Dr. David Gwynn

speaker

906 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 21 Dec

Dr. David Gwynn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Ancients · Rome's Crisis of the Third Century · 9 Jan 2025 podcast

Er hat also kleinere administrativen Units geschaffen, weil erstens ihre Regierungen keine Bedrohung sind, aber zweitens können sie einen besseren Job machen, weil sie eine kleinere Region haben. Also alles, was er tut, ist, an früheren Modellen zu drücken, aber stabilisierend.

Was interessant ist, ist, dass er auch an einem früheren Modell drückte, das, man müsste sagen, nicht funktioniert hat und nicht für ihn funktioniert hat. Denn es liegt unter Diaklesien bei der großen Versuchung. Der letzte große imperialistische Paganer-Einsatz, um die Christentum zu zerstören, wurde im Jahr 303 eröffnet und fehlte.

Es ist sicherlich ein großer Veränderung. Was wir als das späte Romanen-Empire nennen, ist das remodellierte Empire von Diokletian, dann mit der Präsentation von der Christianity von Konstantinus hinweg. Es ist diese Kombination. Es ist schwer zu argumentieren, dass das die offiziellen Schwierigkeiten verursacht hat, die den folgenden Verlust verursachen würden.

The later collapse of the Western Roman Empire, indeed all the disruption of the 5th century, there are some factors that come out of these developments, including the rise of Christianity, but then there are also factors that no one could have scripted, which is above all the arrival of the Huns, driving the Goths onwards on a scale that did not happen.

Effektiv im dritten Jahrhundert haben die Romer ihren Worst-Case-Szenario getroffen, nämlich den Rein und Danube aus der Hand zu bringen, während man plötzlich den Riss eines neuen Empires im Osten bekommt. Und es hat sie sehr fast zerbrochen. Aber sie halten sich zusammen.

Natürlich, wenn sie länger stabiler bleiben würden, würden sie dann eine noch stärkere Ressourcenbasis haben, in den vierten Jahrhundert. Oder tatsächlich, Im zweiten Jahrhundert, wenn sie friedlich sind, stagnieren sie tatsächlich.

Also meine eigene Tendenz ist, zu argumentieren, dass das, was aus der dritten Jahrhundertkrise kommt, zumindest so gut organisiert und strukturiert ist, wie das Empire vorher. Es hat argumentativ ein etwas besseres System für die Unterstützung der Militär. Die Christenheit wird ein weiteres Lager der Organisation hinzufügen. Es wird auch einen viel stärkeren Einfluss auf Wohlfahrt hinzufügen.

But the empire is too big. The third century crisis demonstrated that, so will the later crises. A single person ruling the empire will actually be very rare in the last 150 years of Rome, because it is too large. You're too vulnerable. The basic structure was never able to cope against multiple shocks. The east-west divide. Now that is going to intensify over time.

It's always there, partly linguistically. but it will potentially grow. And yet, if you took, say, Diocletians' provincial tax reforms, they're still there in Justinians' time in the Eastern Empire.

So, you know, by the 6th century, they're still, I mean, indeed, ironically, they were still dating by Diocletians. In the 6th century it's why the man who came up with BCAD dating, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus. His original argument to the Bishop of Rome was, why are we still dating years from Diocletian, the man persecuted us.

Und das ist tatsächlich das, was den originalen Verabschiedungskalender verursacht. Dionysius Exiguus kommt mit einem estimierten, effektiv, Jahr des Herrn. Und so kriegst du den Wechsel zum Datingsystem, den der medievale Welt kennt. Aber Diocletian, die Organisation, die er verlassen hat, stärkte das Empire. So my own view would be, it's remarkable they survived this.

The real question is, why couldn't they repeat this trick in the 5th century? You've got the same shattering effect happening, but Gallienus Aurelian were able to dig in and pull it back together. And a key part of that does seem to be that Posthumus and Odonathus never actually wanted to fully break away. They were proud of being part of a Roman orbit.

Whereas when you've got a much larger migration of Germanic peoples who are creating independent groups, then you do get the breakaway. But it's an awful lot more complex than that.

My great pleasure. Thank you.

The Ancients · Ice Age America · 21 Nov 2024 podcast

There's a lot of characters on the landscape, and the landscape itself is nothing we moderns have ever imagined.

And it was a very, very different place, a very, very different time, and yet a wonderful opportunity to explore what modern humans did the first time they ever encountered a completely new world, a hemisphere that was teeming with animals, was far different than anything they'd encountered before, and a landscape on which they entered

And at some point must have realized there's no smoke on the horizon. There's no freshly killed animals. We're the only ones here. What the hell? Can you imagine the sensation that must have been when they realized nobody else is home?

In the last, oh, let's make it a decade, it has completely changed our understanding. It's been a remarkable sea change. Look, I'm an archaeologist. I've got rocks. Occasionally, I got bones, but that's pretty much it. If I want to do population history, if I want to know who these people are, where they came from, who they're related to, how often they got together, Did they survive?

Did descendants of theirs survive to the present? Or did they disappear? I can't do that. I can't do that with rocks. I can't do that with bones. But with ancient DNA, I can. And since 2014, I've been fortunate to be involved in quite a number of the papers that that have explored human population history. That's really what we're talking about here.

Ancestry, relatedness, admixture among different population groups. With ancient genomic evidence, we can do that. And so this is answering questions that I as an archaeologist have had for many years. about, again, who they were, where they came from, who they're related to, what are the ancestral populations that contributed to the group that would ultimately make their way into the Americas.

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