I’ve just published a chapter called “Inventing the Wild Horse: the Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan from 1828–2018” in Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (Routledge, 2020). I went overboard writing this and outstripped my word count so …
Category Archives: Archaeology
Around the World in Horses
When I was a girl I was only interested in things in museums if they involved horses. I’ve developed a slightly broader range of interests now, but to my mind, by focusing on horses, I learn about everything else: As Chomel put it, “L’Histoire du cheval est celle de l’humanité” – the history of horses …
Whole Heap of Little Horse Links
Composer Eve Harrison teamed up with Scottish schoolchildren to write a musical about the horse meat scandal, called The Unspeakable. If I weren’t on the move just now I would dig out a 17th century story in which Scottish children chased and stoned a man known to eat horse meat. (BBC) The FAO reports that …
Mare’s Milk Champagne And Tipsy Amazons
Thank you to Andrew Curry for tipping me off about this great piece on koumiss, or fermented mare’s milk. It takes you from drunken Amazons to proto-Indo-European paleolinguistics, and confirms what this lactose-intolerant already feared: horse milk is very high in lactose. It’s on Wonders and Marvels, and it’s by Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University. …
Taoism and the Nature of Horses
Discovered while reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals: an extract from the writings of Chuang Tzu, a Taoist collection believed to be written around the 4th century BC wholly or in part by Zhuangzi/Chuang Tzu – an official in what is now Anhui, China. This is from book nine, Mâ …
Happy Eponalia!
Today is the day that modern pagans have assigned to the Celtic-Roman goddess of ponies, Epona. If you want to celebrate, Devon, Maid of Epona has some suggestions involving beer and hippomanes here, and there’s a fantastic, comprehensive site about the history and archaeology of the goddess here. Alternatively, mosey over to Epona TV and …
Horses in the Museum
Yay! The British Museum are going to have live horses in the forecourt this Saturday to celebrate their The Horse from Ancient Arabia to Royal Ascot exhibit. I felt pretty iffy about the exhibit for various reasons (detailed here – it’s a wee bit incoherent, inaccurate and slanted), but the Horse Power day sounds like …
The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot via the British Museum
How could you fit the history of horses and humans into a space? Not even the British Museum could hold it: it would be crammed like Tutankhamun’s tomb. Selene’s chariot horses on the eastern Parthenon pediment would be eyeball to eyeball with Da Vinci’s triple-life-size Spanish steed. The central atrium would be the tackroom to …
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If Wishes Were Horses: Hunters and Amazons
Here’s the Robin Hood Cave horse carving, safely at the British Museum. I drew heavily on the work of a husband and wife archaeology team for the section on the early domestication of the horse: you can find out about David W Anthony and Dorcas Brown’s Institute for Ancient Equestrian Studies here. You can find …
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New Study Reveals More About Origins of Domestic Horse
Ahem. I am now going to attempt to write a simple account of the findings of a new study into the genetic origins of domestic horses. I’m doing this as much for my benefit as for yours. Hopefully my brother will step in in the comments if I’ve got it all wrong. Now. Horses. This …
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