This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
Strange that there's nothing else here... Anyways they recently found a tomb predating dynastic Egypt. This is huge! Estimated to be around 5600 years old.
http://phys.org/news/2014-05-archaeologists-year-old-tomb-egypt.html
Something new in Nigerian pop history.
Last thursday, the National Board of Film and Videos Censors announced a halt to the debut of the film Half of a Yellow Sun which is a period piece set in 1960s Nigeria, in the midst of the 1966-69 Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War, depending on your point of view).
The reason cited is the films pro-Biafran message, which censors fear would stir up regional hatreds between the North and Southwest of the country (which supported the Federal government) and the Southeast (the area of the secessionist Biafra state).
As an aside, the title is a reference to the flag of Biafra
In response to the censor's delays and demands for cuts to the film, Chimamanda Adichie (author of the book that was source of the movie) has accused the Nigerian government of being in denial about history.
I agree with Ms. Adichie. There has not been a spirit of openly and frankly discussing the war years in Nigeria. Rather, the attitude has been to sweep the uncomfortable truth under the carpet, so as to avoid a resurgence of regional hostilities.
I've just read a paper by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley on British occupational structure c.1700-1871. The paper will be a chapter in the forthcoming 4th edn of the Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, and is freely available here.
It's a move in a similar vein to Wrigley & Schofield's landmark demographic history of England 1541-1871 - previous patchy samples and contemporary estimates are replaced with a sample of over 1,000 parishes. At the moment it's still a sketch, particularly as there's no statistical means of incorporating female occupations.
The key finding is that by c.1710 employment in the secondary sector (manufacturing) was much higher than previously thought. Therefore if secondary employment didn't shoot up massively during the industrial revolution, labour productivity per worker must have done.
If the evidence holds up, then we'd need to substantially revise the way we conceptualise the industrial revolution.
