The harsh, unforgiving conditions of the Andes and the nearby Pacific coastline make it one of the best places in the world to study the relationship between people and their environment. Professor Jason Nesbitt is an expert on the archaeology of the Andes and has extensively worked on how ancient people in the region organized themselves to deal with El Nino events and other climatic disasters. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook ...
Jun 02, 2022•44 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast China's Shang Dynasty is something of an enigma. It produced the earliest written evidence in China, in the form of inscribed oracle bones, and decades of archaeology have shed light on its capital city and society. Yet much about it is still unclear, including precisely how the Shang understood themselves and their world. Professor Rod Campbell is one of the world's leading experts on the Shang, and his work has done a great deal to illuminate the Shang worldview and why they did the things the...
May 26, 2022•51 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast The arid shoreline between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific seems like an unlikely place to host one of the world's earliest complex societies. But more than 5,000 years ago, the people of the Norte Chico Culture built cities, temples, and monuments that laid the foundation for thousands of years of Andean civilization. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https:/...
May 19, 2022•39 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast Mesoamerica is one of only a few places in the world where "civilization" - states, writing, cities, monumental building, and so on - emerged independently. The first society to do all this were the enigmatic Olmecs more than 3,000 years ago. Today the Olmecs are known mostly for their colossal carved stone heads, but they were the pioneers of a distinctively Mesoamerican form of civilization that lasted for millennia. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and...
May 12, 2022•43 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past several decades, ancient DNA and other archaeological sciences have transformed our understanding of Europe in prehistory. Professor Kristian Kristiansen has worked with these new methods since the very beginning, and combines them with a deep grounding in both traditional archaeology and big-picture thinking about what it all means. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read ...
May 05, 2022•41 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast The Eurasian steppe is central to grasping the past 5,000 years of human history, and in the past couple of decades, new tools of analysis have transformed our understanding of the place and its importance. Professor Michael Frachetti has developed and applied a whole series of innovative approaches to understanding the people of the Bronze Age steppe and much more, ranging from ancient DNA to isotope analysis to more traditional archaeology. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Refor...
Apr 28, 2022•56 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Four thousand years ago, the sprawling cities of the Indus Valley Civilization dominated much of South Asia; a millennium after that, however, the cities were in ruins, and new migrants ultimately deriving their ancestry from the Eurasian steppe had established themselves throughout much of the region. These new arrivals have become known as Indo-Aryans, and they left behind some of the earliest writing in an Indo-European language - the texts of the Rigveda. Patrick's book is now available! Get...
Apr 21, 2022•45 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast More than a billion people around the world speak a language of the Indo-Iranian family today. These languages all trace their origin to a group of innovative people living on the steppes of southern Russia more than 4000 years ago, people who inhabited a surprisingly far-flung, complex, and mutable world. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge&n...
Apr 14, 2022•47 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast The Indus Valley Civilization doesn’t get much attention compared to Mesopotamia or Egypt, but it covered an area of a million square kilometers, was home to hundreds of thousands or millions of people and a unified culture, and lasted for the better part of a millennium. More than that, the Indus Civilization doesn’t seem to fit the models we have for how early states functioned. Dr. Adam Green of Cambridge University joins me to explain the unusual way in which the Indus Civilization was organ...
Apr 07, 2022•50 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast Language is fundamental to how people experience the world, but how can we know what languages people spoke in the distant past? By 1200 BC, the linguistic outlines of the world were becoming a bit clearer, thanks to an explosion in written texts. Follow along as we go on a historical linguistic tour of the globe around 1200 BC, from the first Bantu-speakers of western Africa to the Indo-Iranians of the steppe to the Austronesians of southeast Asia. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge...
Mar 31, 2022•41 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast About one in every five people alive on the planet today speaks a language belonging to the Bantu family, and Bantu-speaking peoples have shaped the history of Africa in profound ways. But how did they expand from their original homeland, and how can we tell? Professor Kathryn de Luna joins me to talk about historical linguistics, archaeology, and how they can shed light on one of the most important processes of the past several thousand years. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Ref...
Mar 24, 2022•52 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast The state - a centralized administration that exerts control over a territory and can coerce the people living there - is one of the driving forces of the last several thousand years of history. But when and where did states appear, and why? And can we really call all of the various forms of political control that emerged around the world “states?” We can’t understand the world today without understanding the state, but that’s no easy task. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reforma...
Mar 17, 2022•41 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast Ancient DNA and new archaeological work have changed our understanding of many different parts of the global past, but nowhere more so than Africa. Professor Mary Prendergast sits on the very cutting edge of both fields, having worked on both the largest-scale studies of ancient DNA in Africa and some of the most fascinating and innovative work being done on the continent. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ...
Mar 10, 2022•44 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast The most striking environmental shift on the planet in the Holocene epoch was the greening of the Sahara. For thousands of years, the now-deserts of northern Africa were a mosaic of savannahs, river valleys, and shallow lakes. This unique environment produced the ways of life that eventually brought pastoralism and food production, as well as a variety of language families and populations, to the furthest corners of the continent. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Rena...
Mar 03, 2022•45 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Africa is rightly known as the “Cradle of Humanity,” because that’s where the most recent wave of modern human migrants originated and so much of our species’ evolutionary history took place there. But the reality is far more complex. Africa is a big place, and its relationship with our species spans hundreds of thousands of years, different environments, and multiple instances of interbreeding with other archaic human groups. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissa...
Feb 24, 2022•43 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast Human sacrifice is an ugly but essential topic in understanding the Shang Dynasty, but we know very little about precisely who these people were, where they came from, and what their lives were like prior to their deaths. Dr. Christina Cheung is a bioarchaeologist specializing in the study of stable isotopes, and she has produced some of the first work to shed light on who the sacrificial victims were. But that’s just one part of Dr. Cheung’s fascinating body of work, which extends all the way t...
Feb 17, 2022•42 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Jennifer Raff, a longtime friend of the show, returns to discuss her work on the genetic ancestry of America’s Indigenous peoples. We talk about Beringia, waves of migration, the troublesome relationship between science and Indigenous peoples, and her fantastic new book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, which is available now. Get Origin here: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/jennifer-raff/origin/9781538749715/ Patrick's book is now available! Get The Ver...
Feb 10, 2022•43 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast More than 3,000 years ago in China’s Central Plains, the Shang Dynasty crossed the threshold from prehistory to history. For the first time in China, we have access to the written word, in the form of the famous inscribed oracle bones. Thanks to that writing, we can peer inside their society and understand its logic - the logic of violence, authority, and the power of the ancestors. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in ...
Feb 03, 2022•47 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast The reality of the Bronze Age Near East was much messier and harder to understand than a straightforward story of city-states, empires, and kings. Different ethnolinguistic groups, lifestyles, dynasties of would-be rulers, migrating mercenaries, and ephemeral states were all essential pieces of the fabric of that world. Professor Aaron Burke of UCLA joins us to talk about mobility, migration, and the formation of identities in the ancient Near East. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge...
Jan 27, 2022•47 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast China’s written history goes back more than 3,000 years, stretching deep into the Bronze Age. But just how far back does it go, and how reliable are those first legendary texts when discussing a world that had already been lost for centuries? They speak of powerful kings and capital cities, and a dynasty called the Xia, but can we find them in the rich archaeological record? Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy...
Jan 20, 2022•42 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast How did Latin splinter into the Romance languages? In this episode, we explore how Latin transformed from a single, widely dispersed language into a series - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and so on - of related but no longer mutually intelligible tongues. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here. Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons ...
Jan 13, 2022•51 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast China’s late Neolithic period saw the emergence of increasingly powerful groups of elites who buried themselves in lavishly decorated tombs and built palaces and public buildings at the hearts of their fortified settlements. From these political centers, the elites built and ruled a patchwork of small, competing states. But by around 2000 BC, all of these early states had fallen apart, destroyed by changing climatic conditions, social upheaval, and interstate conflict. Patrick's book is now avai...
Jan 06, 2022•41 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast States have defined China from the very beginning of its recorded history more than 3,000 years ago, but how did they come into being? Professor Li Liu of Stanford University is one of the world’s leading experts on the prehistoric archaeology of China, and she returns to Tides for the second time to tell us about states, elites, and why they’re so central to the story of the Chinese past. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the Wo...
Dec 30, 2021•40 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast The late Bronze Age world of the Near East was an incredibly rich and complex place, full of long-distance trade, the exchange of ideas, bickering kings, and empires rising and falling. Among those empires, one of the most powerful and enigmatic was that of the Hittites, whose ruling dynasty survived more than five centuries of intrigue and war to build a state stretching across the region. Professor Trevor Bryce literally wrote the books on the Hittites, and I ask him about the Hittites, the pe...
Dec 23, 2021•45 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast Viewed from the perspective of international trade, political complexity, and written culture, the late Bronze Age world of the Aegean and Near East marked a high point before the fall. But how did this world come into existence? The empires of the Hittites, Mittani, and Assyrians - along with Egypt’s New Kingdom - marked the beginning of something new, an age of intense war and political competition on a scale larger than ever before. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation,...
Dec 16, 2021•46 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast If we know the name of an ancient Near Eastern ruler, it’s probably that of Hammurabi, thanks to his famous Code. But Hammurabi was just one ruler in a time of conflict throughout the region, and the state he built in his lifetime didn’t last beyond his death. This was an age of fragmentation that lasted for centuries, where ambitious would-be conquerors fought one another in endless rounds of warfare and bloodshed. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Fo...
Dec 09, 2021•49 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast Archaeology has come a long way since the first crude excavations at Stonehenge more than a century ago. Our guest, Mike Parker Pearson, spent the better part of a decade excavating in the vicinity of Stonehenge, offering new interpretations of the monument that form the backbone of current understanding. And Stonehenge is just one of Professor Parker Pearson’s areas of interest over the course of a long career that has redefined our understanding of British prehistory. Patrick's book is now ava...
Dec 02, 2021•44 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by ...
Nov 25, 2021•41 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by ...
Nov 18, 2021•45 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Friend of the Show, TV presenter, author extraordinaire, and historian Dan Jones returns to Tides to discuss his new book, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages . It’s a wonderful book and a tremendous achievement, written with both a consummate grasp of the huge scope of medieval history and a cinematic style of storytelling that keeps the reader engaged. How can we say something new about a very old period, and do it in entertaining fashion? That’s the key question for one of th...
Nov 11, 2021•53 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast 
