““Bring the words and the objects together, though, and the new story is much more convincingly human. Life no longer stops dead when Rome falls and the empire collapses and the tradition of classical Latin writing comes to an end, not even when the Saxons and Vandals and Goths and Huns make their various pushes to the west. Human beings didn’t lose their ability to connect, trade, fight wars and generally move about to change their lives just because there are so few surviving documents; indeed, they didn’t lose their ability to write and read those documents. Life goes on; we just need different tools to find and describe it.””
