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...

A map of Europe's different biogeographical zones, which featured in Caroline Goodson's #imc2025 paper

Perhaps the president of Liberia could send some of his country’s best educators here to teach Donald Trump some proper English spelling, grammar, usage, capitalization, and punctuation? This would be a most profound gesture of goodwill.

Finally published! A big thanks to all 68 co-authors!! www.gea.mpg.de/165463/oxfor...

Peter Thiel—the techno-fascist billionaire behind Palantir and JD Vance’s entire career—revealed his thoughts when he couldn’t answer the simple question of whether or not humanity should endure. Why? Because he doesn’t believe all of humanity should survive—only those who look and think like him.

Depopulation not necessarily good for nature

New publication on Ryukyu archaeology with Hiroto Takamiya. (DM me if anyone can't access the PDF) academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

Marco Rubio needs to be asked whether he believes his grandfather who remained in the U.S. after receiving a deportation order from our govt should have been treated the way the father of 3 Marines was treated by ICE this weekend in California. ASK HIM. Make him confront his lack of character.

The Trump regime is deliberately deploying ICE agents at immigration hearings so they can more easily detain migrants. Armed, masked men abducting people from courthouses —and arresting those who ask why — is the stuff fascism is made of.