Test audience for these wonderful colouring sheets our new PhD student Tayla has prepared for our event on Sunday 14th at UoA. Tayla is joining PALaEoScot to work on fragmentary bones from late glacial-early Holocene sites in Scotland using molecular approaches - she’s quite the artist too!

Ever wondered what life was like at the end of the Ice Age? What did people eat? How did they make tools? Come and meet the PALaEoScot team at Explorathon on Sept 14th 11am-4pm at UoA’s King’s College in Old Aberdeen and meet our living prehistorians at their camp! Link below ⬇️

PalaeoScot is down in Pembroke for the week - it’s a PalaeoScot-PalaeoWales collab! We’ve done some isotope work at Wogan Cavern over the last few years and it’s great to finally see the site & to check out a potential new cave with some of the Wogan team too 👀 🦣 🦌 @ukri.org

(Very) Late to the party but enjoying it immensely - wonderful words @lemoustier.bsky.social would recommend KINDRED to anyone interested in learning more about Neanderthals, visiting the other-worlds of the past, or learning more about the process of field and research archaeology

A memorable, creative and restorative week at Moniack Mhor for a writing retreat. Met some wonderful people, was fed like a Queen and broke out of the academic writing bubble just a little bit - like a spa for the brain!

So proud of you @lucyjkoster.bsky.social !!

This week #PALaEoScot has been part of a team testing this wee rock shelter, hopeful for signs of Late Glacial/early Holocene archaeology (or palaeontology!). So far just some cracking lithology (literally) and a very friendly dog - but watch this space! 🦴 🦌 🦣 🪨 @ukri.org @willmills.bsky.social

Spotting her first MALDI plate! Thanks to @archaeoprotein.bsky.social for offering this wonderful training opportunity to @sarahbarakat.bsky.social and helping us further develop our ZooMS capacity in Aberdeen @uoa-archaeology.bsky.social - and for running our first PALaEoScot samples with us!

Lovely to see some experimental archaeology for our PalaeoScot project!

This week we also had a full-day PALaEoScot team meeting and welcomed our new PhD student, Tayla! It was wonderful to hear updates on the incredible lithics, palaeontological and palaeoenvironmental work the team is doing, and to discuss what’s next & to have bit of social time together too! 🦣

This week I’ve scoured letters at NMS for glimpses of Pleistocene animals; celebrated Medieval life at an exhibition opening; & been immersed in prehistoric landscapes at the Europa in Reading. Archaeology is so rich and varied. Thank you to everyone who shared their knowledge & passion this week!🏺🦣

And now to the main event - the Europa lecture from Martin Bell - route-ways and paths as ‘entanglement made manifest’ for human and non-human entities. Movement is the ‘connective tissue between sites’ - inspirational! @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Enjoy #openaccess articles on #prehistory and #prehistoric #archaeology from Cambridge, marking The Prehistoric Society Europa Conference 2025 in Reading this weekend: 🔎 cup.org/4dQdVmE

Great coverage of the Edinburgh’s First Burghers exhibition in the Scotsman - it has been brilliant to see this HES-funded work go from the lab to exhibition! @orshicz.bsky.social @boothicus.bsky.social www.scotsman.com/heritage-and...

For the penultimate talk at the Europa meeting we have Richard Bunning on trackways and water transport in the Somerset Levels - pondering how humans navigated and understood the very different worlds of marsh land, wetland, high ground and sea @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Staying on the theme of connections to other worlds at Europa and to Bronze Age landscapes in Wales and the deliberate deposition of weapons and other metalwork with (a virtual) Chris Griffiths @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Now a ‘slice of Danish’ (his words), Niels Nøtkjær Johannsen on the fascinating landscapes and graves of Neolithic Jutland. More animals too - cattle burials, along with perhaps near-invisible carts that could have traversed local trackways in death as in life @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Jumping ahead to the Neolithic and northwards to Cumbria with Sally Taylor at the Europa meeting. Spatial relationships between monuments and enclosures in the uplands demonstrate shadowing but also respect of the cairns in time and space by settlements @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

It’s apparently National Trails Day! Not sure if it’s coincidence or intent, but what a fitting day to be celebrating landscape connectivity and Martin Bell’s contributions to our understanding of past paths taken at the Europa conference @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

While everyone else was in the session… I had a photoshoot with the @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social banner! 🤪

Now landscape connectivity and lithics at @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social’s Europa meeting with Nick Barton - wonderful insights into the Mesolithic, complete with refits, at Welsh lake sites

Closer to home again at the Thatcham Reedbeds with Catherine Barnett. Lovely to see multiple lines of env arch evidence integrated to paint such a vivid picture of these rich marsh environments that were centres of human and animal interaction in the mesolithic @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

The conference has moved to exotic Verona and the Middle Bronze Age Landscapes of Italy with Elisa Dalla Longa - the theme of rivers as connectors across landscapes is emerging as a common theme across many of the talks today - food for thought! 🐟 @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Now for some landscape-level network analysis with Newcastle’s Tom Lawrence - making complex statistics for archaeologists is a skill! Some sneaky isotopes included too via the Coneybury as part of a connected landscape bringing together animals & people @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

We're having a great day at the @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social Europa Conference, and we wanted to let you know about our special offer for the occasion! Enjoy 25% off our selection of volumes on Prehistory with code EUROPA25 at checkout. Start browsing ➡ bit.ly/4dKntQ8 #Europa2025Reading

Chantal Conneller up now talking about Mesolithic landscapes of Britain at the Europa meeting - with a lovely nod to Scotland, Lacaille and the work of Mesolithic Deeside too! @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Kicking things off in our first session on hunter-gatherer landscape connectivity is @mattpope.bsky.social ‘Landscapes of connection and separation in the Palaeolithic records of the Doggerland and La Mancheland regions’ Reconstructing human activity in submerged regions is just 🤯😍

The @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social Europa Conference has begun! It’s lovely to see so many folks at the University of Reading to honour Prof Martin Bell and I’m so pumped for the lineup of talks 🤩

Next up at Europa - plants in landscapes with Molly Masterson, not just their economic potential but as conduits of meaning and memory. Fascinating to think of wooden structures like those at Flag Fen being sensory mirrors for the felled forest itself @prehistoricsociety.bsky.social

Great to be at the Europa conference today, a celebration of landscape connectivity in prehistory and the career and work of the wonderful Martin Bell. First up, a fascinating and rapid-fire tour of 900,000 years of island (and not island) Britain with Matt Pope

Wonderful to be here at the opening of the Edinburgh’s first burgher’s exhibition. Part of the Edinburgh 900 celebrations, the exhibition runs until November at St Giles’ Cathedral and features DNA, facial reconstructions and our isotopic insights! @orshicz.bsky.social - this time with pictures!

Wonderful to be here at the opening of the Edinburgh’s first burgher’s exhibition. Part of the Edinburgh 900 celebrations, the exhibition runs until November at St Giles’ Cathedral and features DNA, facial reconstructions and our isotopic insights! @orshicz.bsky.social

Come join us for this funded PhD opportunity! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

@whatkatiedigs.bsky.social has a funded PhD opportunity @uniofaberdeen.bsky.social Using #ZooMS and #sedaDNA #ancientDNA, #radiocarbon dating and #geoarchaeology to find Scotland's lost Ice Age animals 🦣❄️ #PhDposition #archaeology #paleontology #biomolecular

Come join us! PALaEoScot is now offering a fully-funded PhD to work on ZooMS and sedaDNA studies at Scottish Late Glacial and Early Holocene sites. Closing 13/4/25. www.findaphd.com/phds/project... 🦌 🐴 🦣 🦬 🦊 🐺 (please note, full funding only available for U.K. domiciled candidates only).

Who says Buchan flint is not knappable?! Lovely work from our in-house stone-whisperer Dr Will Mills #flintfriday #experimentalarchaeology #mesolithic #palaeolithic #iceage

Some lovely coverage of our recent archaeometabolics research www.scotsman.com/heritage-and...

Wild puppy

Check out our new open access paper on analysing metabolites of vitamin D in modern and archaeological human hair. A pilot study for sure, but one that demonstrates a world of possibilities in assessing vitamin D health past and present www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A combination of #microCT and #ZooMS suggests... ... trapping and production of fur clothing at 12,900 BP La Prele site (Wyoming).

The third project on 🐻 aims to recover genome-wide data from brown bear remains spanning hundreds of thousands of years to disentangle how past climate change, human activities, and hybridization with polar and cave bears, have shaped the brown bear’s range dynamics and present-day gene pool.

Read about our fishy bears from the Assynt bone caves that roamed north-west Scotland 40,000 years ago - we aren’t sure if they are polar bears yet, but luckily the press are 😅 www.scotsman.com/heritage-and...