Hi folks, it's time for my semi annual social media holiday! I'll see you folks again in a month 😎

‘Business as usual’ won’t help Australians fully recover from natural disasters Disaster management protocols can’t thrive if affected communities don’t have a seat at the table.

'Business as usual' won't help Australians fully recover from #disasters

“The issues that emerge in the aftermath of disaster make it difficult. For many regional communities in Australia, it means years of living with trauma, isolation, inequality and community disagreement.” Read the full story 👇

I am so happy to share this new paper that I wrote with @cegamorim.bsky.social! We hope that it will help encourage dialogue and collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists trying to understand kinship in the past. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧬🧪

😅😅

Good morning Americas! Now that you're awake, please enjoy this thread about my new article with @carlyschuster.bsky.social

True xennial nerddom is finding the myst novelisation at the library, enjoying it enough to go to a friend's house after school specif to play the game, then quitting after 30 min and leaving for the library because the myst you imagined from the book was way more fun

NEW Who was most at-risk during a plague epidemic?

Research at 17th-century-AD Basel, Switzerland sheds light on the impact of plague on the most vulnerable members of society and invites comparison to the Covid-19 pandemic.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology @unibas.ch

I've got a very vivid mind's eye and i have about one dream every few weeks where i have to really think on waking whether it happened or not

Tagged the wrong Penny here! @pennybickle.bsky.social is the social section editor! Sorry to both of you!

Also i'd rather not delete as it's top of a thread. Could you just mute the thread (or mute me i guess)?

Whoops wrong penny! Sorry!!

Rot, rancour and redundancy: Genevieve Bell's ANU tenure shows accountability isn't really that boring Even by global standards, the rapid unplanned disassembly of Australian National University has been disturbing. And, yes, occasionally even funny.

As Rick Morton @squigglyrick.bsky.social writes, the rapid unplanned disassembly of ANU has been disturbing. And, yes, occasionally even funny. www.crikey.com.au/2026/04/14/a...

I only remember because i didn't get the grant money for the flight until literally the week before so i did all the bookings at extreme last minute - very classic ANU

I presented at that BAF and it's been so long I don't remember whether I declined to contribute or if if I should be miffed I wasn't invited to 😂

but thinking aloud SO PRODUCTIVELY

The statement appealing for greater democracy in the EAA has now been made public. You can find it here:  drive.google.com/file/d/1ehzn...  
We are still collecting signatures here: ee-eu.kobotoolbox.org/x/xZZjy6le

I’ve been informed this is the plot of Dune

(ps: @boothicus.bsky.social you're cited all over this paper as used a lot of your work and Jo's as exemplars of the approach we're developing)

Legacy and Springboard: The Untapped Potential of Archaeological Archives for Scientific Innovation Archaeological archives form a public resource that enables the reinterpretation of original findings from archaeological investigations, provides the raw material for further research, informs mu...

Archaeology is a driver of scientific innovation. Rather than being a perceived financial burden, it is actually a high-value investment that can improve human health and environmental sustainability. 🏺1/7

doi.org/10.11141/ia....

11/ in the unpacked funerary rite we can pull out traces of relating and boundary making that enact, reinforce, rupture or create kinship - both among the living and between the living and the dead.

/Fin

10/ In those acts, we see the complex contingency of kinship. We link this to kin-work, a feminist epistemology of kin-making and kin-breaking. Instead of looking for flat genealogies in our burial grounds, we should be reconstructing funerary rites and exploring their complexity

9/ Instead we put the new kinship into dialogue with funerary archaeologies focussed on process and practice - both anglophone social funerary studies and archaeothanatology - burials aren't flat maps of fixed relations. They are four-dimensional constructions that encompass a range of acts

8/ AND erasing queer and non-normative relations in the process, not to mention the variety of ways kinship is enacted even within genetically related kindreds.

7/ We constrast this with the currently dominant mode of archaeological kinship which draws on 19th/20th c genealogical logics and builds normative models in direct conversation with genetic genealogies. Although these *feel* intuitive, they flatten kinship by biologising it, erasing its complexity

6/ we build on the new kinship studies to say (a) kinship is materialised in all those complex practices and relations so it's accessible to archaeologists and (b) kinship IS those practices, it is work and craft, a verb not a noun, so we can look at the practices themselves for kinning acts

5/ Burials are also the product of fluid, negotiated, manipulated & intensely social practices (and of course represent only a small and often non-random segment of the population)... wow unknown on top of unknown, just gappy data all the way down. How do we get to real relations from this?

4/ Carly and I start with a problem: kinship, especially as understood through the framework of the new kinship studies, is fluid, variable, negotiated, manipulated, & intensely social. How do we map these relations against biomolecular data indicating genetic connections between specific past ppl?

3/ My bigger program in social archaeology has resolved around grappling with the fixed categories we use to segment the archaeological record and build models of the past given the extremely fluid and contigent world of human social practice. This paper forms part of that bigger agenda

2/ Back in 2017(ish) I stomped into Carly's office and said "you're a kinship specialist. I need to get my head around kinship because archaeology needs more of it". She very generously handed me a reading list and then sent me away. I read. oh boy did I read.

1/ Good morning, Europe! Now that you're awake, I'll make a little thread about what we are doing in this paper!

This is part of a special issue on kinship in archaeology ed by @pennyend.bsky.social, Sabina Cvecek and Manaasa Raghavan. All the articles and the three commentaries are very worthwhile