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Write History – Win Books! London Invasions Blog Contest

Feb 8th, 2010 | By E P Wohlfart | Category: Featured

Do you want to win five books of your choice from Thames & Hudson? Or how about 50 credits for use in the HeritageKey virtual reality grid? Right now, you can and all you have to do is answer one question:

Which invader have had the biggest impact on London?

There are…



Learning the Ancient Craft of Flint Knapping

Jan 27th, 2010 | By E P Wohlfart | Category: Featured, Stone Age

Flint knapping is a wonderfully paradoxical craft. It requires next to nothing in terms of material – just a hammerstone and a piece of flint – but takes up towards a decade of hard work to perfect. Anyone can learn to calculate the strike to take off a simple flake, but making a tool…



Successors of Alexander the Great: Lysimachus, Craterus & Eumenes

Jan 20th, 2010 | By E P Wohlfart | Category: Antiquity, Featured
This entry is part of a series.

When Alexander the Great suddenly died in 323 BCE without a legitimate heir, the future of his massive empire was uncertain, to say the least. He had left two unborn children, an illegitimate son and a half-wit half-brother, but the real power lay with none of them. The true power was with the generals…



Choosing the Site for Ancient London

Jan 18th, 2010 | By E P Wohlfart | Category: Antiquity, Featured

Along the banks of the Thames just north of London Bridge, six meters below the current street level, lie the oldest remains of infant London.

The city has changed through its two millennia of occupation, but some things have not. There are still houses in these oldest parts of London that were built on…



A Brief History of the Civic New Year

Dec 31st, 2009 | By E P Wohlfart | Category: Featured

For as long as there has been a calendar, there have been celebrations in honour of the new calendar year. For most of us, whether our civic calendar is the Julian or the Gregorian, that date is indisputably January 1.

It wasn’t always undisputed, though. In fact, though the January 1 New Year…