so much more than just digging

by | Feb 27, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
People invariably want to hear about skeletons, pots and bits of shiny metal. It’s this type of stuff that you will often see in the media, giving the misleading impression that archaeological process is only about excavation.

While the trowel and spade are an important inclusion in the archaeological toolkit, our core disciplinary definition – that of using humanity’s material remains to understand our history – means that we utilise many ways of engaging with this past.

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What we’re finding as we excavate Halmyris, a frontier fort of the Roman Empire

What we’re finding as we excavate Halmyris, a frontier fort of the Roman Empire

by | Feb 23, 2023 | , , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Nationalism is resurging across Europe, and with it has come increasing attention on the vulnerable outer edges of nations: borders, frontiers, and other marginal zones. Today, some of the frontiers of the Roman Empire are now national boundaries, but in antiquity these spaces functioned very differently from how we understand borders today.

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Safeguarding our Heritage – Why we must fund Trove

Safeguarding our Heritage – Why we must fund Trove

by | Feb 16, 2023 | , | 0

Reading time: 2 minutes
Trove, the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) public online database, has grown to include over 6 billion individual items. These include everything from newspapers and magazines to photographs, parliamentary papers, government and organisational reports, theses and research, audio, video and books. These are items from the NLA’s archives as well as contributions from over 1,000 organisations across Australia. These groups have been contributing thousands of volunteer hours to the task of preserving, collating, digitising and describing important artefacts from Australia’s history. They did this safe in the knowledge that it would then be maintained and safeguarded for future generations.

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Roman Britain was multi-ethnic – so why does this upset people so much?

Roman Britain was multi-ethnic – so why does this upset people so much?

by | Feb 13, 2023 | , , | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, has recently been at the receiving end of a “torrent of aggressive insults” for suggesting that Britain under the Roman empire – which at its height stretched from northern Africa to Scotland – was ethnically diverse. The trouble started when Beard described an educational cartoon produced by the BBC, which included a black Roman solider in Britain, as “pretty accurate”.

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Why the Neanderthals may have been more sophisticated hunters than we thought – new study

Why the Neanderthals may have been more sophisticated hunters than we thought – new study

by | Feb 6, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
When Neanderthals are depicted in artistic reconstructions, they often have a spear in hand. Most archaeologists believe that Neanderthals were adept hunters, and we have found spears at Neanderthal sites. But our knowledge of how they used spears and how that compares with our own species has been inconclusive. Rather than using the spears for hunting, Neanderthals could have used them for self-defence or scavenging.

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The Roman dead: new techniques are revealing just how diverse Roman Britain was

The Roman dead: new techniques are revealing just how diverse Roman Britain was

by | Jan 30, 2023 | , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Our knowledge about the people who lived in Roman Britain has undergone a sea change over the past decade. New research has rubbished our perception of it as a region inhabited solely by white Europeans. Roman Britain was actually a highly multicultural society which included newcomers and locals with black African ancestry and dual heritage, as well as people from the Middle East.

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