The Moved Waymarker
~ Monday, March 22, 2021 ~
There is a Roman milestone in the collection of the Opava Museum that was found not where milestones belong.
The Moravian Segment
~ Monday, May 18, 2020 ~
Elena was at the Moravian Gate in May. The wind came through from the north, as it does when the mountain chains on either side funnel the air from the Polish plain down toward the Danube basin. The pass is wider than it looks on a map — the contour lines suggest a narrowing, but the ground is open and gradual, and the headwaters of two river systems lie within a few kilometres of each other at the watershed. You stand at the Gate and you can feel the topography doing what topography does: making certain routes obvious.
Samland to Carnuntum
~ Saturday, September 14, 2019 ~
A map of the amber route shows something that does not look like a road. It looks like a river system — which is, in essence, what it was. The route followed water: north to south along the Vistula, across the Silesian lowlands, through the single gap in the mountain chain that separates the North European Plain from the Danube basin, and then south along the Morava river to its mouth at the Danube. From there, east along the river to the great legionary fortress at Carnuntum. The route is roughly two thousand kilometres. The terrain determines nearly all of it.
What the Romans Knew About Amber
~ Friday, April 12, 2019 ~
The Baltic shore in April is cold and grey, the water colourless where it meets the sand. The material that made this coastline legible to Rome — that gave it a name in the Roman mind when the name of every king who ruled it was forgotten — washes up after storms: pale, translucent, light in the hand. The Romans called it by two different names, and the difference between those names contains almost everything that needs to be said about how knowledge travels.