starting (realistically) in about an hour

a conference being organized by colleagues here in Pisa the next three days, which it will be possible to follow online #ArchaeologyBlueSky ⚱️ www.sns.it/it/evento/be...

🖼️ Gorey

Honestly we are much more sheep than wolves - intensely political, terrified of anything new in the environment, and extremely hostile to outgroup sheep who arrive as newcomers and try to join the flock.

People who say "we're wolves not sheep" have never seen two ewes trying to murder each other over relative status in the flock before they give birth, and then all their friends and family picking sides because being friends with the winner will raise THEIR status, until there is a massive brawl

A post that started out about orthography and monograms, and ended up being about obscure aspects of Roman religion. livyarrow.org/2025/11/18/b...

tfw you flub coordinate systems, but the park border in central Anatolia might as well run through Piazza del Popolo

Several minute piece on the BBC. Lots of detectorists. No archaeologists. No-one from PAS. No-one from museums. No discussion of the costs or responsibilities involved. 😡 #Archaeology #Detecting #Treasure #BBC #News

Turns out I still have a picture of Igl se Wighættefagol for when I fostered him for the holidays and took him to see Pictish stones.

20 odd years later, I think about her* often *The phrase "þæt wæs gōd cyning".

and, not for nothing, there is a further acute moral injury in becoming so used to it all, and so used to it not mattering, that you begin to think of terrible crimes with real victims along the lines of "maybe this will be what hurts him politically"

Delighted that from January 2026 all research articles published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology @cambup-archaeology.cambridge.org will be Open Access view.updates.cambridge.org?qs=85c24bbd7...

New book on Indo-European Afterlives (dowloadable as an Open Access PDF)! : www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/books/e/10.1...

I'm generally pretty calm, and I try to give people benefit of the doubt, but the time I just spent trying to provide constructive feedback in a peer review before arriving at the references and realizing that many were simply invented out of thin air, surely from use of genAI, has me hopping mad

My piece out now in the new PMLA: Marxism, Cultural Studies, and the Rise of Indigenous Studies

ever since I learned about three-cueing I've developed infinitely more patience for replies on social media. mfers literally do not know how to read. people are walking around conjuring random meanings into words they don't know, and they don't know a lot of words. it's crazy

i have concluded that frecciarossa executive class is hilarious and we need it urgently on amtrak: -huge evil villain chairs -next seat is two counties over -big stupid conference room you can book -food is good enough -chairs can swivel, recline, etc. -bizarrely cheap

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

One of the many (silly, nonsensical) arguments that anti-repatriation folks have is that if we return all of the stolen artefacts, our museums would be empty. Meanwhile, artefacts dug up by metal detectors in this country are being sold off…wonder where their outrage is? 🤔

question, especially for USians, but all contributions welcome: if you have a university degree (or intend to pursue one), and have an interest in but don't work in archaeology or a related field, what sort of archaeology courses do you wish had been/would be offered where you went to school? 🏺

question, especially for USians, but all contributions welcome: if you have a university degree (or intend to pursue one), and have an interest in but don't work in archaeology or a related field, what sort of archaeology courses do you wish had been/would be offered where you went to school? 🏺

lol no they absolutely will not, for so many reasons I'd bet everything I own that in 20 years there will never be more than 1000 people in space at any one time. (It'll probably be well under 100.) Nobody will be living there with their kids. Tech billionaires don't know a damn thing about tech.

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Once again urging archaeologists to critically assess the AI push into archaeology. There is a huge swath of problematic ethical issues that come with the AI tech & tech lords & we don't have to make it easier for them to insert themselves in archaeology by welcoming them in. Don't be complicit. 🏺

despite all the fear mongering about trans people and the attempts to abandon and actively harm us from both political parties in the US, transitioning is still the greatest decision i’ve ever made, only regret i have is not doing it younger, and that it has only made my life infinitely better

professor/lecturer/whatever IN or AT the Faculty of Whatevertydo... ? my (northeast US English) instinct is strongly for IN, but I have been tasked with proofing for UK English, and I can find examples of AT... opinions?

may i present for your edification, the pictish beast and the nebra sky disc in pumpkin moonshine form. i will post pics of them lit up this evening after it gets dark too

Hey Homerists, What’s the convention with the suitors in the Odyssey? Are we capitalizing them? “The Suitors did X” or “The suitors did x”? I’ve now typed the word so many times it no longer looks like English. Help?

tl;dr this is, as I've been screaming into the wind about for a week now, not just illegal as shit but fundamentally means the Constitution as written is no longer in effect That said if you want an even deeper dive on the subject than I've done, this is a very good thread

I suppose if the question here is 'why don't these fields produce new discoveries at the same rate as the sciences' the answer is a pretty obvious, 'because they're not funded like the sciences.' We could do a lot of archaeology with, say, a few billion dollars a year!

I'd argue "the sciences" also are much, much slower than most people think. Advancement is kind of related to news and SciComm taking incemental, often mutually exclusive studies as definitive answers instead of particular moments in an argument.

Mods are asleep post brassicas

"People will only really understand what’s happened in Gaza after the genocide stops; it is far beyond what we know, both in terms of the casualties and the atrocities committed." The Hind Rajab Foundation on the long road ahead for accountability. www.vashtimedia.com/hind-rajab-f...

What middle and upper class cis het white people need to understand is that they only have as many rights as the most vulnerable do. You have only the rights trans people and immigrants do.

We know more about the massive military-style raid on a Chicago housing complex thanks to the reporting of @southsideweekly.bsky.social, @blockclubchi.bsky.social, and neighborhood resident Eboni Watson who chronicled the event. Among the emerging questions: what's real estate's role in this?

‘The message is clear: 20th-century colonialism created the conditions for a 21st-century tragedy.’ @josephinequinn.bsky.social on an exhibition of Gazan antiquities: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If you remember last autumn when I was live-skeeting excavations at Rossano di Vaglio, the first report of that work has just been published (in Italian). Happy for it to see the light of day, and also very pleased to present five new Oscan inscriptions to the world... 🏺 #ArchaeologyBluesky

When you study a language that has, say, 500 inscriptions surviving and someone out of the blue SENDS YOU FIVE MORE...! I don't think I've ever cancelled my plans faster than when Dan sent me these. So pleased everyone can read this wonderful publication.

I did a micro post on the coins in this article. V v interesting. Attn: @andrewahala.bsky.social livyarrow.org/2025/10/05/3...

If you remember last autumn when I was live-skeeting excavations at Rossano di Vaglio, the first report of that work has just been published (in Italian). Happy for it to see the light of day, and also very pleased to present five new Oscan inscriptions to the world... 🏺 #ArchaeologyBluesky

This is absolutely excellent to see. Community defense in this way is massively important and literally saves lives. If you see something step in if possible.

Why does nobody see ignis fatuus now, paper speculating that lanterns or flaming torches ignited marsh gas, but authors doubtful this fully explains the extinction of this phenomenon. As marshes are restored will ignis fatuus be restored? www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Coates says Black Americans have stories about relatives who were lynched or had to flee and that a life free of political violence is not in reach in his time Klein: "Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic." They lynched a kid last week.

Zohran, what's your stance on comments in footnotes?