Has anyone heard of the Maguey Plan before? Adela Breton made copies of it which are now in the Bristol Museum. Apparently it records households in Tenochtitlan? I'm not entirely sure,

http://museums.bristol.gov.uk/details.php?irn=230507

Also, I was taking another look at the site map sketches of Los Guachimontones that Adela Breton created. I finally realized why the two maps look so different. They do not depict the same site! This map depicts the ceremonial core of Los Guachimontones. But this map is actually a map of Loma Alta located further up the hill from Los Guachis. Breton failed to draw the ballcourt correctly for Loma Alta leading me to think that she drew a weird version of Los Guachis. So that's cool. I also took a look at the scrap book of photos and confirmed that two of the photos were of Circle 1 and one photo was of Circle 2.

I am curious about another sketch that Adela Breton produced. This sketch was of a stone relief at Cerro Guzman, Jalisco, Mexico. I have very rarely seen stone reliefs from Jalisco. My guess is that this is from a Postclassic relief. I just wish I knew where Cerro Guzman was located. My Google searching has not quite found a place where this could be unless it is suppose to be near Ciudad Guzman just south of Sayula.

Got bit by the pop history bug again. Finished off Time of Meteors and hopped over to At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. I half-remembered it from a JAH state of field essay and it cost as much as a comic for the ebook, so I snapped it up.

There are no citations. Dammit. Superscripts are good enough for a subsequent work of his I checked, but not the one I'm interested in.

The writing's good and I'm still picking things up beyond what I already got by osmosis from being around black history for a while, but every time I want to check something it's a dead end. Now and then it's clear but 90% of the time he quotes something and you just know in a general way who said or wrote it. Singularly frustrating.

Checked the state of field again. Looks like I had Dray's book confused with one of the others, but he does have a mention in the footnotes so he's not entirely off the proper radar. I should probably mind more, and will not consider myself as having properly read a book on lynching when I'm done with him because of all this, but since this is field-adjacent for me and just the first thing I've ever read on the subject I'm not as annoyed as I would be. And, you know, it was three bucks.

I've just about finished Jim Bradbury's The Medieval Siege, and I'll probably be done with it this afternoon, but I thought I'd post my nearly final thoughts now. Overall it's a good book, and probably still the best introduction to the subject available right now. It's a little dated in places (it is 25 years old after all), but I found very few areas where it was egregiously out of date. It's by no means the final word on its subject, and several areas have seen significant improvements since it was written, but it's a great jumping off point and a good broad survey of the subject.

I have only a few significant issues with its contents.

1. The layout is really strange. The last two chapters feel like they should have been the first two. The penultimate chapter is a history of siege weapons, including discussions of how they were used. It is in this chapter that terms like trebuchet and testudo are defined. Since this isn't my first time reading about this subject I already knew those words, but as an introductory work it's very weird to define these words so late in the book. The initial 200+ pages of text are a probably a lot more confusing if you don't already know at least the basics of medieval sieges, which undermines this book's usefulness as a general introduction. The final chapter includes discussions of the practice and rules of medieval siege warfare. While it's less problematic that this is the book's conclusion, I probably still would have put it earlier in the book. It's just a really strange format...

2. Bradbury uses some really antiquated terms when referring to Muslims. He thankfully stopped using 'Saracen' indiscriminately after the first few chapters, but his preferred use of Moslem really dates the text. He also uses some strangely old fashioned names for Muslim leaders. The weirdest one was definitely using Nurredin for Nur ad-Din. Some of the Crusading specific references are a little out-dated, but I think they show their age more because so much interesting work has been done in the past 25 years than that Bradbury was particularly out of touch with contemporary scholarship at the time of writing.

3. Some of his references are super old. His early gunpowder section includes quite a few references to Oman. While Oman isn't necessarily a bad scholar, his work was already ~60 years old when Bradbury was writing this book. In some cases this can be explained by a surprising lack of scholarship between Oman and Bradbury, but in other cases it just seems like he didn't read as broadly as he could. I can forgive this a bit, the book covers a huge subject area, and some areas will get a more thorough covering than others, but it is still a little frustrating.

Overall, it's a good book, and a useful introduction, but it's also showing its age. The time is ripe for a new survey on the subject, one which includes the progress of the last 25 years of historical research.

I got hold of a copy of "Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century" by Renee Dugas. Can only seem to even find 2 in libraries in London (one in the Laktatos collection at the LSE library, the other at the British Library)

I always find Dugas' books weird, both this one and his history of mechanics. He doesn't really analyse the work, providing historical context, he just seems to state it. For example in The History of Mechanics, his section on Navier pretty much just paraphrases Navers paper of his derivation of the equations becoming the Navier-Stokes equations (Stokes get a line mention, not even saying he also derived them. I'd say French bias, but Cauchy and Poisson also don't get mentioned in that context). It just seems strange compared to usual history books.

Dont get me wrong, both books are excellent for an overview of the papers and discoveries themselves, especially if you can't speak the language of an untranslated paper (as the Navier papers seem to be, never come across a translation that isn't either Dugas' paraphrasing, or my own from my dissertation) but they give no non mathematical/physical context to the discovery.