Poppy

Dubai Shop, Cowley Road, Oxford. All the fun of Dubai, without the hassle of being struck by an Iranian drone

Been reading this ... it's very good www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

Jos VanBeurden (Restitutionmatters.org) on "Stone and Fiber" and the project to return the Hampton Archive of Baliem valley material to Papua restitutionmatters.org/publication/...

1963

A recording of a recent talk on a unique, well-documented single-culture collection from highland Papua, and our efforts to conserve, document, and repatriate it. The collection is now on a ship, bound for Papua, where it will become the core of a new museum www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2h2...

Human history upended AGAIN www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

In ye olden days scholars were more, er, forthright on each other’s works. This is Soame Jenyns on Edward Morse’s book on Japanese pottery

Do bicycle factories measure their outputs in Herz?

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

Wow. Ian McNiven has written a review of "Stone and Fiber". Longest review I ever read. (Mostly) complimentary too! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Visiting Britain, and wondering at the fate of phone boxes

These men appear to be hammering on ... a weaving loom. An excellent metaphor for the use of AI in "academic" work

Postcard from Edinburgh

the man is innocent ... and if there was a prize for creating prizes, he would surely win it www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Lana del Rey offered to fix my website. Can't say I'm not tempted

AI produces MORE editorial labor, not less. “[To weed out slop] the journal doubled its deputy editors from 6 to 11 & nearly doubled its sr editors from roughly 30 to 60. All of this is volunteer labor, unpaid academics donating time to maintain scientific quality.“ www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Probably a weaver’s tool, for beating in weft

Many have complained that the Iliad is indigestible, and now we have proof

The largest and most diverse collection of Indigenous American genomes 👉🏻 “The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans” @macscastro.bsky.social @hunemeier.bsky.social @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @jrockdrigo.bsky.social 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Evaluated 15 abstracts for papers for a humanities conference. Depressing. 2/3 apply a fashionable "theoretical framework" to arrive at foregone conclusions concerning "power dynamics", "recontextualization", "negotiated relationships" ... 😑 ... might as well let AI write this stuff

Conserved, catalogued, photographed, re-housed ... after 5 years work a major ethnographic collection (the Hampton Archive) is on its way back to Papua, where it will form the nucleus of a new museum ...

Classifying things isn't the same as understanding them, but it's a necessary first step. In this book chapter I establish a classification for cultural phenomena, and apply it to some southeast Asian traditions ... www.researchgate.net/publication/...

New book chapter ... "The Anatomy of a Tradition". Compares notions of tradition, innovation, lineage, fashion in two different fields: Tibetan Buddhism and rural weaving in southeast Asia, discusses why they are similar, and why this is so ... www.researchgate.net/publication/...

removal of same drums increases oxytocin levels in adults

adding things that I've already done to the list, so that I can have the satisfaction of crossing them off

Our chapter on the tree model (with @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @robinryder.bsky.social ) is at last published online: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

For those in the Bay Area ... Serena Lee and I will be doing an introduction to weaving in southwest China and southeast Asia at the Asian Art Museum in SF. We will try to make sense of this most complicated region in Asia and its rich traditions ... www.societyforasianart.org/program/text...

in which Rob Boyd lays into a couple of students of Toobey and Cosmides (in the politest possible way). He mentions my work at around 57mins in ... but forgets my name. Ah well, you take what you can get ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoqB...

Yes, and for instance the word for "bow" in Lakhota itázipa has been proposed to be a borrowing from a central Algonquian language (though the phonetic details are a bit involved)

The bow spread rapidly across the Americas, the result of diffusion rather than migration. I'm reminded of studies of the diffusion of arrow designs in New Guinea ... also rapid (there's nothing like being shot at with a novel weapon for generating awareness 😉) academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

This evening, at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, CA

Fascinating

Detail of an old silk khata (offering cloth), woven in China for the Tibetan market. 18th century. Photographed in glancing light to catch the damask pattern

Kids, I regret to tell you that your degree in “writing AI prompts” may not be worth the $100k you spend on getting it

Differing views: in western museums (eg Pitt Rivers in Oxford) shrunken heads have mostly been removed from public view. In Ecuador, their country of origin, the Museo Pumapungo in Cuenca has a gallery devoted to their display. It is a big hit with Ecuadorean schoolkids (I could barely get near it)

It's the weekend, so here is a picture of a pisco sour

"[The EES] crowds out critical thought and gives cover for the acceptance or rejection of ideas based on esthetic and ideological standards independent of their explanatory value."

Yep, it’s unfortunate, quasi-religious, and explains nothing

A publication called "Scienmag" wrote about one of my papers. It's pure AI slop ("vibrant tapestry" my ass) and bears absolutely no relation to the paper. The world is doomed and everything is turning to s**t scienmag.com/unraveling-s...

The risks of AI are mundane ... the destruction of education, and the division of the world into a tiny elite that can think for itself, and the rest

This is Mama Rosa, a wool spinner, dyer and weaver in the Saraguro region in southern Ecuador. One of the last remaining backstrap weavers in this region. If you are in Ecuador, do visit her (she has a Facebook page, created by her daughter). Not many visitors in this region ... 1/3

If you are in the Bay Area, here is a date for your diary

A new "encyclopedia" which appears at the top of the search page whenever I search for content related to Mexico. It is entirely written and illustrated by AI and contains 100% pure slop www.mexicohistorico.com/english.php

Ah! the rewards of academic success!

Demonstration of a purely instrument-based analysis of archaeological artifacts (arrowheads), coupled with a Bayesian analysis of phylogeny ... reproduces the classical typology, and much more besides ... osf.io/preprints/so...

Fascinating… AI replicates mediocre human waffle, and raises it to the nth power. It’s writing satire that no-one gets

We visited some weavers in the Cacha region of Cotopaxi province, Ecuador, and ran into a rehearsal for a festival (raymi). These events are held 4 times a year, at the equinoxes and solstices, on a sacred hilltop site ... (see alt text for details)

Still 6 days to go until the deadline ...

Just got back from 3 weeks looking at traditional backstrap loom weaving along the Andes in Ecuador. Over the next few days I will post some weavers and their locations ... I encourage you to visit them, and do buy their excellent weavings, it helps keep their craft going (see alt text) ... 1/2