Always lovely to make a trip to Cambridge to chat to the great staff and students. This time speaking to the BioAnth crew :-)

We are looking for a research project manager for the upcoming FORAGER ERC Synergy Project. Based at the University of York, this is an exciting opportunity to work in a team of 37 researchers from the UK, the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia and Japan. Join us! jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

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.

Evidence for contact between LBK and hunter-gatherers, it grows at every turn, but we are no closer to really understanding the range and scope of relationships. The site of Eilsleben gives us more evidence of just how close interaction could have been. Plus that deer antler mask 🤩

Wonderful study on a cow called Veronica and her use of tools! The video abstract is a treat, as is this thread. Definitely using in future lectures to talk about how we approach animal sociality and mutuality of being in the past. We all know how good it is to scratch that itch!!

Our Don Henson Prize runner-up, Lizzie Lovejoy (@lizzie_lovejoy_illustration @lizzielovejoy.bsky.social) also produced a poem during the conference, a TAG Group Self-Portrait. We hope you enjoy it. And TAG will return. At Exeter on 14th-16th Dec. Save the Date and look out for more details soon.

This marks a rather lovely way to wrap TAG in York and formally pass on to Exeter for this year's conference! Announcing the Don Henson Prize winner and some runner ups, as the panel had such a tough time deciding. Congratulations to Liz, Max and Lizzie!!

Best part of getting back to work emails - seeing all the Christmas and New Year messages from former students with updates on what they are doing. It really is joyful.

Thank you to everyone for coming! I have loved this conference ever since my first TAG in 2003. I really hope there were people at York having the same brilliant experience I had in Lampeter. It feels so good to have given my part to keep the theory flames going. Now to sleep till January...

Absolutely delighted to give this year's TAG prize to the Trowelblazers. Great way to kick off TAG!

New article published today! Funerary Practices Among Central European First Farmers in the Light of New Radiocarbon Dates: The Case of Southern Moravia/Western Slovakia Open access: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Chronology matters when comparing different funerary rites.

Some lovely coverage of the new project in the independent :-) www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Here’s the press release for our new project on Neolithic wastescapes in English from the university of York. The project is funded jointly by the UK and Germany, allowing us to effectively collaborate Internationally. Can’t wait to get started with Henny and the team :-)

So very excited to announce our new project - From Reuse to Resource - joint with the Freie Universitaet Berlin, funded by DFG-AHRC. Starting early 2026, we're going to be analyzing the wastescapes of Neolithic settlements to rethink ontologies of rubbish nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/11/25/u...

New open access publication: Moving to Stay in (a Woman’s) Place: Was Patrilocality the Dominant Mode of Postmarital Residence across Later European Prehistory? Current Anthropology. Thanks to Wenner Gren for funding the workshop it emerged from! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A great account of the brilliant Kiel team's work at the LBK site of Vrable here. Andrew does such a good job of teasing out the complexity of that century of the LBK.

Only a month to go - alternating with excitement at everyone coming to York and sheer terror of how much there is to do in the next month 😱🥳😵‍💫😆

What a fantastic day yesterday was! Such a rich set of data and perspectives on kinship. I learnt so much. Huge thanks to everyone who made it happen. Also good showing from @uoyarchaeology.bsky.social with my paper, and Sophie Charleton speaking later on about the curious site of Banbury lane.

Want to help more people come to TAG - help us by building a bursary fund.

Today is the deadline for bursary applications! Click the link to apply: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

You are an early-career scientist interested in social and environmental processes in the past? For our second phase, we are offering 5 positions for postdocs and 9 positions for doctoral students. Apply now! All the details: www.uni-kiel.de/en/cluster-r... #earlycareerscientists #jobs

Are you a student at a UK university and looking for support to come to TAG York? Did you know the Royal Archaeological Institute Cheney Bursary is available to support you? You can find more details here: www.royalarchinst.org/grants/bursa... @royalarchinst.bsky.social

Oh this is just fantastic news! Congratulations Brenna! Excited to hear more about the research and sounds like there will be two very lucky people joining the project as a PhD and Postdoc.

Donations very welcome to support bursaries at TAG YORK 2025. We want to increase the accessibility of TAG, and these donations will help us do that. You can read more about the bursaries here: tag2025.hosted.york.ac.uk/en/bursaries/

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✅

Like voting, register early and often...

Super proud of my PhD student Iseabail Wilks for her first paper (based on her MSc dissertation for the Masters in Funerary Archaeology here at York!). She applies archaethanatology to LBK Burials to under more about the death work that went into inhumations. journals.openedition.org/bmsap/16077?...

We have a small number of bursaries for this year's TAG - if you are speaking and fall into the unwaged category (students and those currently not in employment) please apply! Deadline 15th Oct.

Can share this again now that the paper has been published: www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The replica pots are out for the first time in a while! It’s time for prehistoric cheese.

So grateful to NEIF for funding this research! The new dates suggest cemeteries started about the same time, rather than gradually spreading from east to west. They reveal funerary practices on the scale of human lifetimes, and raise new questions about how burial rites related to LBK social change

New paper! Were cemeteries of the LBK long-lived, starting in the east and spreading westwards slowly? Our new 14C dates suggest they started contemporaneously across the LBK and were fairly short-lived (though this depends on what you mean by "short"...) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The last piece associated with the brilliant team effort to rethink aDNA results and social relations in Neolithic Ireland is in this month’s Current Archaeology magazine with an absolutely gorgeous cover image of Newgrange (credit: Ken Williams) archaeology.co.uk

Join the Archaeology and Worldbuilding game at TAG 2025 in York. Not your usual type of session for TAG! (though we have a few more things like this planned). If you are interested and can commit to the session sign up below.

⚠️DEADLINE EXTENSION⚠️ Did you miss the deadline for submitting your abstract to TAG? Not a worry! Due to popular demand we've extended our submission deadline another two weeks! The final deadline is now the 18th of August. Check the website for more info: tag2025.hosted.york.ac.uk/en/call-for-...

This is stunning!

Was great to chat to Laura when she was researching this piece and it's turned out great. #NewScientist

This session is going to be really important and the session organisers a wonderful human beings - if you are thinking about submitting a paper go for it!

Listening to Elbow rehearse loudly, while the delegates of an English conference causally chat Derrida in the corridor was not on my bingo card for today, nor is it particularly conducive to getting any writing done….

The passage tomb of Newgrange, Ireland, before, during, and after excavation #TombTuesday Recent genomic analysis of a skull fragment here revealed a rare case of incest, but is this enough evidence to support theories of a #Neolithic Irish 'king'? Find out 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Very cool indeed! Well done Mel and Adam! www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/w...

The Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology at Freie Universität Berlin figures prominently in a new poster exhibition that will be launched today: www.fu-berlin.de/presse/infor...

Thank you to the students moving out who dumped this right outside our garden yesterday. It already stinks and is covered in flies. It is so inconsiderate of you.

Small finds from today’s gardening. Lots of shells which surprised me. Any reason why a 1880s terrace miles from the sea would have lots of buried shells?

Loving seeing the artwork people are producing to advertise their TAG York 2025 sessions!

Nottingham have got themselves a real star 💫 we’re sorry to say bye to Clare in York but know there are lots of exciting things to come.

This is an excellent read! Highly recommended.

Who was NG10 and what was the world they lived in? The sister paper to our CAJ paper is now out in Antiquity and the cover image no less! Working on these papers with this group, has been one of the richest academic experiences I have had in my career. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...