Morale? What morale?

Historians: this is the archaeological equivalent (morally if not legally) of cutting pictures out of medieval manuscripts in a library and selling them on eBay.

Grief is weird & non-linear. Took some of my dad’s clothes to a charity shop & now feeling a) he’s going to tell me off for getting rid of his stuff and b) that he’s really not coming back. A confusing combination

"The far-right is obsessed with the aesthetic of patriotism. Not patriotism as a sense of civic duty or shared sacrifice. But as a set of symbols."

When OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was trained on pirated books. This finally came to light in a lawsuit three months ago, but it has gone essentially unreported. 🧵 1/5

Also, archaeology is interdisciplinary, fine, but it has its own rules, ethics & procedures. I don’t understand as an academic how you can presume to dabble in archaeology from another field (no pun intended) without basic understanding of how archaeology actually works. It undermines the profession

*Academic sells history off to the highest bidder* There, BBC, we sorted that headline for you If he truly feels *a connection* to the find, as the article claims, would he not have donated it to a museum? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Not entirely helpful really

Tomorrow as part of Norwich Science Festival!

I posted this on instagram last year for Valentine’s Day but it’s only become more obvious so I’m reusing it this year🫠

A reminder that my book on the history of protest is now published. It is superbly produced with a great cover. Buy it now from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social

The NHS closed Tavistock over trans care concerns – there were just eight complaints all from cisgender people. 1. JK Rowling 2. Maya Forstater 3. Helen Joyce 4. Graham Linehan 5. Kathleen Stock 6. Posie Parker 7. Wes Streeting 8. Rosie Duffield www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/11/n...

Association of Archaeologists in Greece withdraws from EAA conference 2026 in Athens Difficult to see how international archaeologists can now attend given such opposition

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

Something really interesting about this is that she’s not posting any of this stuff over here on bsky. Her feeds there and here are very pointedly different

Alice Roberts is great and all but why is she - a paleoanatomist and medic - writing books and presenting TV shows about the Roman Empire? It's actually quite corrosive, I think, to the public perception of deep, specialist expertise.

'A lecturer whose job is at risk has said a fully costed proposal has been put forward to the University of Essex in a bid to save 400 full-time roles.' These include 'Changes to the career-break policy, enhancing the voluntary redundancy offer and allowing staff to move to fractional contracts'.

Disinformation spreads for free while more and more news gets locked behind paywalls and other obstacles. It's not hard to envision how that ends. theconversation.com/news-sites-a...

Essex University, Southend campus closure: 800 students and staff afected. "but it will also have a huge impact on a city that has come to depend on the university in many ways." #HigherEd #AcademicSky www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This is a useful article to read if dystopia is your thing

'The University of Nottingham has recorded a deficit of more than £80 million after property experts valued its for sale campuses at significantly less than they were previously thought to be worth.' 1/3

TikTok has some really interesting creators making up their own versions of Ancient DNA history, based on half-remembered cheese dreams from Victorian children’s books & a heavy dose of white supremacy

Monday, you damp, miserable, work-encumbered bastard

Before anyone gets too angry about this, several things. (1) Universities in the UK, unlike the US, are pretty much under the financial and admin control of central govt. If RefUK moves to wipe them out, as they will, then some will choose life. (1/3) www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

New post: A Prehistory of Digital Archaeology introspectivedigitalarchaeology.com/2026/02/01/a... #digitalarchaeology #digitalhumanities

In case we thought that ecological disasters were a special talent of modernity, let’s talk about how the 13th-century peat trade of Norfolk made it permanently vulnerable to flooding, including 3 catastrophic floods just since 2013. #medievalstorytime

No. No. No. Stop this.

Six hours of teaching and one meeting today. Just popping into my office to have a nice lay down on the floor while I question my sanity

Cutting staff at a neighbouring Uni is bad for the whole coastal South East. Aside from London, what industries or large employers are there? Visit a seaside town in the winter? How is this 'levelling up'? 14,000 jobs in HE lost last year. Where is the government support? #AcademicSky

For those not familiar with "destructive scanning", this means Anthropic would buy up millions of physical books, use “hydraulic powered cutting machines” to chop them up, scan the pages on “high speed, high quality, production level scanners,” then send the pages to recycling companies!!!

Applying for promotion during a turbulent time in HE: huge risk or small reward? I shouldn’t keep putting this off but is it honestly worth it (on so many levels)?

Our volume on Stone Age clothing is now online and completely open access: Jöris, O., Dietrich, O., Risch, R., & Meller, H. (Hrsg.). (2026). A Stone Age History of Clothing: Mitteldeutscher Archäologentag vom 26. bis 28. September 2024 in Halle (Saale). doi.org/10.11588/pro...

Just over two weeks left to submit your abstracts! Had quite a few already. Please share with your networks. Welcoming colleagues across time periods and disciplines!

The latest book in our Critical Heritages of Europe series with Routledge is out! Do take a look at all 14 books in the series so far - we have more in the pipeline too for 2026 www.routledge.com/Critical-Her...

What this prune desperately wants to say is ‘people who are not white’. And as this interview clip demonstrates, any amount of data from credible sources won’t be able to shift this depth of very British racism. Because ideology over truth, right?

A photo from my first visit to Auschwitz I in 1997. I have never experienced anything so utterly devastating, so violent, so silent, and still frightening. I cried until I couldn’t stand up, & had to be carried out by my then-boyfriend. It was snowing.

400 jobs at risk. A campus set to close. This film explains what’s happening at the University of Essex and why staff, students and the local community are organising to stop it. 📍 Southend rally | 5 February

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember all those murdered during the Holocaust, Nazi persecution of other groups, and in more recent genocides. 🕯️ Visit the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website to find out more https://www.hmd.org.uk

Even Reform’s to the left of Suella’s politics

Finally submitted the outstanding paper revisions, but given the apocalyptic nature of the world, the state of UK Higher Education & the likely number of people who might read it even if it did get published, what's the point? Succumbing to despair for the rest of the afternoon

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

@a-rfa.bsky.social have you seen this? Might be of interest?

@gedarcy.bsky.social look at this 13th century comic strip!

This week, an X user created an AI video of me being chloroformed and prepared for rape. Victims are told it's not real and they're getting offended for no reason. But nudification tools are weapons of sexual assault, and the harm they cause is real 👇 jessasato.substack.com/p/ai-nudific...

I really hope that this session considers the ethical aspects of AI & archaeology/heritage. Archaeologists have as much responsibility to the future as we do to advocating for & sharing the past

Fantastic work & Anna Gurney was also the first woman member of the British Archaeological Association!

Just published a paper on the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir meme, the decade-old tumblr in-joke that continues to impact the public understanding of the ancient world. Paywalled but email me if you want a copy. 🏺

Do Humans Dream about Electric Gods? What lessons can we learn from history & past imaginaries of extra-human intelligence? How does science fiction cinema try to teach us about human hope and technological change? #NorwichScienceFestival lunchtime talk at The Forum by me & @gedarcy Feb 16th Free!

"Drawing on a 20.3-million-query audit of ChatGPT, we map systematic biases in the model's representations of countries, states, cities, and neighbourhoods. From these empirics, we argue that bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI”. ht: Dagmar Monett

This is horrific. Docking all pay for refusing to reschedule teaching due to strike action (for which pay has already been docked).