Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

I was supposed to be getting work done today! I had intended to pick the boys up from school, help with their homework, do a bit of housework, flit about on Facebook and Twitter … maybe even read a bit of an archaeology book … nothing too crazy. Instead I’ve spent much of the afternoon standing in one spot and breathlessly saying ‘awesome’. In fairness, I’ve not been alone – the Chapples Minor have also been standing about alternating between ‘awesome’, ‘cool’ and ‘wow’ … but the emphasis is clearly on the ‘Aaaaaaaaawesome’. Let’s back up slightly … I consider myself fortunate to be among the number of correspondents that the wonderful Howard Goldbaum (he of Voices from the Dawn [ Facebook | Web ] and All Around Nevada [ Web ]) uses to Beta test some of his project on. They’re invariably wonderful and seem to require little input for me, but at least I get to see so much of his work before it goes public. About a week or so ago I received an email from Howard about a...

Some years ago I spotted a lovely image on one of my trawls through the internet. While I do enjoy a breathtaking landscape or a beautifully captured scene - preferably with archaeology involved - this was something special. It was a simple set of six maps of Europe showing the 'Cities with Printing' at decade intervals from 1450 to 1500. It clearly showed an explosion from the single dot representing Johannes Gutenberg and his Bible in Mainz around 1452 to incorporate cities across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and from the toe of Italy to southern England by the turn of the sixteenth-century. A bit of searching led me to Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog, and thence to  Jeremiah Dittmar's 2011 paper Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press . It's well worth a read as he manages to quantify the rate and magnitude of city growth where early printing presses were established over those who were left behind in the ad...