This whole volume looks great! Looking forward to reading.

A short provocation paper by Lea Rees and me has just been published in First View: doi.org/10.1017/S138...

Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution Data from more than 15,000 ancient people reveal natural selection of hundreds of genes linked to immunity, skin tone, behaviour and other traits.

👀🤓☝️

Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We cordially invite you to participate in our summer school from August 17 to 21, 2026. The application deadline is May 15th, 2026. For more details, see www.lwc-recoment.de/veranstaltun...

What’s impressive is not that your brain stops working under the influence of AI, but how quickly.

The same top words, but organized semantically, with (roughly) hunting-related words to the left, population and group words in the middle, and food words to the right

7. Word clouds have many critics because, e.g., longer words are more prominent simply because they're longer. I looked for alternatives, and a cool one is "word rain", which organizes words semantically along the horizontal axis, and by frequency along the vertical axis:
wordrain.org

5. The sex bias in stop words, and my failure to notice the absence of "man", are examples of exactly the kinds of biases that critics of Man the Hunter are rightly worried about!

We cordially invite you to participate in our summer school from August 17 to 21, 2026. The application deadline is May 15th, 2026. For more details, see www.lwc-recoment.de/veranstaltun...

Remains of a wooden ship in a metal frame, being lifted from the sea by a floating crane.

Marine archaeologist and #Trowlblazer Margaret Rule died #OnThisDay in 2015. She is best known for the decade-long project to excavate & raise the Tudor warship Mary Rose, one of the most ambitious maritime #archaeology projects ever 🏺

📷 The Mary Rose Trust / CC BY-SA 3.0

Brilliant to see @dgron.bsky.social check how much time he has left to talk
@leizarchaeology.bsky.social

Interesting first day of the ‘Transformations during the Mesolithic and Neolithic’ conference in Groningen @rug.nl focusing both on wetland indigenous transformations as well as the more settled Neolithic and strong landscape and ecological perspectives!

Making the Invisible Visible

"Making the Invisible Visible" 🦪
Der Ausstellungsraum spce | Muthesius zeigt noch bis zum 11. April 2026 eine interaktive Projektion von Thiemo Frömberg zu Miesmuscheln und ihrer Rolle im Ökosystem. Die Installation entstand in Kooperation mit GEOMAR-Expert:innen.
🔗 www.geomar.de/service/vera...

How archaeology turns political in the West Bank Archaeologists, residents and government officials talk about how uncovering and preserving centuries-old sites and artifacts in Israel and the West Bank also serves to highlight contemporary disputes...

More on the weaponization of archaeology.

Archaeology does not "turn political," it is and always has been inherently political. In cases of conflict and genocide, archaeology's political nature is easily weaponized through both destruction and control/preservation:

1/3
🏺

The planet Earth being flipped off

the Artemis II crew just posted a new photo. what the fuck

La prehistoria contada por moluscos El consumo de moluscos en la costa cantábrica durante el Mesolítico formaba parte de estrategias planificadas de subsistencia, no de emergencias alimenticias. Gracias al análisis isotópico de conchas,...

Muchísimas gracias al @elcorreodeburgos.com por su interés en nuestro trabajo en la @universidadburgos.bsky.social.

www.elcorreodeburgos.com/innovadores/...

LIBS on Mussels from Santa Rosa Island | SeaFront Alexandria Marie Firenzi is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR; Reno, Nevada, USA). Her work focuses on reconstructing past sea-surface temperature and salinity variability a...

Read her blogpost here!

seafront-project.com/post/libs-on...

Alexandria sitting at a computer desk next to an elemental imaging system based on laser induced breakdown spectroscopy. the computer screen shows the sample acquisition process.

We were lucky enough to have Alexandria Firenzi from @unevadareno.bsky.social to visit our lab
@leizarchaeology.bsky.social and study Mg/Ca in mussel shells. Sorting out this species should open up research on HEAPS of new sites in the Pacific!
🏺🐚🧪

I use typora a lot and the license works across platforms. I mostly like it because of its lack of extra features, though. Very different from Obsidian

Text in blue and red on a white background reads: Save the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA).

🚨Calling all archaeologists🚨
Please consider signing this letter, to ask for democracy, transparency, and accountability in the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA)

NB: You do not need to be a member to sign & can sign anonymously, if you wish

ee-eu.kobotoolbox.org/x/xZZjy6le

#Archaeology

Ancient DNA reveals 4000 years of grapevine diversity, viticulture and clonal propagation in France - Nature Communications Here, the authors present aDNA from 49 grape pips spanning the Bronze Age to Medieval period in France and surrounding areas. They find evidence of long-distance exchange of domestic varieties through vegetative clones and one Medieval sample that is nearly identical to modern Pinot Noir.

Ancient DNA from grape seeds spanning 4,000 years reveals the domestication, cultivation, and trade of grapes in France over this period, according to research in Nature Communications. The authors find that one Medieval sample is genetically identical to modern Pinot Noir grapes. 🧬 🏺 🧪

Something smells fishy! Check out the recently published proceedings of the ICAZ Fish Remains Working Group meeting held in Vienna in 2022 e-book.fwf.ac.at/detail/o:2089
#ICAZ #zooarch

Oooooh the #zooarchaeology of FISH!! I never had any contact with fish bones before three years ago (weirdly, my site in AK long ago had LOTS of marine mammals but no fish)and they are an unholy hellscape to identify. So many fish species! So many little weird bones!! Evolution, man.

Its official! We're handing over to Exeter for this year's TAG @tag26exeter.bsky.social. Give them a follow over there to follow updates for this year's conference.

Their call for papers and website are open! tag2026.square.site?utm_source=i...

I am SO EXCITED to announce that CENIEH in Burgos, Spain will be hosting the third installment of the IZAZ (Integrating ZooMS and Zooarchaeology) Workshop on the 15th – 16th September 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Join the mailing list to stay up-to-date: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Rheinland-Pfalz: Autofahrer ignorieren gesperrte Straße: Hunderte tote Feuersalamander in Wachenheim Amphibienwanderung auf einer Kreisstraße bei Wachenheim (Kreis Bad Dürkheim). Dort sterben hunderte Feuersalamander, weil Autofahrer Sperrungen ignorieren und die Tiere überfahren.

Falls jemand aus der Zukunft mal fragt, warum es keine Natur mehr gibt.

www.tagesschau.de/inland/regio...

New Results From the Pre‐Pottery Neolithic Site of Al Uyaynah, Tabuk, in Northwestern Saudi Arabia Al Uyaynah is a low sandstone mound on an alluvial plain, long known for its extensive surface remains of stone-built circular and rectangular structures. Following test excavations in 2012, more det...

New Open Access Paper! We present the site of Al Uyaynah, Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Saudi Arabia, excavated by my former PhD student Dr. Khalid Alasmari. New set of C14 dates, thanks to @isotopesuk.bsky.social funding

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@uoyarchaeology.bsky.social

New study shows democracy has deep global roots—not just Greece and Rome A new study on ancient societies from around the world is rewriting what we thought we knew about democracy. A team of researchers analyzed archaeological and historical evidence from 31 ancient socie...

Press release for our new paper!

“…people across the world created inclusive political systems, even under difficult conditions…An understanding of the hallmarks of autocracy and democracy can help identify threats and pump the brakes on burgeoning totalitarian regimes.”

phys.org/news/2026-03...

What can we learn from Neanderthals? Professor Penny Spikins, Professor of the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of York, will be honoured with the Europa prize for her contributions to European prehistory, and the conference will explore issues salient to Professor Spikins' work. The lives of Neanderthals have fascinated us since the earliest finds of these ancient humans in the nineteenth century. Discoveries continue to surprise and intrigue us, alternately encouraging us to see our nearest cousins as just like us, or subtly different. Over the past few decades our knowledge of Neanderthal lives and behaviours has expanded at a remarkable rate, yet if anything more and more questions have emerged. This session will combine some of the latest archaeological evidence and research on Neanderthal behaviour with a sense of reflection on what this evidence and how we understand it continues to tell us about ourselves. From pressing us to reflect on how we decide what makes us human. how our preconceptions affect our judgements of people, why we fail to live sustainably or the downsides of global connections, we will uncover how Neanderthals help us know what it means to be ourselves. Conference presentations will take place over the whole day (6th June) in person, with early career researcher talks alongside invited speaker presentations. Confirmed invited speakers include: Prof Chris Stringer, CHER, The Natural History Museum London Dr Jennifer French, University of Liverpool Dr Matt Pope, University College London Dr Silvia Bello, CHER. The Natural History Museum London Call for papers Please email title & abstract of no more than 350 words to Meetings Secretaries of Prehistoric Society (Adelle Bricking and George Prew-Stell, meetings@prehistoricsociety.org) by Sunday 5th April 2026. Please include your current title and organisational affiliation in the email. Authors will be notified if their proposals were accepted by Sunday 19th April 2026.

Call for papers for the 2026 Europa, 6th June at Uni of York honouring work of Professor Penny Spikins. The topic will be:

What can we learn from Neanderthals?

(Please note change in previously advertised title)

Further details here: www.prehistoricsociety.org/events/2026-...

#Archaeology 🏺

How AI will destroy universities

"If LLMs gut the graduate workforce, it won’t just be the undergraduate essay that they put out of business. It will be the British university sector as a whole – which is easily big enough to take the rest of the economy with it."

Paul Sagar of KCL on HE'S Devil's bargain with #AI Broligarchs.