Archaeology of the Night: life after dark in the ancient world

October 31, 2018 6:08 PM

What the Archaeology of Night Reveals. Podcast. TEDx talk. Symposium abstracts. The Archaeology of Darkness: abstracts.
posted by paduasoy (4 comments total)

This is fun - April's office is next door to mine. I'll send her a link!

I'm always sayin' to her, they need to focus more on High Arctic archaeology, where the invention of the oil lamp perhaps 4,000 years ago really unlocked that huge and productive terrain to year-round habitation, by making it possible to live and work in the months of serious dark and twilight. Peter Dawson at U Calgary has done some neat work using architectural software to model light and shadow inside (virtual) Arctic dwellings, and found correlations to artifact distributions (pic, his pubs are on ResearchGate and other places). There's definitely a lot of neat work to do in modelling light in other archaeological contexts as well.
posted by Rumple at 10:37 PM on October 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh man, thanks so much for posting this! I only recently found out about Archaeology of the Night, and I'm dying to read it. That book (along with this post, etc.) is the perfect marriage of my interests as a former archaeology student who is obsessed with night as a subject. It's been hard finding academic writing on the subject of night, let alone through this archaeological focus.

There's a lot to look through here (especially those abstracts in the last link!). Seriously, thanks!
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:41 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Interesting stuff. A few years ago I read At Days Close: Night in Times Past, which really changed my perceptions on historical night.
posted by fimbulvetr at 9:01 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thanks, fimbulvetr - that looks good. People might also like Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew Beaumont.
posted by paduasoy at 4:46 AM on November 3, 2018