Nice to give a paper in my own institution for a change!

1/3rd of a paper I'm delivering on Thursday now on the page and it's nice to have a reminder that this is just how my writing process works (a very large chunk of the stuff I've written that was any good began similarly).

We are accepting donations to the Tag bursary fund! Donate here: store.york.ac.uk/product-cata...

New discovery: A #bakery was unearthed in the Roman town of Sisapo, Spain. The town was part of a major economic center linked to mining in the Sierra Morena region. The bakery occupied a large complex of over 200 m² with five rooms, including a large circular oven, milling areas with stone ...🧵1/2

Two great scholars of the early Middle Ages having a chat about @alexharvv.bsky.social’s cracking book!

A new interview blogpost from me! This time talking to @alexharvv.bsky.social about his book "Forgotten Vikings". We also touch on the importance of promoting academic history outside academia.

Interviewed by the one and only @karanthir.bsky.social Read on for chats about Frisians, vikings, Frisian vikings, and more Frisians…

Who’s off to TAG this year?

This sort of project that, when it comes into being, its importance is so clear that the reaction is amazement that no one had managed to bring it into being already.

XRONOS is an open data infrastructure for the backbone of the archaeological record – chronology. As described in our paper out today in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology (https://journal.caa-international.org/articles/10.5334/jcaa.191), XRONOS is the most comprehensive […]

A common trope here is that AI-written material is easy to spot for everyone. Please, please, dissuade yourselves of this notion. Material written entirely by AI is getting through: in BA and MA theses, in job applications, in journal articles. Probably in PhD theses. And this should trouble us all.

Troubling. I knew the PAS was under financial pressure and has always faced an uphill task, but I hadn't quite realised the scale of the problem.

My blog post with the ADAM network has now been published. It's about precarity, the future of small subjects, and communal approaches to academic work. I hope it will resonate with some. #IchBinHanna #KleineFaecher #SkandiRetten difficultmedieval.com/2025/10/23/h...

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, a TN sheriff had a 61-yr-old man arrested for posting a meme on Facebook, which the sheriff absurdly construed as a threat. It was pretty clearly bullshit but I dug into the case using FB & public records and now it looks even worse. My latest @theintercept.com:

This is an atrocious idea.

This isn’t going to end well. Some of that team are going to be under pressure and/or lazy. And we know from disciplinary cases that ChatGPT “hallucinates” cases and opinions.

This is going to be a career defining moment for some poor archaeology grad student in 500 years.

Good thread!

22. Solidarity requires trust, though, which brings me back to the tattoo.

21. None of this is to say that a decent man of integrity from a respectable bourgeois background cannot be a champion of the masses. Solidarity against the ruling oligarchy does not require warriors for the working class to be of the working class. After all, Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t.

18. While it’s apparently true that working-class kids can afford Bapst thanks to gov't support, it’s also true that no credible definition of “working class” includes access to an elite institution for the son of an attorney, who is the son of an eminent architect, who left his mark on Yale.

16. His mom is an entrepreneur. His dad is an attorney. His grandpa was architect & furniture designer Warren Platner, who worked with the firm that, among other things, designed Dulles Airport & a college at Yale. (There are chairs, literal chairs, named after him.) www.knoll.com/shop/en_us/d...

15. As far as I can tell, Platner has performed the part of a "working class Mainer" impressively. He has allowed media allies as diverse as TYTs and Pod Save America to believe he is the real deal. And that’s where the problem begins. He’s not working class.

11. I can’t know what the future would have been, but I’m guessing a goodly number of potential supporters would have been willing, even eager, to overlook Platner’s transgressions, in the service of his anti-establishment politics, if he had expressed a measure of regret.

Silly that there are folks trying to defend this Platner nonsense by saying things like "the Totenkopf had a history in the Prussian/German army before the SS" since, well, be that as it may, the versions used in earlier instances were different from the one Platner used, which is the Nazi one.

Na gut, wenn die Abiturienten und Abiturientinnen KI verwenden und die Lehrkraft auch, können wir das halt zwischen Computern fortsetzen und ganz ohne die Menschheit gehen.

Jap. Warum noch selber denken? Ohne Bildung lassen sich Menschen leichter ausbeuten.

Bitte nicht. Dann müssen wir diese Studis unterrichten.

Been surprised not to see this shared more so reposting again!

Want to help more people come to TAG - help us by building a bursary fund.

The university sector needs to recognise that, just as with the NHS, being the largest customer means they really can set the price, and stand their ground on this one.

If this increased capacity also means reduced costs I am unreasonably excited about this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Neues #WissZeitVG bis Mitte 2026 verspricht der Koalitionsvertrag. 2025 ist bald rum. Ob HRK, GEW oder wir von #IchBinHanna: Bislang haben wir keine Einladungen zum Stakeholder-Prozess. Das sollte langsam mal was werden! @timgabel.bsky.social berichtet für @table.media: table.media/research/ana...

It isn't normal to have a Nazi phase!

We're doing a conference on the Early Medieval Period and demand that you buy tickets and then share this post immediately. sussexpast.co.uk/event/the-su...

1993: Stephen Lawrence is murdered by racists. 1999: The MacPherson Inquiry recommends recording of non-crime hate incidents. 2005: After the Discrimination Law Review, non-crime hate incidents begin being recorded by UK police. 2025: Mainstream transphobia ends a harm reduction policy that worked.

US Caribbean boat bombing campaign keeps getting worse. Colombia says US killed Colombian fishermen in Colombian waters. Add international incident to illegal, unethical, and bad strategy. This isn’t national security, it’s murder. Who’s selecting these targets? Is this why Adm. Holsey resigned?

What's the likelihood that when I upgrade to the new Mac OS it's going to try and foist some sort of AI crap onto me?

Well today's certainly proving to be a nice reminder of the huge glaring issue that is the multiple single-points-of-failure that can bring down a vast swathe of digital infrastructure.

truly the most perverse messaging / governing strategy in history they control the entire apparatus of the state and instead of using it to (a) advance the general welfare and (b) focus on issues where voters agree with them they have chosen (c) exclusively raise the salience of their worst issues

Christ Almighty.

A fun (“fun”) new thing we need to address is the time wasted correcting the errors of people who arrive at a conversation having only read the AI summary of a document.

Took a while but nice to get my author’s copy!

I'm not one to draw lines in the sand, but if you've never eaten a curry of any kind then you aren't British. Simple as that.

FC Kölle

Conflicts, disease, and a major schism in the church. Seen this before.

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?

Although I haven't been told about it and have had to find out for myself via their website, at least one nice thing to come out of AUP's move to Taylor & Francis is that my book has now been made a paperback for the rather more affordable price of €40: www.routledge.com/Ethnic-Ident...

Any opportunity to hawk the open-access publication that came out of it 😉: www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress...

PLEASE TAKE OUR MONEY! With the new academic year now well under way, a reminder that we offer University Research Grants of up to £1,000 for students carrying out research on the British Army or of the land forces of the British Empire & the Commonwealth. Details at: www.sahr.org.uk/university-r...