My only frustration is that AI use is not acknowledged or clearly described, and that sources are not linked to translation/edition/pages. That would have been appreciated.
I think with AI we'll see a lot more of these little data viz projects that look good on machines like the one they were developed on, with little care for other devices.
Its not so bad. Before AI this information might not be even this accessible.
I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].
But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.
Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.
There never was any big battle.
There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.
Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.
So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.
I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.
[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.
congrats and thank you for the detailed post!
"1480"is like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour imo.
So, no, it's not at all like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour.
It was our own much later civilisation that made the historical distinction between the older East and West combined "Roman Empire" and its continuation in the East (and sometimes in the West) post ~476 AD ("Byzantine Empire"). The Romans themselves never saw the distinction.
An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power. Byzantium != Rome. It's different in multiple ways.
People call themselves European all over European. It doesn't mean Spain = Portugal. It's a larp.
"with several scholars identifying the "Dmitry", one of the three Golden Horde princes in the Battle of Blue Waters (c. 1362/1363), with a Prince of Gothia."
[sorry, I'm old school. I still Wikipedia is a damn good single source of truth]