History on Display: The Vikings Begin

While we were at Mystic Seaport, we were lucky enough to see an exhibit titled The Vikings Begin: Treasures from Uppsala University, Sweden. Curated by the Gustavianum Museum at Uppsala University, the exhibit is based on a ten-year research project that began in 2016. Known as “The Viking Phenomenon”, the project is designed to study…

Read More

Women Warriors and So-Called Armor

  I am slowly tiptoeing my way into the edits on Women Warriors: responding to my editor’s concerns about structure,* fixing sentences that cause me pain as I read them a month or ten after writing them, tracking down incomplete references,** tightening up some sections, and expanding others. I find it to be a satisfying…

Read More

Oracle Bones

Historical texts sometimes take surprising forms. The earliest Chinese written records for instance are the “oracle bones” that were used in used in the art of “scapulimancy”, or bone divination, in Shang dynasty China (ca. 1600 -1046 BCE). The language used on the oracle bones was rediscovered in 1899 by a Chinese scholar named Wang,…

Read More