If you could return a specific Time and place. ....

[BAJR]

Funny how many of us would like to understand the Iron Age (or immediate Post Roman (which to my mind is the bloody Iroan Age again under a rebranded name!)

[Jack]

Hmmm, If I could travel to any time period............all of them. But that may involve stealing the time-travel device then spending the rest of my life fleeing from the time cops. Hmm sounds like the plot of a film.

But after visiting the early 4th millennium BC (or maybe late 5th) to convince the hunter gatherers of this country not to take up farming.......then visit again around late 1st century BC to see how things are going. If it looks like Ceasar is still on his way, teach the locals how to make gunpowder weapons and how guerrilla warfare works.

Then I'd show up in my own past to play pranks on myself before nipping off to the future to see how it all pans out. If I don't get embroiled in 'some save the universe' scenario its back to early hominid times to see if the out of Africa theroy is true or not (doubt it).

After that its back to the 1st century AD to see if I still need to help keeping them smelly Romans out. If that works out and people are still living in roundhouses with ring-ditches, then I'll travel the country convincing people to put odd things in their ditch termini, just to wind up archaeologists.

Hmmmm. Then I'd have to retreat back to sometime quite to think about what to do next.

[kevin wooldridge]

Funny how many of us would like to understand the Iron Age (or immediate Post Roman (which to my mind is the bloody Iroan Age again under a rebranded name!)

I may have mentioned this before, but in Scandinavian archaeology the Iron Age is split into : Older (early) Iron Age c 500BC-0AD, Roman Iron Age 0AD-500AD , and Younger (late Iron Age) 500AD-1066AD (within which there are further specific sub divisions e.g Migration period 400-550AD, Merovingian 550-793AD, Viking 793-1066AD)....a similar definition adopted in the UK would both account for the post-Roman period in areas of Roman influence and give a time perspective to some of the extremities where Roman influence was less apparent i.e splitting the Iron Age into more 'manageable' chunks....

[P Prentice]

i would go back to jack's uni days and get him to read some decent books

[Wax]

I'd go back and hold the lamps/torches for the group who first decided to paint on the walls of caves. what was that all about ? Are the symbols they used just a bit of fun or were they the start of encapsulating ideas to pass on to others (writing?).

Might also go back to post WII Britain and lobby for the preservation of the hearts of our medieval towns and villages that were ripped apart in the post war development.

[Jack]

i would go back to jack's uni days and get him to read some decent books

Grin.

But I did read loads of decent books back then. Lots of Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Harry Harrison, Moorcroft....etc. not to mention several dusty old books on folklore, a brief history of time and Chaos by James Gleick, seem to remember reading some about the history and reasoning behind science some Thomas Kuhn I think, but it was a long time ago.

Post a list of the 'decent' books you think I haven't read and I'll see.

Besides......I was far more critical of pseudo-science back then }

[P Prentice]

@ jack - so what makes you think that the hunter gatherers of this country took up farming?

[Jack]

@ jack - so what makes you think that the hunter gatherers of this country took up farming?

Ah good point........the evidence is scant.
Invasion or innovation (or both!)

I can't state a definite, but ockhams razor would have me favour a mixture of both...and a creolisation of the two separate cultures, resulting in the construction of monuments as a statement of ancestral 'ownership' or summit along those lines.

But nothing is simple. I'd have to say.............erm. Dunno for sure.

Till I get my mits on a time machine though.

There's interesting stuff around Ertebole in denmark and some sites in the balkans though, with 'hunter-gatherer' sites looking contemporary with 'farming' sites, and later 'hunter-gatherer' sites with pottery presumably form the nearby 'farmers'.

But definitions of both are dubious at best! We still hunt and gather now, and the divide between sowing a field with selectively bread crops and throwing the seeds of your gathered plants back where you got the from is very narrow (in archaeological terms). The whole thing is a very fuzzy transition.

Add that to the difficulty in recognising the difference between people and ideas moving in the archaeological record we're a bit stuffed.

Just have to wait for lots more isotope analysis of human and animal bones to provenance them and maybe tell what they've been eating to sort it out.

[P Prentice]

aye tis the singlemost interestin bit of our history to me but bugger all to be certain of

[Wax]

Possibly a bit of a digression and definitely on the fringe ( got to meet BAJR's expectations ) but has there ever been any archaeological evidence for time travellers I read some where that time travel must be impossible because no one has ever met a time traveller. Read folklore and there are hints with stories of a land where time travels differently and of people who move between worlds never ageing or ageing slowly.