Seshat: Global History Databank, established in 2011, was initiated by an ever-growing team of social scientists and humanities scholars to test theories about the evolution of complex societies (Francois et al. 2016; Turchin et al. 2015). Seshat reflects both what is known about global history (within certain practical constraints, discussed below) and also what is unknown, or poorly known. Seshat is a continuously growing dataset incorporating evolving interpretations, highlighting persisting controversies, and contextualizing enduring ambiguities. The quantitative data, suitable for statistical analysis, is buttressed by qualitative nuance embedded in descriptive paragraphs along with references to pertinent scholarship.
T.J. Dunbabin's book The western Greeks was published 50 years ago. In it he modelled the development of the Greek cities of Italy on the British Empire of the 1930s. Here Franco De Angelis explores the problem of faulty and distorting analogies.
On his recent retirement from the chair of classical archaeology in Cambridge University, Anthony Snodgrass reflected on the state of the subject, wondering whether a paradigm shift has occurred. Snodgrass assesses various matters, including, for our purposes, how archaeological approaches to ancient literary sources have changed. His comments deserve quotation in full:…Classical archaeology is often stigmatized, by its many critics, as being ‘text-driven’ … [in] that the subject takes its orientation from, and adapts its whole narrative to, the lead given by the literary sources. Thus the archaeology of Roman Britain has been built around Tacitus' narrative of conquest; the study of Greek art around the text of the Elder Pliny; the archaeology of fifth-century Athens around the narratives supplied by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon; that of Republican Rome similarly around those of Livy and Diodorus; that of Sicily again around Thucydides; and most notoriously, that of Aegean prehistory and protohistory around Homer…. But there is a deeper level still. Traditional Classical archaeology is stated…to have directed its energies at those aspects of the ancient world on which the written sources, taken as a whole, throw light. Thus, on urban but not on rural life; on public and civic, but not on domestic activity; on periods seen as historically important, but not on the obscurer ones; on the permanent physical manifestations of religion, but not on the temporary ones – sacrifice, patterns of dedication, ritual meals, pilgrimage; on the artefacts interred in burials, but not on burial itself; on the historically prominent states – in Greece, Athens and Sparta – but not on what has recently been called ‘the Third Greece’…
Haptic interfaces represent a revolution in human computer interface technology since they make it possible for users to touch and manipulate virtual objects. In this work we describe a cross-model interaction experiment to study the effect of adding haptic cues to visual cues when vision is not enough to disambiguate the images. We relate the results to those obtained in experimental psychology as well as to more recent studies on the subject.
The terms of twentieth-century debate on the causes of Greek overseas settlement were set by Gwynn and Blakeway: overseas settlements were either founded to feed hungry mouths in an overpopulated homeland, or they were founded to improve Greek trading opportunities in the rest of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Although the trade versus agriculture dichotomy is increasingly being regarded as false, its legacy lingers on, even in recent work. Detailed attention to the earliest remains at one of the best-known Greek overseas settlements, Megara Hyblaia in south-east Sicily, provides strong evidence in favour of seeing agriculture as central to Greek settlement abroad, but agriculture as a basis for trade rather than agriculture for its own sake.
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