Fire, not just for cooking, the slash and burn method for cultivation.

I finished the Last Kingdom and played the game Assassin's Creed Valhalla, both which feature real locations and real people from that era.

As people already mentioned, post-Roman Britannia was a series of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms all fighting for power.

If you read up the history on Alfred the Great, it'll fall in line with the plot for the the show.

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That’s Phil Harding’s music!!

There's two main reasons. One is more pragmatic and the other is about long term political interests. The first one is that at the time, cotton exhausted the soil. Plantation crops, especially cotton couldn't keep being planted on the same soil economically. In this period there wasn't as much understanding of soil maintenance and health, and while there was some chemical fertilizer (Daniel Immerwahr's book, How To Hide An Empire gets into the importance to the development of American empire bird guano was b/c of its use as fertilizer) it wasn't as economical to transport into the south and use. So the Southern states constantly wanted new territory to expand to.

The political reason was that free states were expanding. B/c of the Constitutional preferences for slave owners in the Constitution, the South was able to impose their interests on the Northern states. But if the North population kept expanding faster than the south, and if the US added more free states, the South's advantage thanks to the 3/5ths clause would totally disappear and it's stranglehold on the Senate would be gone. At the time of the Civil War, the south had only about 1/3 of the population of the North. On top of that, 1/3 of the South's population was enslaved, so their interests were represented and they gave a representational boost to their enslavers against Northerners. So, if the balance of population kept shifting, the South, already weak in the House, would be totally ignored, and their abuse of minority power in the Senate would be totally sidelined. They had to keep expanding and adding more slave states or become a political non-entity.

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Totally don't expect a dissertation on the ancient history of a kingdom, but could you point to some good sources to do the reading ourselves? This subject and timeframe has become a great interest of mine lately.

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Its funny how lords and kings basically had the one pragmatic purpose for peasants: to "protect" them. But really, the lords and kings just conscripted peasants to fight their wars anyway.

Good question. I often see people saying "but that's not ancient, ancient refers to (usually the fall of Western Rome, or something like it)" which is partially true within a certain context. But the word can be used in other areas -- including histories -- in different contexts. For example, you might describe an Atari as an ancient video game system (to use a very extreme example) because in comparison to the PS5 it is. But you could not refer to an Atari videogame as an ancient game, because games themselves do go back into antiquity (note the usage there).

And while it's less common in modern scholarship, you can find works describing the ancient history of places like New Zealand, covering periods around 1300 CE because that's when we're getting the earliest human activity there. the Ancient Art sub had to try and figure out cut-off dates, and while I'm sure there's some work that could be done on it, they decided that this would depend on geographical location. https://www.reddit.com/r/ancient_art/comments/k62ml1/ancient_art_timelines_and_rules/

But with antiquity there's less wiggle room. When used on its own it usually refers to the regions around the Mediterranean up to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. You can use it in other specific examples, but you would need to be specific on where if you wanted to be understood. But it would stick out like a sore thumb if you used it to describe video games from antiquity, or claim that the Maori tribe had existed since antiquity. This even gets carried over in terms like antiquities, which have a fairly time sensitive meaning, or at least a stronger cut-off.

So while neither ancient nor antiquity are older, the term ancient has a much longer span and can be used in more contexts than antiquity. Hopefully I've made sense.

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This is a tough question and I don't think I've ever come across a good definition or any criteria. Part of the problem is that the realization that people moved around a lot before Europeans showed up, is kind of a recent phenomenon. It's obvious if you think about it for a few minutes, and it's even evident in texts, but it wasn't really considered important until the late 60s when cultural studies got established and people started seriously researching the question.

It's interesting how unseriously your question was taken until the last few decades b/c we have stories and information like part of the "Aztec" origin myth is that they migrated to the Mexico City valley in waves between 600 and 1000 CE, so it was staring us in the face the whole time. Another interesting one is when the Spaniards first arrived in Texas they were approached by Jumano people who were looking for allies b/c they were being pushed out of the area by Comanche and Apache peoples.

Was there a round table there?

Fair enough, thanks!

Was it cafeteria style?

Unless the reddit comment is on /r/askhistorians of course

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As Bentresh said, all of our tech is the end of a long line. Without writing we have no history of the source for so many things. For me the most prevalent is textiles and cordage and basketry. In only a few instances do these items get preserved and yet we still use ropes and shoe laces and now we weave items out of carbon fiber.

I'm personally very interested in the US Civil War. B/c of that one of my favorite history podcasts is The Rogue Historian. He has lots of good interviews with people who study or work in the field. https://keithharrishistory.com/

I also really like The New Books Network history channel. It's a podcast with interviews of authors of academic books on history. There's a lot of content and not all of it is interesting. I don't listen to every podcast, I just focus on ones I think are interesting. But there is a huge amount of content. If it's too much you can focus on more specific types of history. https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/history-1/history

I've also recently started listening to History That Doesn't Suck: https://historythatdoesntsuck.com/

and Backstory: https://www.backstoryradio.org/

These are more general history podcasts for the everyday listener but they have interesting stuff.

I'd also recommend all of Mike Duncan's work and the wonderful BBC podcast In Our Times. In Our Times is especially fascinating and I think it's a great model of what good public media could provide to the public.

I also like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I will say that Dan focuses on narrative and he uses a lot of older texts that fall into the Great Man trope. That means his podcasts have a lot of bad information and a fairly limited historical viewpoint. But they are interesting to listen to. They're just a little too focused on war from an upper class white male perspective. Dan's getting better though and is starting to try and consider other viewpoints on the topic.

"In Our Time" is an incredible podcast that's been going for decades (firstly as a radio programme) on the BBC. Not sure about how accessible BBC podcasts are outside the UK though.

Indigenous is used politically to describe people who have been subjected to colonialism and the nastiness that goes along with that, like forced assimilation campaigns and even genocide.

While technically yes all humans are native to Africa, no one's yet come up with a better term to describe groups such as Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Ainu, Chechens, Chukchi, Buryats, Cham, Sámi, Navajo, Cherokee, and Maya.

Which is older? Ancient or Antiquity?