Cemeteries aren’t just resting places — they’re cultural landscapes that reveal how we face death. In this episode, we explore Joel David Robinson’s Death and the Cultural Landscape, from stone monuments built to defy time to modern designs like Spain’s Igualada Cemetery, which embrace decay, nature, and human transience.

When Rome marched into Britain, they carried with them roads, walls, and the machinery of empire. But what about the machinery of time itself? Across the provinces, sundials and water clocks marked the rhythm of Roman life — yet in Britain, they are almost nowhere to be found. In this episode, we follow historian Jérôme Bonnin into the archaeological puzzle: a lone mosaic at Brading, military relics from Housesteads and Richborough, even a broken water clock at Vindolanda. Were Roman timekeepers in Britain the privilege of soldiers alone? And how did the mystery of missing sundials give way to the strange, carved dials of the Anglo-Saxons centuries later? Join us as we uncover how two cultures measured — and sometimes lost — the very hours of their days.

This episode shows that for the ancients, time was never a simple abstraction. To measure motion—whether through speed, frequency, or rhythm—was to confront fundamental questions about order, change, and perception. By examining how these patterns were defined and debated, the chapter reveals the sophistication of ancient approaches to timekeeping and the broader intellectual frameworks that gave such measurements meaning.