Excellent new article on Kofun archaeology

For me Brexit has changed everything. My happiness, my whole life. How can this person suggest otherwise, based on what evidence?

Henry Gee’s book spotted on sale in Merano, South Tyrol @endofthepier.bsky.social

I’ve signed. Have you?

The Society's President and Council have released the following statement on the proposed closure of undergraduate degrees at the University of Hertfordshire, in #History and the wider humanities bit.ly/4dmV5oO This comes at a time of further bad news from Essex and Nottingham #Skystorians

For anyone wondering about how future historians will cover the Trump regime @timothysnyder.bsky.social is already doing it! snyder.substack.com/p/on-superpo...

New paper published today. Although the Okhotsk culture in Hokkaido has been associated with the Nivkh since at least Kikuchi (1978), we provide the most detailed linguistic and archaeological evaluation attempted so far. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The life and work of Dame Averil Cameron, historian of the Byzantine empire, is remembered in this week's BBC Radio 4 'Last Word' www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... With contributions from @tigerlilyrocks.bsky.social and Mary Beard. Starts at 7 mins 10 seconds #Skystorians

Now available via the April print issue of Antiquity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Italian government criticism of Trump's pope comments www.bbc.com/news/article...

So many things about the USA are completely unbelievable and this is one 😰

Pleased to announce that the German translation of 24 Hours in Shogun's Japan will be published by Penguin Germany in November. I would be even more pleased if the site listed the right author 😅😅 (Contacted this morning) www.penguin.de/buecher/mark...

An article last year claimed that tree-ring data shows a link between drought and late Roman conflicts such as the "Barbarian Conspiracy" of 367. We show problems with such claims and appeal for interdisciplinary palaeoclimatic research to respect historical method. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Publication tomorrow in the UK! www.gea.mpg.de/201646/24-ho...

This war may not have been entirely thought-through.

‘She claims to speak French, German and Italian, but her encounters with French, German and Italian speakers suggest otherwise.’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Melania Trump. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Now only a month before publication of 24 Hours in Shogun’s Japan. Translation rights have been sold for France, Spain, Germany, Serbia and Ukraine! www.mombooks.com/book/24-hour...

Job alert in Malta on my ERC funded IslandLab Project for a post excavation research assistant. A bachalor's degree in Archaeology, or related fields is required, ideally with experience working on faunal assemblages and handling bones/fossils, and curating finds. www.um.edu.mt/media/um/doc...

Currently advertising: PhD project on Neolithic waste, based with Henny Piezonka. Project focuses on spatial analysis and the Neolithic. Deadline is 9th Feb. A chance to work with a cool range of sites from Serbia to Poland and you get to live in Berlin, so what's not to like! Link in next post.

Final call for the talks for the 11th International Congress of Phoenician and Punic Studies in November www.um.edu.mt/events/xippc...

Catholicism and Language Diversity in the Late Habsburg Empire only a handful days to go until our conference in Rome - many thanks to my co-organizers incl #janBernot First academic gathering of my @fwf-at.bsky.social project :-) www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/In...

A German soccer federation executive committee member says it's time to consider a World Cup boycott because of the actions of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Sunday, at least 7 ICE agents stormed a house and took an elderly man out into the freezing cold, wearing only his underwear and a blanket. He was a member of the Hmong community, which came to the area from Laos in the 1970s after siding with the US in the Vietnam War. Notice the suppressors 1/2

FISH!! #MosaicMonday

A sighting of the new book by @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social in the wild in Ljubljana

Zelensky lands in Miami. Not a single US official is on hand to greet him. In the language of diplomacy this send an unequivocal message of coldness and hostility. Compare it with the lavish pomp and red carpet shown to Putin when he landed in Alaska a few weeks ago.

'Japan’s Resonant Pasts: Materiality, Landscapes and Heritage': a session at next year's European Association of Archaeologists conference in Athens organised by myself and Claudia Zancan. The call for papers opens today. Looking forward to moving the field ahead with this exciting session!

Booking for the first @royalhistsoc.org Lectures of 2026 is now available: bit.ly/48N0CCY > Charles West on 'Queens & the Making of Medieval Europe’ > Vinita Damodaran on 'Decolonising the Natural History Collections of Empire' > David Stack on 'Well-being: a Historian's Perspective' #Skystorians

Really proud of the whole team for the all the hard work they put into this. Our database lists depictions of fish and other marine organisms in prehistoric Japan, something not previously available even in Japanese. openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/articles/10....

Denmark just did the unthinkable: They labeled the United States — under Trump — a national security threat to Danish citizens. And there are more coming.

Our new publication on the archaeology of early modern mercury production at Idrija, Slovenia (a UNESCO World Heritage site). www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I can't see how this is not a declaration of war against a sovereign state by a neo-imperialist USA? www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

New publication on archaeology & Japanese eco-nationalism. Had a lot of fun writing this over the summer. My co-author Claudia Zancan provided several new insights that had not occurred to me before, especially with respect to the Kofun period. www.frontiersin.org/journals/env...

An exciting new publication, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective, co-edited by Claudia Zancan. I attended the original conference in Venice but the editors have brought together an important series of papers on the theme of 'metaphors'. edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni4...

24 Hours in Shogun's Japan: A Day in the Life of the People wot Lived There. Coming soon (hopefully 😅and certainly with a little help from my friends 🥹) www.mombooks.com/book/24-hour...

Women and Archaeology 1990-2010. Out in hard copy now!

New paper accepted! www.frontiersin.org/journals/env...

Rather remarkable that the Trump administration response to a government shutdown is "let's inflict as much pain as possible on as many Americans as possible"

New paper published on Japanese eco-nationalism. www.frontiersin.org/journals/hum...

A harrowing but important and timely account from my colleague Bucky Sheftall www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We were sort of neighbours and I attended several concerts in my teens. RIP! www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

Interesting lipid analysis from Japan and Korea www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

RIP Brian Fagan www.theguardian.com/science/2025...