(ii) From the window of his New York apartment in 1954, Everard sees lights flaming against a hectic sky, crawling automobiles and a hurrying crowd.
(iii) The London office of the Time Patrol in 1894: heavy oak furniture and gas lighting. (As in the Amsterdam in the late twentieth century, the cover is an import firm.)
(iv) A quiet village railway station among well cultivated flower gardens.
(v) 464 A.D.: a dark forest and a howling wolf.
(vi) An unpaved courtyard of mud and manure with naked children, a girl milking a cow and a farmhand swilling the pigs.
(vii) A dirty inn in a moss-grown ruined town house.
(viii) London, 1944: cold wind down dark streets; an explosion and a fire.
The opening story of the Time Patrol series presents five very different periods.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And (v), (vi), and (vii) gives us too plausible glimpses of how miserable life was in early post-Roman Britain as the Western Empire was falling.
Sean
Recent research indicates that at its height, most provinces of the Roman empire had bigger populations and a more monetized, trade-oriented economy than they were to have again until well into the 18th century; in many cases, not until the 20th. This was fairly abrupt; the late Empire had problems, but the high plateau it reached in the 200's CE was basically maintained until the collapse of the Western Empire's political structure.
Historiographic analysis swings back and forth. Currently it's swinging back towards a "catastrophist" interpretation of the Empire's fall, driven by archaeological data like the Greenland ice cores (which can trace lead pollution, itself an indicator of silver production, which in turn indicates how much money was in circulation).
Mr Stirling,
I knew that everything is connected but not that ice cores connect with money circulation.
Paul.
Paul: the ice cores reflect led pollution from smelters in western Europe; led pollution was a by-product of silver mining; silver mining in the Roman Empire was state-controlled and carefully controlled to provide the desired level of circulating currency.
Wow. More is learned about the past through technological advances in the present.
Oh, very much so. The latest advances allow us to get direct evidence of things that had to be done by inference before.
Eg., the Beaker complex (a set of associated material remains centered on what are apparently ritual drinking vessels) spread to Britain around 2500 BCE. For generations, there was an ongoing archaeological dispute over whether this was due to copying or to the immigration of a new population group.
Just recently, a large number of samples of ancient DNA was obtained from British sources, spanning the Neolithic, late neolithic and Bronze Age periods.
Comparisons showed that the Beaker phenomenon in Britain -did- correspond to a new population.
In fact, it corresponded to a drastic -replacement- of the previous population by a new one, with a 90% genetic discontinuity before and after.
The populations even looked different; the predominant element in the Neolithic population of Britain was ultimately derived from Anatolia, via the Mediterranean, and were small and dark. (The secondary element were derived from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the area).
The Beaker complex intruders were from the Rhine delta area and were tall and fair, looking pretty much as NW Europeans have traditionally.
This was a bit of a gobsmacker to the archaeologists, who hadn't expected anything of the sort.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/the-beaker-people-a-new-population-for-ancient-britain.html
Archaeological opinion has swung wildly between associating material cultures with population movements and assuming that cultures changed by local innovation or diffusion of cultural traits by adoption among established populations.
(An example of the latter would be the change in burial customs associated with Christianization in northern Europe.)
From the early twentieth century through the 1950's migrationist explanations were predominant; after that diffusionist ones. It was impossible to settle the issue directly because skeletal evidence is ambiguous, and languages and the like don't leave physical traces in preliterate cultures.
Ancient DNA analysis cuts through those problems.
One thing it's established is that populations are not nearly as persistent as was thought in the last couple of generations. Complete turnovers happen, and large-scale migration events are even more common.
For example, it's now been demonstrated that there was a quite large-scale migration to England in the post-Roman period, accounting for 30-40% of the genome of the subsequent population of England.
Other techniques help with this sort of thing. Teeth enamel isotopes can determine where someone is from, for instance -- the "Amesbury Archer", buried near Stonehenge, turned out to have come from the Alpine region of Central Europe.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Is it reasonable of me to think that because of the "monetized, trade oriented" economy of the Roman Empire, that standards of living were quite high, least for those belonging to the middle and upper classes? And even for many lower class persons living in cities like Rome which had state subsidized food and other amenities?
Sean
Sean: pretty much, though "high" was in comparison to a low baseline before and after.
The Imperial economy was regionally specialized enough and had a high enough division of labor that its collapse had very far-reaching consequences -- local populations had often lost the skills necessary to make a good many routine products like pottery, for instance. And places that had produced for wide areas stopped doing so themselves because their methods were based on being full-time specialists.
You went from a situation where people shipped building stone and fish sauce and tableware across the Empire, and where otherwise un-Romanized settlements in the hills of Cumbria had small coins and mass-produced pottery to one where only kings and great nobles would have anything from more than a few days travel away.
And from one in which workers in shops making tiles were literate enough (in Latin) to write scurrilous graffiti about their co-workers on their products one where emperors were illiterate and the law assumed that literacy was proof you were a priest.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Very interesting comments and ones I agree with.
Sean
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