Garrett G. Fagan

Pliny the Elder on science and technology

The Elder Plinys Natural History is essentially a work of reference providing a wide-ranging account of human mores and achievement in the arts and sciences in the first century AD. It influenced the content and character of subsequent technical literature, but errors in transmission of the manuscripts led to undeserved criticism from the time of Niccolo Leoniceno, the late fifteenth-century Italian humanist. Plinys work is here re-examined for the first time since the 1920s. Modern experiments, simulating the techniques described by Pliny, and an in-depth study of his development of a technical language, confirm his unique contribution to our knowledge of science in early imperial Rome. Pliny does not, in general, understand the principles underlying the phenomena he observes but makes a significant input - especially in the fields of crystallography, chemistry, and physics as well as of the applied sciences - from which beginnings those scientific disciplines would evolve many centuries later. Ironically, Plinys scientific curiosity led to his death in AD 79 while observing the eruption of Vesuvius at close quarters.

Crusading against straw men: an alternative view of alternative archaeologies: response to Holtorf (2005)

This bit of silliness from the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, came to mind while reading Cornelius Holtorf’s (2005) recent article in these pages, ‘Beyond crusades: how (not) to engage with alternative archaeologies’. We all laugh at this scene because we know that Stan, now calling himself Loretta, cannot have babies. We didn’t reach this conclusion as the result of some socially mediated process, or by imposing the will of the ruling class, or through some cultural negotiation. There are actual, observable facts and materially testable propositions that inform our conclusion: for babies to be conceived and to gestate, there must be a womb; females have wombs and males do not; Stan is a male; Stan cannot have babies. As the old saying goes, ‘facts are stubborn things’, which, we agree, is predicated on our assumption that there are such things as independent facts and that facts matter. Is Stan-Loretta’s desire to have babies merely an ‘alternative’ to an inflexible biological worldview being imposed by Reg as a form of undemocratic, scientific indoctrination? Is Reg really oppressing Stan-Loretta? Or is that claim just silly? We think it’s the latter. We also think many of the preceding (pretty fundamental) observations can be applied to Holtorf’s article.