I recently stumbled across a file I made a couple of years ago when in an idle moment I collected data on how many scholarly publications per year various Greco-Roman authors were getting. This was just a matter of doing searches in L'année philologique for the relevant year.

The results are here. All graphs use five-year averages, to make them less spiky, and to make the trends more visible. The enormous spike in publications on Vergil in the early 1980s is quite remarkable. Easy to see the increasing popularity of Hesiod, too.

But it's really the last graph that I found most interesting, which shows publications by language on a particular author (Homer). I was surprised to see just how major a language Italian has become in the last couple of decades! (By the way, the online L'année database only has metadata for Spanish-language publications from 1994 onwards, which is why a line for Spanish suddenly appears in 1996 -- 5-year averages, remember.)

In the first imgur album I neglected to include the same graph rearranged to show the different languages as a percentage of the total: here's the language trends expressed as percentages. It's interesting how the dominance of English has sharply dropped in recent years.

Edit. minor typo

I think shaft tombs in West Mexico were purposely dug deep to reach the water table and fill with water. This was an attempt at making an artificial watery cave that other Meso people associate with the underworld. Too bad so many of them have been looted and so few excavated.