Python does not have tail-call optimisation (TCO), and it likely never will. Several packages exist that add TCO via decorators (e.g., tco). Most of these packages use some lambda calculus to implement TCO. In this post I want to explore an alternative way to achieve TCO, using the ast module to rewrite the decorated function. Read more

This post is a based on our presentation at the EAA Annual Meeting in August 2020 (slides)

The Roman Empire was a remarkable achievement in world history: extending from the north of England to the Syrian Desert and Morocco at the height of its powers it integrated a population of some 60-100 million into one political, cultural and economic unit. For a few centuries this generated a remarkable growth in population.

To understand how this could be we have to focus on rural developments, and the best data for that are obtained by the many archaeological field surveys of the last half century. Read more