Kim Bowes: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much is there still to discover, do you think, practically speaking? Oh, so much. Oh, it’s amazing how much there is to discover. I’ll give you an example. How in the world did they build Rome? Well, Rome is not only a city of marble, as Augustus claimed to have left it, but it is above all a city of brick. Where did those bricks come from? We used to think the bricks were made right there in the city of Rome. Some brilliant colleagues of mine figured out that, in fact, that’s not the case, that the Romans could never have made all the bricks that built Rome right in the city of Rome because they’d already cut down all the forests. They had to keep moving farther and farther outside of Rome in order to actually make the very fabric that the city was made from. We didn’t know this until 20 years ago. Only recently have we actually found this massive industrial belt of brick factories going up and down the Tiber Valley, probably 80 to 100 kilometers away from Rome. That’s a big thing to have missed. That’s like having missed Pittsburgh. Twenty years ago, we figured this out. There’s so much to discover. Think about it. For Italy, the number of farms, this is the majority of the economy is smallholder farmers. How many farms have we excavated? Ten? Fifteen? That’s amazing. So much left to discover. You grew up in Big Moose, New York. How has that influenced how you approach the Roman Empire?…

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