Does Britain value culture any more? Ask the striking workers at the British Library | Zadie Smith www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What’s the difference between the period before Alexander the Great died and the period after he died? One is kinda nistic, the other is hella nistic

A view from Norwich Castle of the wonderful Church of St. Peter Mancroft. The Church was built in one phase between 1430 and 1455. 📸 My own. #SteepleSaturday #StPeterMancroft #Norwich

It is that time again. And that time where its up to you, to help make our collective lives better. Poverty Impact Report 2025 is anonymous and we so need this information to help. Please answer if you are employed in - or have been employed in UK Archaeology survey.app.do/archaeologis...

Time to lie face down on the floor

I am once again telling you that taking money from Musk makes you complicit in his instrumentalization of cultural heritage to support his beliefs. Taking funding from amoral entities is, in my opinion, not ethical and it is in fact harmful. www.finestresullarte.info/en/news/elon...

REMINDER. Calling all hillfort folk and ex diggers from Maiden Castle excavation 1985 and 1986. There will be a small display and film from the excavations. Bring any stories, photos etc for archive gathering.

Our fifth session at TRAC-TiDA 2025 looks at integrating the study of ancient DNA with archaeological theory and practice, in an interdisciplinary dive into one of the most fascinating and challenging topics facing our discipline today. www.trac.org.uk/trac-tida-20...

Hey, grad students—this is for you! Getty’s graduate internship program hosts full-time paid 12-month positions at the Getty Center and Getty Villa in Los Angeles. Apply before November 4 for the 2026–27 program: gty.art/gradinterns

This can't be real can it? An AGI paper from many big names in the field that invents a metric of AGI and claims we're 58% of the way there, and then the references are fake, generated by an LLM? That's got to be an elaborate hoax doesn't it? It's too perfect.

Professors *never* supply information. Students aren’t paying premium prices for ‘information’ at all. How can people who presumably have attended universities misunderstand their role so badly?

À ces deux scandales récents, il faut ajouter la destruction, en début d'année, de 500 m2 de vestiges sur l'oppidum de Corent (Auvergne), sur un site pourtant classé MH dont les travaux d'aménagement en cours n'ont donné lieu à aucune prescription malgré le diagnostic positif réalisé par l'Inrap...

Reminder.

We don't just have university departments represented at University Archaeology Day #UAD25! The CBA @archaeologyuk.bsky.social will also be there and contributing to our panel session talking about the huge range of careers you can pursue with an archaeology degree!

Are you a student at a UK university and looking for support to come to TAG York? Did you know the Royal Archaeological Institute Cheney Bursary is available to support you? You can find more details here: www.royalarchinst.org/grants/bursa... @royalarchinst.bsky.social

Update - this is terrible. Clearly meticulously planned. #Archaeology 🏺 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The exhibition at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes consists of screenprints, paintings and relief prints, alongside books, lithographs, prints, paintings, drawings and maps drawn from the museum's own collection.

Thanks to CBA for two nominations for Teffont Archaeology! Delighted to see our efforts to engage people from all backgrounds and demographics in archaeology, and our training and skills work, for everyone from carers, to volunteers, to positive action placements and students, recognised like this.

Just back from our final Teffont Archaeology workshop! Double header of human remains by Dr Anna Davies Barrett, plus three talks. Nearly 150 volunteers engaged in under 24 hours... exhausted! Thanks to NLHF for funding, and to our hosts in Teffont, Bowerchalke and Horningsham for the talks!

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

If you pick up the Guardian Weekend Magazine today, please read about my daughter Milly’s battle with Lyme disease. And if you’re feeling bold, drop your copy into your local GP. There are thousands of Millys out there. Most are currently not helped at all by the NHS or, worse, not believed.

Amazing, inspiring Rugby World Cup final between England and Canada. Fantastic performance by the Red Roses under huge pressure. Perhaps they and the Lionesses are a better and truer vision of today's England than the standard negative, backward looking, exclusive media narrative..

AHRC Early career fellowships in cultural and heritage institutions are open for applications! Work in a major cultural or heritage host organisation on a co-designed research project. Apply by 10 Dec 2025. More info:

Just a reminder to the museums sector, UK national minimum wage for over 21 years old is £12.21 per hour, or at 40hrs per week, £25396...

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

Today is the last day of our AHRC IAA funded Community Archaeology Specialist Training workshops; we've run 2 day workshops on each of Roman pottery, animal bone, and digital data in each of Cardiff, Exeter and Devizes, for volunteers from more than 14 community archaeology groups. 1/2

Blatant, gross homophobia. As many, many people have predicted, by promoting the erosion of public respect for and then the actual rights of the trans community for more than a decade, conservative/far right are now feeling more comfortable to say all the other things that they think.

Some cracking #ClassicalReception in David Squires football cartoon this week on … Nottingham Forest’s mythical quest for a new champion www.theguardian.com/football/pic...

AFAIK, UK govt expenditure on HE has always been comparatively low, and what is remarkable is how amazingly strong and effective our HE sector is. Imagine the turbo-charging of R&D if we got up to OECD average levels. And yet, even with a national Mission of economic growth...

Check out the latest @uor-research.bsky.social blog post to learn more about how REMADE's analysis of the Cunetio Hoard coins is revealing details of rebellion & uprising during the Roman Empire's Third Century Crisis 🪙 #AncientSky #Archaeology #RomanEmpire 🏺

Great article. If AI coding is so transformative where are the end products? Reminds me of how archaeologists use proxies like coin debasement and shipwreck frequency to model the economic collapse of the Roman empire.

Somehow I've ended up with 3 community archaeology training workshops running simultaneously today... Teffont Archaeology NLHF funded workshop on Roman glass by Sally and Elizabeth from the Association for History of Glass at Salisbury Museum, plus...

Because, unfortunately, his videos get a lot of traction, for my sins I'm now watching Rowsell's attempt at a 'debunking' of Sayer et al. 2025. I'm ten minutes in out of 60 I've identified what is 1 certain and 2 possible (tbc) major, basic factual errors on his part that directly hit his argument.

If I Must Starve by Nour Abdel Latif (from Reefat Writes Back)

“While previous work has explored LLM hallucination and sycophancy, we propose machine bullshit as an overarching conceptual framework that can allow researchers to characterize the broader phenomenon of emergent loss of truthfulness …” arxiv.org/abs/2507.07484

As the archaeologist who worked with the detectorist and land owner to properly lift this hoard, I'm thrilled it is headed for a brilliant museum that really punches above it's weight. Please support their bid to secure this hoard. Every little helps. Great to launch it on #FindsFriday!

In light of this, I want to share some resources on trans people in the medieval and early modern period, for anyone who might be interested. There is a thriving field of research into the lives, identities, and experiences of trans people globally before the advent of modern medicine (a 🧵)

Alternatively, y’know, you could get an AI trained on 20th century potboiler pop sci to generate you a chest-beating Neanderthal. 🤷 If you want your work to be taken seriously, invest in serious interpretation. 🏺

By their new Terms Of Service: "WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for."

A reminder that an annual salary on minimum wage is now £25,396.80

It's such an indictment of the heritage sector, though, that this doesn't even look like an especially low wage compared to other opportunities. For a job based in Zone 1, which requires significant experience. It's getting harder and harder to do these jobs without independent wealth.

Thanks to an incredibly generous former student, we have some wonderful news for archaeology at Birkbeck: a new institute. The Carena Institute of Sustainable Archaeologies will enable research projects, support global collaborations, and fund studentships as well. www.bbk.ac.uk/research/cen...

Test match cricket. Best game in the world. Brilliant finish today to five days of superb cricket by India and England. Ravi Jadeja and Ben Stokes, what wonderful all rounders.

We at @instituteforgovernment.org.uk have coordinated a letter in @thetimes.com today in which numerous individuals and organisations call on the government to withdraw its mistaken rules which are having a serious chilling effect on civil servants speaking in public…

Don't worry everyone, I'm arranging not one but two excavations next summer, so that'll guarantee a wet summer 2026.. this sunny summer is surely because I've taken a year off excavating, and the sun is getting rid of a backlog from all those wet july & august weeks I've dug through in recent years.

Are you a doctoral student working on medieval history who'd benefit from a stay in Paris?

Good to see this in the news, and to see the legend that is Buzz Busby, with whom I spent some formative time in a ditch at Whitby Abbey a dozen years ago. Well done HE Archaeology and Cotswold, looking forward to the publication in due course.

Had a great time teaching Teffont Archaeology NLHF funded Stratigraphy workshop with our volunteers last week, and some keen souls made it two days in a row and attended our Roman Pottery workshop the following day. Really rewarding teaching and engagement, upskilling the team ahead of next summer..

Happy to report that colleagues at Historic England have recently added over 300 older reports to the map of RCHME/AML/EH/HE research - the easiest way of finding archaeological surveys and other work on historic places across England: historicengland.org.uk/research/res...