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...

This might have passed English colleagues by, but academic and development-led (preventative) archaeologists are united in protests across France today against changed heritage legislation in the government. Solidarity with their struggles and I hope to join them later this afternoon. 🖤

New pop-up exhibition on display in the ICS Lobby, Senate House: Women of Romano-British Archaeology Curated by Tatiana Ivleva focusing on women archaeologists who dedicated their lives to the study of various aspects of Roman Britain, including material culture, art and archaeology.

🧬 Our first blog post for HSDS has been written by Dr Ewan Chipping. Ewan travelled to the Harwell Heritage Network to understand how they aim to connect different parts of the heritage sector and supporting the use of advanced spectroscopy tools. To read more visit: buff.ly/KpXPPaH

"Where’s Walh-y? Searching for ‘Invisible Britons’ in Early Medieval England". Strong title game by James Chetwood eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/22...

Arts & Culture in the UK is worth more than food manufacturing; 3x the value of car manufacturing. It employs 2.1 million people. But this Government, ostensibly focused on stabilizing the economy, is so uninterested in it that there isn't even gossip about the also ran ministry in charge.

Great to see UK gov announce £86bn for RnD, but how about they paid even the slightest bit of attention to the collapsing UK universities sector which underpins that research and development, through research and teaching the next generation of research professionals?

BHO is having intermittent downtime at the moment. We're being hammered by AI bots and scrapers, overloading our servers. Our server engineers will be back on the case after the long weekend. Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is due to third-party bad actors.

Published in #Cambridge's #ClassicalStudies and #Archaeology journals, articles in this free-access collection bring together recent scholarly research on the #history, archaeology and cultural dynamics of #RomanBritain: ✅➡️ cup.org/3YMP1hO

Universities need to hire whiever is lobbying for the fishing industry.

This is a brilliant and deeply disturbing thread. Essential baseline data and it's totally unreliable.

Another incredible day of breaking news & cutting edge research at the #IronAgeDialogues conference at Cardiff University Plenty of new ideas & topics for future discussions & research 🛖👍

The Leicester Roman festival #AncientBluesky ⚱️🦋

As the mum, I am the one who needs to look after her during that week. I don't have the luxury of going on my own, but I also can't be in control of my own plans. And people wonder why women leave academia? It's the 10000 small things, made unnecessarily challenging by people who don't get it.

If academics could be 'trusted' to book our own travel rather than having to do it via travel agents (waste of project and university money, if you ask me...!), then we would also be able to make changes to our own arrangements, which affect our lives.

Next week! Exploring Ancient History & Religion Family Fun Day @caerheritage.bsky.social! Both subjects are sadly facing closure at Cardiff, this event will highlight the incredible significance of ancient history & religious studies for communities ❤️ @ltotelin.bsky.social

‘Mobility in the Early Middle Ages, and Beyond’, ed. by @laurysarti.bsky.social & Helene von Trott zu Solz, now #OpenAccess thanks to our Transformation Package! 🔓📚 This bilingual volume combines expertise from fields like #archaeology, #digitalhistory & #naturalsciences tinyurl.com/27aybuvc

Bay Watch. Love this sign at Caer Gybi. You might have to be a certain age to get the reference, but can you spot David Hassellhoff? For real 🤣. Pointed out to me by the eagle-eyed @drtobydriver.bsky.social #RomanFortThursday

By "free speech," the Americans mean creating a media environment in your country dominated by American digital fascism preparatory to right-wing regime change. Vance essentially said as much in Munich. Give in now, forget about sovereignty later. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Raking shadows thrown by low sun emphasise the terraced banks of an extensive IronAge/#RomanoBritish field system on the steep N-facing slopes of Burderop Down, Wilts. ... AND the ditches of a #medieval sheepfold that cut across them. 📷 historicengland.org.uk/education/sc...

The misguided assumption that humanities assignments can be marked by rote, ticking off correct or incorrect answers against a set scheme became very clear when employers were trying to break the marking boycott. It's a fundamental misrepresentation of what it is we teach & graduates' skills.

A key problem is that Universities are both educational communities & financial entities. While the FE is there to support the EC, that's not a problem. But it flipped. So when the Times talks of collapse, they mean collapse of the FE & consultants can axe the education to save it

This. An emergency recall of parliament on a weekend for British Steel. Nothing at all for UK HE which employs far more people, has already shed 10,000 academic jobs, with several institutions on the brink of collapse. A reminder: we train all the doctors, teachers, engineers, nurses, lawyers &c &c