Category: History

I must recommend Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World! Wow!

If I could write like this I would feel truly blessed.

What a sweet way to learn history!

Thank you Mr Stephenson!

John Philip Cohane wrote a classic book The Key which unfortunately is not available on amazon but can be obtained as my link indicates.

This fascinating book shows how language can be used to unlock the riddle of our past, like DNA strands can unlock our genetic structure.

Well worth a read!

Daughters of Fire by Barbara Erskine

This wonderful novel lights up the Celtic World in great brilliance.

It is a great story and also great history. It is well researched and takes into account all the recent archaeology and also the current arguments, fights and debates in modern historical and archaeological academia. Very clever indeed! read this entry »

Stephen Oppenheimer’s new book The Origins of the British is packed full of interest for Celtic and English studies.

There is indeed ample evidence of Celtic writing, which is interesting because of the assertion that the Celts never wrote anything down. In fact it seems they wrote all the time and in many languages, for example, the many Tessera Hospitale and inscriptions located all over south west Europe, written in Celtiberian, Latin, Lepontic, Gaulish, Iberian, Lusitanian, Greek, Galatian and Noricum, Brythonic, Goidelic and with possible links to Basque. The Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn provides ample evidence of the survival of Celtic writing dating back to at least 2400 BCE. Funny how so little has survived! I wonder what happened to it all? read this entry »

“They do not understand that the reason why the poor exist is that the rich own too much.

“Abolish the rich and you will not be able to find the poor.

“If no one possesses more than he needs, all will have as much as they need.

For it is those who are rich that are the reason for the many that are poor.”

From ‘On Riches’ attributed to Pelagius, native Briton writing about 390-410AD read this entry »

How can archaeologists recognise and interpret the remains of cult and ritual activity?

Defining the term “cult” could take an essay in its own right, and many books have been written on this subject from many different academic perspectives over the centuries, with little sign that modern debates are flagging.

Definitions are varied, as if the term itself is alive. read this entry »

What remains for us to study?

It is indeed remarkable that so much organic material from the past remains for archaeologists to study.

Egyptian and South American mummies survive in large numbers. Frozen remains also exist, giving us dramatic snap shots from the past. Material remains from ancient techniques of smoke drying, honey soaking, air drying, shrunken body parts and also remains from bogs and wet lands, ensure that we have a remarkable body of evidence to study. read this entry »

I have published my new book, The Lost Book of History, which is already up and online under its component pages as follows: read this entry »

1. Never trust anyone who says ‘this is the first time in history…’ There is plenty of room for history to be turned on its head every time someone puts a spade in the ground! read this entry »

• 1700 AD North Africa the Barbary Pirates slave raids in Europe stole 1,000,000 people from Europe and sold them into slavery
• 1700 AD North America The 600 mile long Camino Road built from Mexico all the way along to coast of California by the Spanish to colonise the area, greatly inconveniencing the indigenous Chumash People
• 1700 AD Great Britain Edmund Halley famous astronomer names Halley’s Comet and member of the Royal Society read this entry »