Benjamin Breen

Jan 16, 2025 | resobscura.substack.com | Benjamin Breen

In 2019, construction workers in Carmona, Spain uncovered something remarkable underneath a very old house: an access shaft that led them to a Roman tomb which had remained perfectly sealed for two thousand years. The tomb itself was striking enough: a vaulted chamber decorated with geometric patterns in red and ochre, its walls lined with eight niches for funeral urns. But it was what they found in one of those niches that would prove extraordinary.

Dec 5, 2024 | resobscura.substack.com | Benjamin Breen

One of the reasons I’m a historian is that I find the strangeness of the past to be underrated. You can find something deeply, fascinatingly weird about virtually any aspect of any human culture prior to around the year 1880, provided you take the time to dig into it. Here’s an example for you: I stumbled on this image last week while reading the Wikipedia page for Terra Mariana, a medieval state which covered part of present day Latvia and Estonia.

Oct 29, 2024 | resobscura.substack.com | Benjamin Breen

You know the holiday: the one where people wear outlandish costumes and sweet things are eaten. It’s fun, but also otherworldly, with roots in an ancient belief that this evening — this one night at the change of the seasons — is when spirits roam the earth. I’m referring, of course, to qāšoq-zani, celebrated in Iran on the eve of Chaharshanbe Suri, the beginning of the Persian New Year festivities. And also Halloween. And Día de Muertos. The days of the calendar differ.

Oct 23, 2024 | resobscura.substack.com | Benjamin Breen

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world that my two daughters — both under the age of three— will inhabit when they’re adults. Last night, I was surprised to find that my older daughter Yara was able to recognize a 1980s-style tape deck in a picture book we were reading (“this… a… musicbox,” she said, after studying it intently). And she certainly knows what the mail is — in fact, one of her favorite books is called The Jolly Postman.

Oct 9, 2024 | resobscura.substack.com | Benjamin Breen

Earlier this year, amid a sea of bones in the vaulted crypt beneath Milan’s Ca’ Granda hospital, Italian researchers made an intriguing discovery. Analyzing mummified brain tissue from two men who died at the hospital in the seventeenth century, they found evidence of coca use—the earliest ever detected outside of South America. Their results, published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science, push back our documentation of coca’s presence in the Old World by nearly two centuries.