I hope this is the right subreddit, but I couldn’t find an ask archeologists

I only have experience with America/ Anglosphere but certain baby names seemed to have abruptly switched genders. I do not mean feminizing a male name like Robert to Roberta, but a name being given to the other sex while unchanged. For example, the names Leslie, Ashley, Madison "Maddie", Sydney, and Shannon all used to be solidly male names but today are solidly/ mostly female. Superficially, it seems like the male versions were at least reasonably common and thus understood to be male.

Also, why only those names? People had more rigid gender norms and the first girls named Ashley would have been seen like somebody naming their daughter David or Matthew today, right?

What happened?

PS: I know some Catholics give boys feminine middle names like "Maria", but I'm talking about aggressively gender swapping some number of first/ given names.

I’ve been learning about the Middle Ages (Europe) in general for over a year, but I’ve found that there is so much to learn because of the time span, as well as how many kingdoms there are. Is this a good thing or should I focus on one kingdom?

Today, most countries have the similar education system, primary school, middle school, high school, where students spend 6-8 hours taking lectures and one professor giving lectures. Students sit in an organized fashion and are expected to pay attention to what professor is explaining for 30-50 mins. The lectures teach mostly general knowledge in different topics, history, science, mathematics etc.

So, I am wondering how did this start? Is it coming from a military based system in any way? And what alternative systems have been used throughout history?

As I understand it the initial brigade of volunteers would have been led by Col. Charles Young & might have been integrated. To what degree did this motivate opposition to the volunteers?

The show LastKingdom depicts Alfred the Great (King of Wessex) offering a bride price for his son Edward's bride. Dowries seem to have been a thing in Regency-era England (as a way to distribute inheritance early?)

Is there any insight into why was there a switch between who's side of the family would pay for the marriage and when it happened? Or maybe brideprice vs dowry differs between social strata? (Or maybe Last Kingdom is less than accurate?)

I've never been able to wrangle the pieces I know into a narrative I can understand. The Bolsheviks, as members of the RSDLP, would have considered themselves social democrats. In 1918, they started calling themselves Communists. Did this mark a change in ideology? And, why not just call themselves socialists? My understanding is that back then socialism referred to the classless, propertyless society at the end of history. How did it come to mean a stage between capitalism and communism? What was the nature of this stage? And has it, as I suspect, come to mean something else altogether? Does social democracy still mean what it meant in 1898? Finally, is democratic socialism related to any of the above? Thank you!

We know that cities grow and expand and their populations increase over time, but, what happened when walls surrounding the city become not big enough to fit the ever growing city? Like did they destroy them and build bigger ones instead (which I doubt they had the ability to do so)? Did they leave it and start building outside the walls, and if they did, did they build another bigger wall to surround the previous wall (so it becomes like a city with it's walls inside another city with it's walls)? did they just simply build another city?

Maybe I'm understanding it wrong, like did they have the entire city inside the walls or did the walls only protect the essentials like citizens houses and the rulers palace and the other things like markets and farms were built outside the city outside the city?

With American culture being exported all over the world, I'm curious about the American cultural touchstones that never achieved worldwide popularity and baseball seems like one of the biggest ones.

I may be underestimating how popular it is as I know it is popular in East Asia (Japan especially) and Canada, but it seems to me it never spread worldwide the way soccer did, for example. Why is that?

If they would what were the odds to success?

Hello! I'm writing a novel set in 1920s Birmingham and I recently changed the economic class of some of the characters. However, I couldn't find information on the cost of living or the minimum each class earned, beyond the groceries price (£32/year), to have a reference and assign them a job appropriate to.

(Sorry if I made any mistake, English isn't my mother tongue)

I guess what I am trying to ask is what was general public's reaction to this atrocity?

Thanks in advance!

my friend says that a lot of the things I learn online are manipulated history written by people that only want you to see certain sides of something…. and history that was written by the victors…..

also that the government secretly sensors internet and very cleverly shows stuff that they want you to see and that the media is also very biased and are the puppets of the governments.

I have to say, we are human beings after all. We do have conscious and subconscious biases.

with all of this, how do I know which source of history is the truth? and what to trust?

how do I know if this is the history that actually happened and this is the history that is taught in all the other areas of the world?

How do I know that this isn’t a manipulated history written by the victor.

how do I know that this isn’t history from “western” point of view

how do I know that a lot of the things that we know today were not lost or misinterpreted through text translations?

I suppose my question is, where did people room during travels in between 1000-1600? In fantasy books it's usually the tavern, people room in the tavern, but was that even a "thing"?

I went down a wikipedia rabbit hole and landed on the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people (I went to look up something from a novel and kept clicking links). The wikipedia entry says that this event "... [is] considered significant to the developed history and culture of the Jewish people, and ultimately had a far-reaching impact on the development of Judaism."

The entry cites an estimation that there were 75,000 people living in Judah at that time. Between the war, the destruction of Jerusalem, famine, disease, and the deportation, the population was possibly reduced to 10% (7500!) remaining afterwards (archeological surveys report a population of 30,000 people in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE). It further states that most of the exiled did not return to their homeland, and those that left Babylon instead travelled to what is now Israel/Lebanon/Syria area.

Okay, so my questions are:

• How the heck does an invading foreign army force the deportation of (possibly) 20,000 people? The distance between the two nations is almost two thousand miles by land (capital to capital, according to a quick google). Do they feed them? Is the intent to kill them all on the road? How many people actually managed to arrive in Babylon?

• What are these people expected to do once they get to Babylon? Were they all slaves/serfs, or did the Babylonians crash their local economies by bringing a bunch of skilled craftsmen to compete with the locals? Or did they (essentially) just drop a bunch of homeless people into their society and expected them to figure it out for themselves?

• Edit: and what was the population of Babylon like? If 20,000 Jewish people suddenly arrive, do the Babylonians just... absorb that into the population no problem, or were there conflicts like sometimes happens in modern times with countries absorbing a lot of refugees.

• Who were the people who were taken? Were they primarily leaders/politically influential people and their households and retainers, or did they round up the regular Joseph's, too? I'm assuming it's a mishmash. I'm assuming it's any live body they got their hands on after the destruction of Jerusalem, it's surrounding area, and on the march out of Judah, but is there any indication that they specifically targeted influential people or had a strategy to who they took?

• How long did they intend to keep them? Forever? I know the exile ended when Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon, but how could they have prevented people from simply leaving and making the journey back? Were they always under guard, was it like a "leave and your family is punished" threat, or was just moving them far away from Judah and stranding them there without money or influence enough to make it difficult for people to return? If that was the case, how did some people leave Babylon after the exile ended?

• And what was the goal? Like, the purpose of deporting them? Was it to absorb and assimilate the Jewish people into Babylonian culture? Did they need the people to support their government (like, war conscripts, or maybe a bunch of Babylonians died of plague? is that thought an anachronism?) Was it genocide? Did they not expect the exiles to maintain their culture and identity in this new country?

• Is this a common thing for this time period; for invading armies to scrape up as many people as they can find and Trail of Tears them to another location? The wiki article said only 25% of the population had been deported (at its highest estimated number of 20,000). "Only" implies that it could have gone higher without being remarkable!!

• I understand the event itself is definitive for Jewish history and cultural development, but which group was the ... I suppose "driver" of that development: the people who were taken, or the people who remained? I'm assuming the people who remained, since the wiki article says this was the beginning of a permanent Jewish diaspora, but if there's a "king in exile" story of someone later returning to Judah and reestablishing the culture from the perspective of the exiled, I'd be interested in knowing that story.

• Why would people who did leave Babylon at the end of the exile not return to Judah? The wiki article said that leaving was a "trickle" and many people who did return settled in what is now Israel/Lebanon/Syria area. After traveling thousands of miles, why not go back to your country of origin (or your parents/grandparents?) why get so close and then move in next door? Was there something happening that made Judah undesirable to settle in?

Sorry if I asked a question answered in wikipedia. I double checked as I typed them out and deleted a few I'd missed, but I might have missed a few more.

TYIA!

Edit: fixing grammar/typos

So this question is more in regards to the Indigenous of the United States and Canada particularly the Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes and Mississippi Basin area. I am aware that the Mesoamericans and Andeans had abundant spices like chili, achiote, allspice etc.

But there is not much information about the Indigenous in other parts of the Americas. How did they make their foods flavorful. Are there any pre Colombian recipes for how exactly they used to prepare their food and what sorts of seasoning and herbs they used to make it taste good? Quite a few of them were sedentary and had taken up agriculture so surely they had elaborate ways of preparing foods

I’d ask one of the Norse pages, but they are all over the place about everything. Also, internet searches have not been fruitful, either. Question is: How far back in history is there evidence(written or archaeological) of people worshipping Freyja?

I was at a social do tonight. A guest was telling us that a relative had recently died. She had worked at Bletchly Park during the war.

She had revealed in her later years that the girls had been split up after the war, and were not allowed to keep in contact with eachother or the men of Bletchly.

She had said Bletchly had had her married off to a Cornish farmer, meeting him for the first time on her wedding day. This happened to most/all the girls. She was given a new name and a job running the post office.

Can this be true?

I believe what he said because he's a straight up guy, but it seems extreme.