If where I live, in Paraná: 1300 then. I’d be teaching the local Kaingang: a few farming techniques, a bunch of food-preserving techniques, writing and paper making. Ah, and gunpowder too, so they can use it against the Spaniards coming from Asunción and the Portuguese from the coast. Past that I’d… marry a local girl and try to live a happy life? Language would be a struggle though, because even if I knew 2023 Kaingang or Guarani that doesn’t automatically makes me know some older variety of the language.
If anywhere in the world: Republican Rome, around 150 BCE. I know basic Latin so it wouldn’t be actually easier to adapt than the above. I’d probably find some craft to live from, either in a taberna selling food or blacksmithing. I actually know a few Roman recipes (thanks Apicius), I could even give them a bit of modern twist; they should already know pizza (Virgil mentions it) but a modern style pizza bianca would be new. Perhaps I should leave a note to the Julii that, if one of them conquers Gaul, he should watch out for potential killers.
I wouldn’t be preempting pizza, the Romans already prepared it*. At most I’d introduce a specific type of pizza - bread, melting cheese, oregano. Perhaps topped with figs and onions and cured ham.
*excerpt from the Aeneid, published around 20 BCE, telling tales that were already old back then:
Aeneas and his chiefs, with fair Iulus, under spreading boughs of one great tree made resting-place, and set the banquet on. Thin loaves of altar-bread along the sward to bear their meats were laid (such was the will of Jove), and wilding fruits rose heaping high, with Ceres’ gift below. Soon, all things else devoured, their hunger turned to taste the scanty bread, which they attacked with tooth and nail audacious, and consumed both round and square of that predestined leaven. “Look, how we eat our tables even!” cried Iulus, in a jest.
OK… where in the world would I pop up?
If where I live, in Paraná: 1300 then. I’d be teaching the local Kaingang: a few farming techniques, a bunch of food-preserving techniques, writing and paper making. Ah, and gunpowder too, so they can use it against the Spaniards coming from Asunción and the Portuguese from the coast. Past that I’d… marry a local girl and try to live a happy life? Language would be a struggle though, because even if I knew 2023 Kaingang or Guarani that doesn’t automatically makes me know some older variety of the language.
If anywhere in the world: Republican Rome, around 150 BCE. I know basic Latin so it wouldn’t be actually easier to adapt than the above. I’d probably find some craft to live from, either in a taberna selling food or blacksmithing. I actually know a few Roman recipes (thanks Apicius), I could even give them a bit of modern twist; they should already know pizza (Virgil mentions it) but a modern style pizza bianca would be new. Perhaps I should leave a note to the Julii that, if one of them conquers Gaul, he should watch out for potential killers.
You would fuck up history by preempting pizza? What kind of pizza would we end up contemporarily?
I wouldn’t be preempting pizza, the Romans already prepared it*. At most I’d introduce a specific type of pizza - bread, melting cheese, oregano. Perhaps topped with figs and onions and cured ham.
*excerpt from the Aeneid, published around 20 BCE, telling tales that were already old back then:
Aeneas and his chiefs, with fair Iulus, under spreading boughs of one great tree made resting-place, and set the banquet on. Thin loaves of altar-bread along the sward to bear their meats were laid (such was the will of Jove), and wilding fruits rose heaping high, with Ceres’ gift below. Soon, all things else devoured, their hunger turned to taste the scanty bread, which they attacked with tooth and nail audacious, and consumed both round and square of that predestined leaven. “Look, how we eat our tables even!” cried Iulus, in a jest.