So why were there no Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century?

My little post about Roman ghosts was not being a thing in the nineteenth century, of course leads on to the obvious question of why?

Well, I don’t know, but I have a theory.

Nineteenth century people loved ghost stories, as much, if not more than we do. Like us they liked being creeped out, so it’s not a distaste for the actual idea of ghosts.

It's more to do with a lack of awareness of Roman remains in Britain in the nineteenth century.

Thirty or so years ago I used to live in the middle of York, near the centre of the old city, in a nineteenth century terraced house, and the standing joke was that if you wanted your garden dug over, all that you had to do was notify the York Archaeological Trust that you’d found something, and you’d get a van load of spade wielding diggers round that afternoon.

Not true, but there’s a bit of truth in the story. Archaeology only achieved any sort of popularity in the nineteen eighties, before that it was seen as an occupation of dotty academics who spent the summer poking about ruins in Greece or Italy, or equally enthusiastically went on about crop marks.

Again not true, but not exactly untrue either.

Lets wind back to the nineteenth century.

There was no archaeology until the latter half of the nineteenth century. There was the odd antiquarian, and some of them were quite odd, who would sometimes investigate the odd bronze age grave mound or some Roman masonry they found on their property, but that was about it.

Some were quite systematic, and some were decided amateurs, and some like seventeenth century antiquarian Edward Lhwyd made valid inferences based on the evidence available.

Archaeology as we know it developed on the back of Schliemann’s mis-discovery of Troy and the discoveries of Nineveh and Babylon, and was something that happened out there, rather than closer to home.

It’s only later, in the early twentieth century that one starts to see something like systematic archaeological investigations in England and Wales.

While local antiquarian societies would occasionally sponsor digs, and finds of  Roman coins and pottery would occasionally be reported in newspapers, reports only start to become common after about 1880 - which is slightly strange as I thought the railway construction boom of the mid 1800s might sometimes  turn up Roman remains, but if they did, they appear not to have been reported widely in the newspapers of the day.

Before the early twentieth century, little was known about the Roman presence, because there actually were relatively few visible remains from the Roman period, people simply forgot about the Romans, and hence no stories about Roman ghosts, because there was nothing to inspire them ...

Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century

 I've been down an internet rabbit hole on this one - I was reading Irving Finkel's The first ghosts about ghosts in early Mesopotamian culture.

In passing Finkel discusses how deeply embedded in our culture stories about ghosts or encounters with ghosts are and I was reminded of the story of the Roman soldiers appearing in the Treasurer's House in York.

For no reason other than it was raining, I wondered about nineteenth century newspaper accounts of encounters with Roman Ghosts and turned to Welsh Newspapers online.

Interestingly, there are none.

Sure, there are plenty of articles about ghosts and encounters with ghosts, but none with Roman ghosts.

Trove is much the same if you search over the long nineteenth century, say 1800-1914.

Yet if you search the Google Books corpus with the Ngram viewer you get a small number of hits

(click to view)

but random sampling some of the links suggests that very few if any items link to stories about encounters with Roman ghosts.

It's not as if people didn't tell ghost stories - a young Charlotte Bronte was reprimanded at school for scaring the purple pussy cats out of her room mates by telling ghost stories after dark, but despite both the interest and familiarity with the classics in the nineteenth century, and the popularity of gothic novels in the first half of the nineteenth century, Roman ghosts seem not to feature ...

Optus

 Yesterday, for causes still unknown, Optus, Australia's second biggest telco, went off line.

While we all had a bit of a snigger about the lady who found out about the outage by her cat complaining to management that the wifi enabled cat feeder was offline and not dispensing cat nibbles as it should, it does show how dependent we are on the internet.

Imagine the following scenario:

A health worker trying to get to work yesterday - the commuter trains in Melbourne stopped because signalling relies on Optus - and of course because the internet was down they couldn't get a cab or an Uber, and if they were lucky enough to flag down a cab old style, they were unable to pay because the cab's eftpos was down.

Oh, and the hospital couldn't text you to say your appointment was postponed due to staff shortages.

That's just one scenario.

I'm sure there's more. And because the internet is pervasive, when we lose connectivity, the world stops.

Equally, it's not just about the ability to make calls or send texts, its about performing basic tasks like paying bills, ordering your groceries. It's how we consume media, be it Spotify, online radio, or catchup TV - it's notable that outside the cities Australia doesn't do DAB - it's internet based radio in one form or another. 

When I was in rural Tuscany in a village which remarkably had no mobile phone signal, life carried on because there was really good wifi. People texted, made phone calls, even put their rubbish out - the dumpsters were internet enabled and you needed a magic card to open one  - because they had internet access.

So, what the Optus outage shows us is that the internet is the jizz that keeps things running. And because of that we need to consider what steps we need to make to give resilience.

And that's where it gets tricky. People are focusing on roaming as a solution, where if your mobile internet provider goes down you fail over onto another network, much as what happens with SOS calls in rural areas.

However, that's not the complete answer - remember Optus went down, not only taking out their mobile services but their fixed infrastructure NBN based services, which is why some businesses had problems, and that is a trickier one to resolve...

Travel in 2023

 As I've written elsewhere we've just been to Europe for a few weeks.

Many things were different from pre pandemic travel - like that the use of cash had disappeared.

Yes cabs and informal market vendors preferred cash, as did cafes in Italy if all you wanted was a couple of espresso lungos, but in the main Europe had gone cashless. Having a low cost debit card such as our ING bank cards proved invaluable, as did having a second debit card, this time from HSBC, for dealing with self service petrol pumps and automated motorway toll stations - I have a paranoia about one of these machines swallowing my card.

In the even all the motorway toll plazas accepted contactless payments and the self service petrol pumps proved reliable - none of the fun and games we had in Portugal a few years ago where selfservice pumps would randomly take a dislike to an overseas card and spit them back out in disgust.

We did use trains and planes, and where possible we preprinted our tickets before we left.

Telstra has this absolutely stupid way of charging a flat $10 fee  per day for roaming which made downloading tickets to our phones an expensive exercise - although we did take a phone with roaming enabled, and installed the various train booking apps on it in case one of the scanners along the way didn't like one of our printouts.

I guess we could have download the tickets over wifi prior to travelling, and stored them in a wallet application, but to be honest, I didn't think of that, especially as I didn't realise that French train stations now need you to scan your ticket prior to boarding - Italy is still old school with train conductors who carry what looks like a modified phone to scan your ticket.

The Oppo phone performed excellently, and Belong's roaming coverage was so good we didn't need to buy a second local SIM card.

In fact I was so impressed with the Oppo's performance, especially with 5G, that when we got back to Australia I decided to ditch my pandemic era iPhone SE and use the Oppo as my phone, and sell my iPhone to a refurbisher, there being a healthy market in old iPhones, even the lowly 4G only SE.

(Incidentally I don't regret the iPhone SE purchase - it did its job, and did it well, but having used a more advanced phone like the Oppo, its limitations were self evident)

Our rental car in Italy for some reason didn't have a GPS, instead you were supposed to pair your phone with it over Bluetooth. Belong's data allowances proved more than adequate for getting us to and from rural Tuscany.

Google maps did get us lost in Siena - I suspect it lost the signal and directed us round in a loop. Restarting the phone cured the problem.

Airports almost universally used self service machines that scanned your passport and then retrieved your booking allowing you to both print your boarding pass and check your bags, and with the exception of Marseilles all the airports had smart gates with facial recognition. In Marseilles we had to line up old style and have our passports stamped.

Interestingly, in Bologna, while they had smart gates they still had a pair of border guards in a booth solely to put an exit stamp in your passport.

Britain and Singapore no longer required any entry and exit stamps, although Singapore did need you to fill in an online form in advance, basically replacing the old arrivals card that you used to have to complete.

The other thing that I found surprising was the pervasiveness across Europe of Whatsapp as a communication mechanism, especially in rural Tuscany where sometimes mobile phone coverage was surprisingly poor, but wifi was everywhere ...

twitter and the enshittification of academic social media

 It's a year (more or less) since twitter was bought by Elon Musk and began its journey to becoming X.

I'm not going to comment on the changes, I jumped ship sometime ago, more because of the gradual change in content, than any inherent distaste for the new ownership.

Basically, what was happening was enshittification where the signal to noise ratio on a particular channel rises to a level to no longer make it useful. It's also why I don't do facebook, or insta, or anything else - too much crap.

Interestingly there's a post going around about how a large part of the academic community has stayed on twitter because of the community - essentially people are staying there because people are there, and none of the alternatives, for example Mastodon, have the critical mass of individuals to make it worthwhile posting.

Now I'm not an academic, or even a retired academic, but I have been a digital archiving specialist and more recently worked as volunteer on a project for the National Trust to document the contents of Dow's Pharmacy, and certainly twitter, with its large community, was tremendously useful when I had a something like a transcription problem on a handwritten label.

Equally, it let me stand on the sidelines and follow my lifelong interest in Roman history and archaeology.

Twitter was indeed valuable.

However, I don't miss it.

Using a RSS reader (I use inoreader) has allowed me to assemble a set of feeds that let me follow my interests in both Roman things and Victorian murders and pharmacology. Likewise mastodon gives me a platform where I follow enough people to get the happenstance effect - like ninety per cent of everything posted is crap irrelevant, but every so often there's something interesting or relevant.

However, what I do see is the fragmentation of communication, with material appearing on SubStack etc, as well as other social media platforms, leading to a loss of universality.

 For a long time twitter was the default because  it was the only game in town, and classic blogging platforms because they've been around for years and provided an established platform for longer more complex posts.

Now things are more fragmented, and that, potentially, is a problem ...