Kim Bowes: belief

Transcript context

…A doctoral student comes to you and says, “I want to find something like those newly discovered brick factories. Where should I actually go and look?” Where do you send them? Increasingly, actually, I’ve been sending—since you asked about papyri—I send them to the papyri. These amazing efforts by colleagues who work on papyri have increasingly put huge swaths of what amount to the economic records of the ancient world online, papyri.info. Any of your listeners can go and look it up. There are thousands of papyri that have not been either published or analyzed or really made use of in the ways that we now can do, now that they’re so available to us. Those papyri, although they only relate to Roman Egypt, mostly, so a tiny corner of the Roman world—it was arguably the breadbasket of the Roman world, one of its most important economic regions—they have so much to teach us. In 20 years’ time, I think we’re going to think completely different things about the Roman economy, and that’s going to be because of the papyri. The second place that’s going to change the way we think about the Roman world or the ancient economy generally is all of the new excavations that are going on in advance of modern construction. Once Italy, and Spain, and Southern Europe start to have the same rules and laws that basically make partners of development and archaeology, we’re going to have huge amounts of data from those places as well. It’s really modern construction and the archaeology that goes on around modern construction that’s transformed our knowledge about, say, Roman demographics or Roman farming or any of these other activities that make up the heart of the Roman economy. A lot of that material hasn’t been studied. It’s all out there. That’s where I send them. Is it much harder to do work outside the EU? Say someone wants to go to Tunisia, is that just as easy, or there’s additional obstacles—legal, regulatory, cultural?…

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