Sublime

As barbarians by definition, their traders may have been forced to queue at the entrance to the empire. Intriguing concentrations of finds from the Northumberland village of Great Whittington, just a mile or so north of the Wall, suggest that here was a sort of caravanserai where drovers, traders, petitioners, embassies and wannabe citizens had to

For example, economist George Steckel and anthropologist Jerome Rose (2002) examined health indicators for Prehispanic New World societies and found that the median health of individuals declined as societies grew more complex. This suggests social complexity emerges from mechanisms that promote coordinated behavior even if it is not in the best in

This is one area in which early missionary or travellers’ accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perh

For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.

Hannibal shrewdly took advantage of the old pecking order rule: friends flock to the beast on the top; they abandon the beast on the bottom. Whenever the Carthaginian triumphed, he reduced his Roman prisoners to slavery. Since the Romans had been bolstered by armies of allies—troops from the conquered tribes of the Italian boot—the savvy commander

Perhaps the first major horse-based society in Eurasia was the Yamnaya people, hypothesized to have emerged as an admixture of hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Their territory was the northern Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe).