• Paleolithic (2.6 million years ago-8000 BCE): fire, stone tools, domestication of animals
  
• Neolithic (8000-3300 BCE): invention of agriculture, pottery, textiles, sun-dried brick
  
• Bronze Age (3300-1200 BCE): irrigation, cities, invention of writing, water clocks
  
• Iron Age (1200 BC-700 CE): widespread trade, philosophy

Hellenistic Alexandria

• Scientists such as Euclid, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Archimedes
• goal was "to know, not to do, to understand nature, not to tame her" quoted on p. 22
• despite that they made some significant inventions

Astrology

• how the movement of the sun and planets influence human life
• seemed logical to people who watched the calendar for times to plant and knew the cycles of the moon correlated with the tides and women's cycles
• not fully separated from astronomy until around 1700

Roman glass at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archeology and Anthropology

The Romans purposely gathered technology from all over their empire

• The Gies's say the Romans introduced a plow with a moldboard that turned the soil, usually considered a medieval invention
• mills and presses for grinding grain and extracting oil, turned by slaves or a donkey
• skilled craftspeople made goods such as glass for a large luxury market
• the most advanced Roman technology was for building
• aqueducts
  
• hydraulic cement
• bridges and buildings supported by arches
• roads
• Romans copied some farm technology from northern Europe

Limitations of Roman technology: why?

• horse harness

• the water wheel was invented in Roman times but not widely used
• the Romans were not very interested in Greek and Hellenistic science
• widespread use of slaves discouraged labor saving technology, and slaves also were not potential customers
• the rich invested in land, not businesses