Matt Damon playing a 14th century French knight that looks like a third baseman for the Phillies. Mullet. Beard. Smells like horse shit, pine tar, and cigarette smoke.

Matt Damon while playing Odysseus who also looks like a third baseman for the Phillies. Long, skinny beard. Smells like horseshit, pine tar, and perhaps Mediterranean herbs.

Matt Damon playing a 19th century cowboy that looks like a third baseman for the Phillies. Mustache. Shaggy hair. Smells like horse shit, pine tar, and definitely chewing tobacco.

Every time Matt Damon takes on a period role he ends up looking like a third baseman for the Phillies.

Cover of the book reviewed, depicting a coin, with the text 'Book Review, Antiquity'.

📕 #BookReview

Anna Flückiger & Jan Bemmann (ed.)'s 'Coining values: bronze between money and scrap in late Roman and early medieval Europe' investigates what role bronze and base-metal goods and materials played in late and post-Roman societies 1/2

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

2/2 He asks the mom to promise that if he raises her son, that the new freedmen will still be free. "Peter looked at her for a long time to see her thoughts." But _eventually_, she agrees, & even offers to give them the funerary goods. Then, "in the presence of all these freedmen," Peter miracles.

Out of many great papers at the Assoc.Anc.Hist conference, 1 moment sticking with me is Bill Owens' talk about slavery in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, & esp a moment where a rich matron asks Peter to raise her son from the dead. Peter notes that various enslaved men had been freed in his will. 1/2

This is such an exciting time to be working on Roman money, economy, cognition. Just so much wonderful work.

I see Simon woke up this morning and chose violence.

...being enslaved as constant process is useful and more accurate. In fact, we could really use a similar term for Roman freedmen, b/c "freed" does not cut it. Does not capture ongoing labor obligations, threat of re-enslavement, etc.

A better reason IMO is its closer relation to a verb & thus to ongoing process. We have Roman treatises about how to control/break people through beatings, food deprivation, imposing hierarchies, etc. This is not at the moment of enslavement but as daily routine. Drawing attention to...

This is superb.

www.nber.org/papers/w30451

(Re-)Uniting City and Country This volume inaugurates the IN-ROME Studies Series and explores the dynamic relationship between cities and their surrounding landscapes. Its objective is to enhance our understanding of the complex c...

a volume I'm a co-editor on has just been published. Contributions aim to center urban peripheries in the Roman world (heavy on Rome and Italy) from a variety of perspectives
(The paper version will cost you mightily, but an open-access digital version should be available within a day or two)
🏺

I'm trying to formulate something re: Roman economic futures that currently goes: "the extension of value circulation into the future was primarily created by means of foregrounding repetitive encounters with concrete stability," which I think resonates w/Macrae's article. Excited to mull it over.

Especially interesting since ancient warehouses have been on my mind for a few years. Powerful read.

I'm trying to formulate something re: Roman economic futures that currently goes: "the extension of value circulation into the future was primarily created by means of foregrounding repetitive encounters with concrete stability," which I think resonates w/Macrae's article. Excited to mull it over.

I wrote this is a furious fugue state after reading Owen's skeet this afternoon. How I learned I can't trust academic online resources anymore, and what happened when I asked ChatGPT for some sources...

Academia is cooked.

www.ancientalexandra.co.uk/p/ai-lies

Perhaps this is why people are convinced they are poor

I'm teaching excerpts from this book already, and it's wonderful. The title here (not the review itself) does the book an injustice, b/c Bowes works very hard to show us the resilience and hope of the 90%, and how their lives were NOT an undifferentiated mass of "nasty, brutish, and short."

Screenshot Lucavi @lucavi_ftw good news everyone SPACE com Potatoes are better than human blood for making space concrete bricks, scientists say.

Were

Were those the only two options

“I think we need to admit that coins existed.” Yes!

Sit by the riverside long enough, and you will watch your enemies' corpses float by.

young men benefit enormously from being taken up by older men as proteges in a way that is far riskier and less common for women

Duchamp would love

No paywall copy of the article in the Times about unwanted sexual advances by Simon Goldhill at Cambridge. Thank god students in 21st century report this shit and the universities take it seriously archive.ph/2026.04.09-1...

In my Roman Archaeology class yesterday I was talking about the importance of water transport and how it was the cheapest way to get things around the empire. Then I said it’s still the most important way to get things around today. Then I just fell silent for a bit.

The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back

Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted

Useful; this is the heart of it IMO

Very red tulip open against blurry gray ground

Spring

Marble sculpture copy of Knidian Aphrodite with brown hair, red headband. Wavy hair, calm face, full lips.

Randomly thinking about the fact that Aphrodite has brown hair

(in this Roman copy of the Knidian Aphrodite at the Walters Art Museum, anyway...)

I’d like to be on it!

A guy was playing “What a Wonderful World” at the Tidal Basin and it could not have been more perfect #cherryblossoms