New pottery aprons from RAYGUNshirts for students in Yale’s Archaeological Ceramics class! (Shared with student permission)🏺

I’m PSAT-famous! “Variously, researchers have closely examined obsidian artifacts to understand ancient social and economic structures, as in Colin Renfrew’s 1975 study, or to glean aspects of cultural identity, as in Ellery Frahm and colleagues’ 2017 study.”

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1mGK-,rVDBnOVO

Hot off the presses! Last year's full-class project by my awesome students in "Introduction to Archaeological Lab Sciences" is now published and freely accessible for the next 50 days via this link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mGK-,rVDB...

Extreme Neanderthals!

You’ve heard of Neanderthals, of course. But have you heard of… ?
From “The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution” (1955)

Ellery is easily distracted by rocks

Ready to talk stone tools with Yale first-years and give them a chance to try making their own

More donkeys from Tell Brak

I find the title of this 1993 article hilarious — it’s just so bizarrely blunt. My wife, though, doesn’t see the humor (“Explain to me again why you think it’s funny”). What do you think?

Spam email

Let’s count the clues in just this part of the email that this is super dodgy: 1. This person doesn’t exist and has a nonsensical affiliation. 2. Which scholarly society, hmm? 3. Their US headquarters address is mangled… And as a bonus, 4. I have never asked for an author’s WhatsApp number.

Dire wolf skulls

Actual dire wolves.

Here's the free-for-50-days link for my new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews: "Scales of toolstone transport in the Armenian Highlands during MIS 3: The contribution of Ararat-1 Cave (Ararat Depression) to reconstructing opportunities for social interactions"
authors.elsevier.com/a/1kt3c-4PSD...

Archaeologists don’t dig dinosaurs’

Et tu, LEGO?

pXRF instrument being used to test obsidian outcrops on the slopes of a volcano

What's new in obsidian artifact sourcing? This link offers free access (for 50 days) to my new article – Archaeological obsidian sourcing: Looking from the first 60 years to the next – for the 50th anniversary special issue of Journal of Archaeological Science – authors.elsevier.com/a/1koEW15SlU...

I didn’t expect to see my favorite demonic Mesopotamian deity appear on “Saturday Night Live” in a sketch with Lady Gaga, but sure enough, they invoked Lamashtu, featured on my favorite stone amulets! 😍

Rocks in the Yale Peabody Museum collection

Tablets in the Yale Peabody Museum collection

Well, now I'm hungry for soft-serve vanilla ice cream – and it would go great with the Babylonian Collection tablet cookies

Two “Neanderthal” comic books

Doing some Saturday morning reading for research and teaching — yes, comic books count

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks.

Nature Editorial Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere. US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Ancient fire-starting kit

It’s gonna be lit 🔥 in Experimental Archaeology class today as we start fires the *really* old-fashioned way: flint, pyrite, and tinder fungus — Paleolithic archaeologists are really just undercover survivalists

An entry that I wrote on XRF and #obsidian sourcing for an #archaeology encyclopedia was published at a such limited subscription level that even Yale doesn't have access – and our libraries have almost everything! Anyway, I've posted a free preprint version – enjoy! doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/khpx9_v1

Yup, it’s a box with a small chunk of mammoth meat

My freeze-dried mammoth meat has arrived 🦣🥩

So, yes, sometimes the copyediting software can suck, and sometimes the software engineers will try to make it "better" like when Word, Zoom, or Canvas updates to a new version without doing enough UX assessments and actually makes more problems. But those are old fashioned human errors, not AI.

"... The journal trialled a production workflow that inadvertently introduced the formatting errors to which the editors refer. We had already acted on their feedback and reverted to the journal's previous workflow earlier in 2024."

"We do want to address an important inaccuracy in the statement issued by the outgoing editors, specifically the incorrect linking of a formatting glitch to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in our production processes. We do not use AI in our production processes...

It is basically "dumb" software that uses automated scripts as well as humans for formatting, and depending on how the file is formatted, errors can be introduced. It's no more AI than the "Sentence case" option in MS Word is. The official statement from Elsevier follows in the next comment:

Sign with "AI?"

Re: the JHE situation – Just to be sure that I was being factual and that my impressions were indeed correct, I reached out to my contacts at Elsevier, and the answer was exactly what I thought and consistent with the statement that Elsevier put out yesterday: there is NO use of AI in copyediting...

The geoarchaeology, chronology and environment of Lusakert-1, a Late Middle Palaeolithic rockshelter (Kotayk Province, Armenia) Lusakert-1 (LKT-1) is a key site in any discussion of the Palaeolithic of the Armenian Highlands. This is in large part because of a long-running camp…

This multi-year (well, multi-decade) work on the excavations at the Middle Paleolithic site of Lusakert-1 Cave in central Armenia is finally online (only early view for now) and will be open-access when the final, nicely formatted, PDF version becomes available:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

FIREMAKING with Dr. Ellery Frahm — alie ward Grab your fire extinguisher and hang on to your eyebrows, we’re building FIRES today. We’ll hear all about how our ancient ancestors learned to wield a flame, tame it, transport it, and use it to make...

Check out the brand-new, kid-friendly, condensed “Smologies” version of my Ologies podcast interview with the delightful Alie Ward of @ologies.bsky.social !
www.alieward.com/smologies/fi...

There are original reports from the 1990s on various aspects of the excavations, and all the original documentation, field notes, photos, maps, etc. went with the materials for any desired further study. No new work was done.

Box of rusty firearm components

Today I oversaw returning 63 boxes of excavated materials from the Eli Whitney Gun Factory to the Eli Whitney Museum, including this box of firearm parts (note the bayonet and the revolver component). The museum plans to exhibit the materials, including the finds from the employee barracks.

Ellery and a Neanderthal

Also Ellery and a Neanderthal

This too is Ellery and a Neanderthal

Me twinning with #Neanderthals, occasionally having a brow ridge contest on the side

I have apparently become an extra-credit meme in my friend @jaysongillpaleo.bsky.social’s class… I approve.

Mesopotamian cylinder seal made of out black obsidian

Three-dimensional scatterplot showing the composition of different obsidian sources and artifacts

100+ more followers, so here's another fantastic obsidian artifact I've studied: an Old Babylonian cylinder seal carved out of obsidian. I couldn't find a geochemical match to Middle Eastern obsidian until I started looking at East African sources. It matches to an Egyptian artifact! That's a first!