News

 The Lorenz Eitner Lectures on Classical Art and Culture are now available as full-length videos on iTunes U. See below for more information and links to the videos of the lectures, which are hosted by Stanford Classics. The videos should also be available for in-browser viewing on YouTube by mid-December. The website will soon feature a page devoted solely to these fascinating lectures by distinguished scholars.

In a book Jared Diamond has described as "three books wrapped into one: an exciting novel that happens to be true; an entertaining but thorough historical account of everything important that happened to any important people in the last ten millennia; and an educated guess about what will happen in the future," Ian Morris spans fifty thousand years of history and brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.

Michael Shanks and fellow archaeologists from Durham University (U.K.) broke ground last summer on a promising new dig near Binchester, the site of an old Roman fort that forms part of the Hadrian's Wall complex. 

The project attracted several Stanford Classics students--both grads and undergrads--and uncovered several more artifacts and structures than had been expected in the dig's first year. Plans are already underway to bring a larger group of students as well as interested members of the public to this summer's archaeological field school at the site. For more information, please email Michael Shanks.

Professor Walter Scheidel and Professor Peter Turchin (University of Connecticut) have published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which they analyze Roman coin hoards to explain population changes in the Roman Republic during the first century B.C.E. A good summary of the report and its implications is available on Stanford's Human Experience website, and the findings have been cited by ScienceNOW, published online by Science magazine here, as well as The New York Times.