The forgeries/copies thing reminds me of when I went to the Otago Museum in Dunedin. They had all these Greek and Roman artifacts, and very few of them were originals. The rest were copies (with little placards identifying them as such), and this seemed like a total non-issue. It was more important to the museum to have accurate copies on display than to avoid an entire section of history because they didn’t have the originals.

In my Humanities class in high school actually! And then I also lived in Japan for a bit.

Silvo is a brand name of silver polish, and if you haven’t read the story of the Mildenhall Treasure, you must you must you must. Read the real story, but also read Roald Dahl’s (true, based on interviews) short story that he wrote about it. It’s the most astonishing thing.

The specific product I was working with is intended for teachers – it lets them custom-build tests based on the tests that go with the books, so they can pick certain questions or certain skills only, or add their own questions, or generate different versions of the same test (same questions but different order). And then they can either print the tests or have their students take them online. Then there’s also a set of e-learning DVDs that I wasn’t involved in the development of, but have seen demos of – they have videos (documentary and also dramatization-style – e.g. “introductions to the stories and Stages, presented by characters from the Course”!) and other stuff. And yes, there are apparently games online, though I had nothing to do with those/don’t know anything about them, though I suspect they’re more quiz/test-ish than game-ish.

I know! I was a little shocked that this led to hurt feelings more than about once, because I feel like after that first time, people would get better about communicating effectively.

There are related electronic products? What. I never had such high-faluting things when I was a kid. What sort of things are in the electronic products? Are there games? Are there moving cartoons of the characters?

I hope so too! Archaeology stuff is interesting.

I don’t know because I don’t know what Silvo is! What is Silvo?

Hahahahaha, I assure you that I too am a nerd. I guess I just felt like the title wasn’t alluring to me and also didn’t describe the contents of the book very well.