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A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations
A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations and the scope of human freedoms
In the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon – taking inspiration from ancient writers such as Tacitus – described the Roman Empire (before its ‘decline and fall’) as covering ‘the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind,’ surrounded by barbarians whose freedom was little more than a side-effect of their primitive ways of life. In the years following the publication of the Atlas, archaeologists working in the inland delta of the Middle Niger revealed evidence for a prosperous urban civilisation with no discernible signs of rulership or central authority, focused on the site of Jenne-jeno, and preceding the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai by some centuries. In Ukraine, before the Russian invasion, archaeological work on the grasslands north of the Black Sea – which ancient Greek authors portrayed as ‘barbarian steppe’, a land of fierce nomads – was generating detailed evidence of a lost urban tradition, 3,000 years before Herodotus; at sites such as Nebelivka, for example.
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