'I wish I was pesto pasta'. Carved by my eldest www.instagram.com/greshdesign?...

Enjoying the column last April...

Hitting all the middle age clichés, but the swifts have returned and I heard a nightingale for the very first time this morning and that is all I need to make this the best day.

Maybe it’s just me and my feed, but I haven’t seen enough chatter about the discovery of this marble statue of Athena in Turkey, specifically Laodicea.

"We have a handful of years until our carbon budget is exhausted. To waste what little bandwidth we have left – when 750 million people worldwide lack access to electricity – assisting some of the richest men ever to hone their plagiarism bots would be a historic idiocy...."

Our cherry blossom giving 110% this spring

Mighty indeed!

Day FOUR of #Glass-tonbury, our experiment @butserancientfarm.co.uk where we try to recreate Roman window glass. 🔥🍷 We have a parallel experiment running where we try to find out how many near-identical pictures of hot things we can post on Bluesky before we get complaints. 😬😳 Let's see.... 🧵👇

Back to #Glass-tonbury, our project to recreate Roman window glass today. We emptied 4 buckets of hot embers from yesterday's firing (in which we baked a couple of potatoes for an excellent lunch). The furnace still had 200 degrees worth of residual heat when we re-lit it.

St. Botolph's Church at Boston in Lincolnshire. The main body of the church dates to the C14th, while the magnificent west tower (the ‘Boston Stump) was largely constructed during the C15th. 📸 My own. #SteepleSaturday #Boston #Lincolnshire

Oh the indignity wrought by the Victorians! Cast off, hidden and ignored after the church was rebuilt, the original Romanesque font at All Saints, Braunston, Northamptonshire shows signs of a church of great antiquity now all but lost to the world. #FontsOnFriday

Will archaeological data ever be FAIR? 🌐💻 Nicholson et al. explore why so much data remains hard to find and reuse. They advocate for the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) to improve stewardship as open science becomes the standard. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Disregarding the fact that he's cos playing as some of home counties Tory, just caught my husband pouring melted chocolate over a pile of tennis balls....

"integrate AI into your workflow..." buddy, given half a chance I'd be scratching on vellum with oak gall ink in a nice dark clochán on Skellig Michael. I have no interest in generative AI at all, I wish they would stop trying to crowbar it into *everything*. Sometimes the effort is the point.

I hope I continue to always be amazed at the images a mere $500 telescope can capture from my backyard in just a few hours of time. Set up my Seestar sometime after 8:30 pm last night. Carefully levelled, aligned, etc. Aimed at M42. Let it capture 1.5 hrs of data. A few editing tweaks & "Voila!"

Using this as a start: what are your favorite examples of unconscious/unforced dad-or-mom shade about your musical tastes? Just something said immediately or off the cuff. Spill all your secrets!

#AdoorableThursday Canons Ashby

Did you know that there are over 80 Historic Environment Records (HERs) in England? Most of them are available online. Learn more on www.heritagegateway.org.uk/gateway/chr/... #sharedhistory #historicenvirommentrecords #algao #sharedhistory #culturalheritage

This is absolutely brilliant. Instigated by Gordon Brown, delivered today. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Two brand new films highlighting the work of Historic Environment Records will be released next week. We can't wait to share them with you! Have you ever looked really looked at where you live? Here's where you get started lnkd.in/ewYiJCPg #historicengland #historicenvironmentrecord

New paper. Recording the female experience of UK archaeology 1990-2010. Anne Teather and I document how an industry EDI agenda evolved in the 1990s and was dismantled, uncovering the ramifications of that for women archaeologists over the next decade. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #openaccess✅

My latest online offering presents the bloody history behind the word ‘shibboleth’, with the point to make that a story about death brings its people to life. Naturally, it accompanies that point with references to Monty Python, German accents, fossils, and Stalin. dannybate.com/2026/03/16/f...

Most of us walk across layers of history every day without realising it. Not just famous landmarks, but ordinary places. Fields. Streets. What stories do these places hold? Who or what was here before us? The answer is out there, sometimes all it takes is knowing where to look.

This is cool. The Government is set to allow plug-in solar, low cost solar panels that families can buy at supermarkets and put on their balconies or outdoor space. "In Germany over a million have been sold, helping households with energy costs and reducing dependence on fossil fuels."

In 1290, Eleanor of Castile, wife of King Edward I & mother of his 14 kids, died in Nottinghamshire. The places where her body rested during the journey to its tomb in Westminster were marked by stone crosses. One of these still stands at Geddington, Northants, & I took these pics there this p.m.

My new needy sheep friends

The Saxon doorway from the south side of the tower of All Saints’ Church at Brixworth in Northamptonshire. Using recycled Roman tiles, the doorway was originally an internal door leading to a now demolished cell. 📸 My own. #AdoorableThursdsy #Brixworth #Northamptonshire

I've been going down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding lead 'pigs' for a piece of work I'm doing on silver. Some were marked 'ex arg' ('of the silver mines') which suggests there may have been some de-silvering going on in Britain. A lead thread 🧵 😉 #Archaeology 🏺

Ammoniting on cold damp English beaches=pure joy

This is just the tip of the iceberg: bigbookoftorcs.com/2026/01/11/t...

Spend a little time learning how monumentally broken our heritage protection frameworks are. Thank you @tessmachling.bsky.social for doing the hard work our sector organisations should be leading on. 🏺

Visit to the early 19th-century Ordnance Depot for coffee and sun (and a little light nerdery) Find out about the site here her.northamptonshire.gov.uk/Monument/MNN...

One of my favourite images! If you haven't seen it before The Farthest, a documentary about the Voyager spacecraft, is on BBC on Monday- 👌

36 years ago today, the Pale Blue Dot picture was taken by Voyager 1, from an unprecedented distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU). The Earth appears as less than a pixel; just a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight refracted by the camera lens.

🚨 We have heard that the County Archaeologist for Hampshire is being made redundant, with no plans to replace him. 🚨 If you live in Hampshire please write to your MP and Councillors. If you live elsewhere treasure and support your County Archaeologists, and stand by to protect them. 🏺

'The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots' by Robert Herdman, 1867 in Kelvingrove At Gallery, Glasgow. She was beheaded #OTD 8 February 1587 at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire. The execution was reportedly a messy one, several strokes being required to remove her head. 1/3

Roman penknife with gladiator handle found at Piddington, 3rd century AD, portraying a secutor, beside a modern reproduction. Oh, for a museum shop that sold the replica… British Museum #FindsFriday

"What is most alarming is that a staggering nearly nine in 10 women [affected] are facing mental health struggles but feel the need to hide it." Perhaps because we don't have the energy to fight health professionals for help. Just saying...

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8... 🏺 Archaeological metadata in studies of aDNA can be a bit of a pain to navigate given there's no set way of doing it and so the details can be wildly variable both within and between papers. This paper sets out a standardised minimum which should be included.

Compare & contrast. This is Trump’s demand for Greenland. And this is Hitler’s for the Sudetenland. There is no difference. The language. The unstoppable need to dominate. The megalomania. It’s the same. And Keir Starmer’s response is appeasement. We are in that moment. 1/

I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026... Might not be as pretty as a carnyx, but fantastic find nevertheless!

This is such a cool finding--the oldest direct evidence of poisoned arrows. Poisoned hunting weapons were a game-changing innovation for our ancestors. Absolutely incredible that researchers found traces of plant toxins on these tiny arrowheads from 60,000 ago 🤯🏹 🧪

Best thing about those early winter dog walks? Unsullied snow

The more you know. We are all chimeras at a very small level. You likely have cells in your body from your mother and your siblings that were born before you. How this chimerism influences your immune system is beginning to be unraveled. #Science #ScienceSunday

A bronze head of Marcus Aurelius which was found in 1976 when ploughing at Steane, near Brackley in Northamptonshire. The head is now part of the collections at the Ashmolean in Oxford. 📸 My own. #FindsFriday #RomanBritain #Ashmolean

It's New Year, so time to look back and forward. These are 10 things I think we need to recognise in 2026. It’s a response to what I think are profoundly damaging mistaken assumptions I’ve heard and read from practitioners, journalists, and analysts in 2025. Warning: very long🧵

The dog Christmassed too hard. Now broken