Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellaicorethorn. Can we follow in the footsteps of our prehistoric and medieval forebears?

Well, archaeologist Dr. Jim Leary of the University of York would like us to try

because he's been researching the importance of mobility and travel in the period.

Our content director Dave Musgrove called him to find out more.

Dr. Jim Leary is lecturer in Field Archaeology at the University of York.

And Jim you've written an article in the journal Antiquity with Professor Martin Bell, which is called

Pathways to the Past, a positive approach to routeways and mobility. And I saw that on Twitter and had a look at it and then we were chatting on

social media and you shared with me an unpublished manuscript that you've

written and which incidentally is looking for a publisher, provisionally

entitled Rome, which talks about the archaeology of travel and movement more generally.

So that's the conversation that I wanted to chat about today.

So Jim, thank you very much for joining us. I hope you're well.

Thank you very much for inviting me, yes. Really delighted to be talking about Rome.

Okay, good. So let's start off with just the basic premise. So we tend to focus when we're thinking about

archaeology we tend to focus on archaeological sites, graves or static places, but that means that we

overlook one of the basic aspects of life, which is mobility.

And in that recent article that I mentioned in the introduction,

I'm just going to do a little quote, you said,

concentrating on sights removes the physical evidence of bodily movement from the discourse and imposes a stillness on the past.

So what do you mean by that?

Well, what I mean is that when we look at archaeology, when we talk about

...