That is roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed how deep into the archaeological woods Cat Jarman’s River Kings goes in places and reading it reminded me a lot of my time as a PhD student – where I was surrounded by people doing Viking age archaeology in Ireland. I really enjoy archaeology and I’m fascinated to learn what interesting nuggets of information have been dug out of the earth. I kind of regret that I’ve never been hanging around when someone pulled something old and cool out of the ground and I am a little jealous of those who have. However, I’ve never been to a dig site or participated in any of the usual archaeologist activities most people picture when they hear the word. This was, by any reasonable measure, an archaeological study. I took measurements of five-hundred-year-old crossbows in a Swiss castle and examined an early 15th century crossbow in the basement of the Met in New York. I did my PhD on the development of the bow and the crossbow in the later Middle Ages and for much of my evidence I used surviving medieval weapons. I have often felt like a fake archaeologist.
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