Little out of season, but the Solstice does mark the nights getting longer, I suppose. I've heard great things about Edward Parnell's books, especially in how he writes and deals with the prospect of grief. Some good ghost stories and landscape phenomenology are great mediums for it 🪨

Just in! Next reading is from @englishpilgrim. Very excited to go on a few pilgrimages and revive the tradition in defiance of Henry. #englishheritage #churches #henryviii #pilgrimage #folklore

www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2... The arrests of the Medici network in the late 90s was instrumental in understanding how the illicit antiquities market operates and continues to provide interesting insights.

Excellent work by MOLA! www.bbc.com/news/article...

Statue of the god Anubis in classical garb, holding a caduceus, more commonly seen as the symbol of Hermes (and in Egypt, Herm-Anubis, the syncretic god). Made from Pario Marble, c. 1st - 2nd century AD, Villa Pamphili, Anzio. Vatican Museums, Inv. 22840.

After 2 weeks of mentally taxing work, I was in need of something that re-aligned my embodied/kinesthetic knowledge. Having been studying Halaf and Ubaid cermanics, it struck me that I've never experimented with pottery sculpting and that learning it would be useful. I certainly have a new hobby.

Honestly, one of the best things I can recommend for graduate students is to start reading philosophy, especially Logic and philosophy of science, to understand how arguments are constructed. It's strange to me how little archaeology engages with theory in the wider social sciences.

Can any of my followers in academia give me some advice on the doctoral application process in Germany? Coming from the UK, the system seems somewhat different.

One of the things that I think is often missed in the polemics of science deniers/pseudoarchaeologists is that science -by its nature, is designed to be self corrective, not dogmatic. As a rational and systematic accumulation of knowledge, "truth" is something we continually progress towards.

Very sad news.

I'm working on my slides for my first ever academic lecture on Tuesday! It will be at the Ancient Near Eastern Seminar in Foster Court on the main UCL campus. It will be speaking on the archaeology of early Greek curse tablets (defixios), with a focus on wider Near Eastern and Egyptian contexts.

Just came across someone online selling a "new translation of the entire hermetica," which is actually just a rewording of the GRS Mead theosophical editions from the early 1900s combined with "Thoth the Atlantean", all reworded in modern Gen Z/Millennial slang. This person has 2 million followers

Exploring the London Mithraem this morning. Its reconstruction of a Mithraic Mystery initiation was done well. Thoroughly impressed. The history of its excavation, disassemblement, and reassembly raises intriguing questions about the nature of significance, value, and integrity. Lots to think on.

In the company of the Grandmother of Wicca this afternoon, while I work in the library on a wonderfully grey and melancholy day. There is something poetically ironic about finding Murray's bust in the section on Celtic paganism and sculpture.

Trying to condense the question of why it took 4000 years for cities to develop in the Near East after the introduction of farming into under 1000 words is proving to be both nightmarish and exhilarating. I'm down a rabbit hole of Hobbesian state dynamics and Italian Marxist post-workerism.

Why do we keep doing this dance? Science is a fundamentally human practice, which means it’s inescapably political.

Maturing is going into writing a paper thinking the Uruk or Early Dynastic periods are cool, but slowly realising the Halaf is where your actual interest is. Decentralised, egalitarian village economies that have enormous trade interconnections all before any cities have an eldritch allure to them.