your periodic reminder that “archaeology isn’t political” is a political statement

Happy Monday! Here’s an ancient amber bear carved about 10,000 years ago! This magical find washed up on a beach at Fanø in Denmark from a submerged Mesolithic settlement under the North Sea. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. 📷 by me #Archaeology

🚨DEADLINE ON FRIDAY!🚨 Do you do art-related archaeological research? Are you itching to discuss how we identify individual artists in the past, or the agency art had in societies? Then make sure to get your abstracts in for @tag2025york.bsky.social! You can send them to me at: [email protected] 🏺

Just a few weeks left to get your submissions in for our session "Visualising Artistic Action in the Past" at @tag2025york.bsky.social! If you do research related to artists, art, craft, and agency in the past - from theoretical entanglements to cutting-edge methods - we want to hear from you! 🎨🏺

🏺🗃️ Not sure why this is getting more attention today, but happy to see it shared again! And thrilled that Yusra will of course be part of our #ExcavatingGarrod project, re-examining archives for new insights on Garrod's work on #Neanderthals, and her collaborations & wider networks with women.

Inspired by funky Minoan octopus motifs (after an amazing visit to the Heraklion museum on Crete), I just had to draw this guy! 🐙🏺

How can we visualise the agency of art and artists in past societies? Mine and @dparrott.bsky.social's session at @tag2025york.bsky.social intends to bring together exciting new research to explore this question! Interested? Why not submit an abstract!✋ 🎨🖌️🏺

I'm always impressed with the reconstructions made by the Kennis brothers, they have such character. www.belganewsagency.eu/prehistoric-...

Oh my gosh, I love Samson 😍

Why did Palaeolithic artists decide to produce art on the same walls that someone else had decorated? Do rock art palimpsests reflect dialogues that occurred across tens-of-thousands of years? My new OA paper develops a conceptual framework to explore these dimensions! 👇🏺 doi.org/10.1007/s108...

Storytelling in caves…

Around 43,000 years ago, a Neanderthal gently pressed an ochre covered finger onto a stone - leaving behind the ridges and impression of their unique fingerprint 🫆 This is exactly the kind of archaeology I love! An intimate insight into a moment from the deep past. Paper: doi.org/10.1007/s125...

It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.

My incredible friend @rhigarthjones.bsky.social wrote a book! If you want a lil sneak peak into what it will include, check out the thread below 🏺👇

Today, I'm highlighting some of the historical people that feature in my book – that might give more a flavour than "not just Rome!" Let's kick off with Constantine the Great, founder of New Rome (Nea Rhome in Greek, Nova Roma in Latin). More commonly known as Constantinople, or Constantine's city.

Why make art in the dark? New research transports us back to the shadowy firelight of ancient caves, imagining the minds and feelings of the artists aeon.co/essays/why-d...

Finally out 🥳: I've written and recorded a podcast episode with the amazing Karen Kramer for Sapiens Magazine on the origins and evolution of division of labour in hunter-gatherer societies, and its implications for undestanding (or misunderstanding) gender roles: open.spotify.com/episode/2ZGA...

Anyone that knows me knows Dorothy Garrod is my archaeological hero - not only took all-female archaeology teams on her excavations (in the 1930’s!) but very often trained local women too!

Pleased to see our work published: The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies. Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter. doi.org/10.1017/S095...

A turtle sculpture from 35 Kya A distinct ritual compound and centered around an engraved object in the deepest part of Manot Cave, a pivotal EUP site in southwest Asia. Early human collective practices and symbolism in the Early Upper Paleolithic of Southwest Asia🏺🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

New, colourful perforated discs, their waste, and use at amazing Pincevent: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - were they spinning top parts, @roope.bsky.social? 🤩🌀

Very proud of the incredible @rhigarthjones.bsky.social on her new book! She’s put so much time, thought and dedication into this - from the proposal to the final version - and it’s a really fresh take on why we’re so obsessed with the Roman Empire! 🏺 (p.s. it’s also available to pre-order now!)

I had the pleasure of being invited on one of my favourite podcasts, @manymindspod.bsky.social, a week ago. We talked about string theory. No, not the physics—but knots and string figures. Humans have a long history with string, but it’s a thoroughly understudied topic. 🎧🎙️🪢: manyminds.libsyn.com

I wrote a brief article on the challenge that AI presents to archaeological visualisation. Check it out here: theconversation.com/how-ai-image... Though I have done a lot of scicomm, it was the first time I'd written for The Conversation. 🏺 +

Meaning is in the making, just as it was tens-of-thousands of years ago 🎨🖌️

🏺 Re: prehistory & intersections with right-wing ideas, it may be of interest that the new exhibition I was Science Consultant for, at the #Neanderthal Museum, has been called "a politically motivated woke whirlpool" because we dared, for the 1st time, to centre women & discuss gender stereotypes.

Making this oval brooch cake is maybe my greatest achievement.

Want to hear more about Ice Age children’s drawings? Check out this lovely little interview I did yesterday for NPR + WBUR’s show Here and Now! Always enjoy discussing how this kind of research can breathe life into our understanding of creativity in the deep past 😊 www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2...

A good friend (@nateswitzer.bsky.social) recently pointed out to me that the gripping beasts adorning early 9 c. oval brooches are essentially just the Grateful Dead bears and now it’s all I can see 📸 me (brooch is from the Danish Island of Fyn)

It’s been a super fun and intellectually-stimulating workshop these past 3 days, celebrating eSYMb and the work of Kristian Tylén - and hearing all of the amazing interdisciplinary work being done on symbolic behaviour! And with the most wonderful colleagues who really embraced Kristian’s spirit

3rd day of "Celebrating eSYMb: The Evolution of Symbolic Behaviour - A Workshop in Memory of Kristian Tylén" workshop. Murillo Pagnotta on the makapangsat cobble: this face-like pebble is a controversial archeological finding, but can we test the idea that it's attention grabbing because of 1/

Riccardo perfectly capturing how I somehow always do “thriller” hands during my talks…! 🧟‍♀️

2nd day of "Celebrating eSYMb: The Evolution of Symbolic Behaviour - A Workshop in Memory of Kristian Tylén" workshop masterfully arranged by @izzywisher.bsky.social. Larissa Mendoza Straffon presents Honing the tools of the mind (paper here: osf.io/b8fz2) 1/

At the "Celebrating eSYMb: The Evolution of Symbolic Behaviour - A Workshop in Memory of Kristian Tylén" workshop (masterfully arranged by @izzywisher.bsky.social). Thread of thoughts: 1/

Sne! ❄️

Super cool research by @mathildevm.bsky.social on the importance of children’s toys and play for cultural adaptation! Children yet again showing us adults that we need to be paying attention to what they’re up to…

“The discussion was always about how adults were teaching children,” says Izzy Wisher, an archaeologist at Aarhus University who led the new study. “This panel shows children were also doing their own thing.”

so basically the paleolithic version of "look kids I have a Zoom meeting so can you *please* keep yourselves entertained for the next 30 minutes..." interesting article on identifying children's cave art 🏺🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

Super cool to see this! @spoke32.bsky.social coverage of our Ice Age children’s drawing paper made it to @science.org list of their favourite articles of 2024! I loved working on and writing this paper, and it’s wonderful to see people enjoying it 😊 www.science.org/content/arti...

Enigmatic signs, mysterious message, or just a bunch of kids scrawling all over the walls? 🤔 Got to keep the offspring busy, even 14k years ago. 🤷🏻‍♂️ @spoke32.bsky.social on some really cool insights into lives & #CaveArt 🏺 of hunter-gatherers in #Paleolithic #Spain: www.science.org/content/arti...

Back in Durham for a friend’s wedding, and enjoying showing @dparrott.bsky.social all of my favourite sights! I miss this beautiful, historic city

Fab coverage by @spoke32.bsky.social for @science.org of our recent paper on Magdalenian children's drawings at Las Monedas. Led by the awesome @izzywisher.bsky.social we use x-cultural dev psych to inform how early-age drawing reflects embodied cognition across ontogeny!

A lovely summary of our recent paper by @spoke32.bsky.social! Just Ice Age kids doing their thing and scribbling on cave walls - of course!

So, this is VERY cool! Dr Izzy is an expert on Palaeolithic cave art, and has just co-published a paper showing children made art back in the Stone Age!! Read the research, and then check out the podcast we did together about Cave Art, it's so interesting (and fun) podcasts.apple.com/cr/podcast/p...

Kids were active contributors to Upper Paleolithic art, as evidenced by the playful, imaginative marks on Cantabria’s Las Monedas cave’s Panel of the Masks. @izzywisher.bsky.social et al identified marks characteristic of kid's art. Cool! #PrehistoricArt #anthropology #art #children #psychology

I was in two minds about sharing this paper today. Kristian Tylén (co-author and my PI, close colleague +mentor) passed away two weeks ago. Kristian had endless enthusiasm for the research we did together in eSYMb. All the lovely responses mean a great deal, and are in Kristian’s enthusiastic spirit

New paper out! Children actively made hand-stencils and flutings in the Upper Palaeolithic, but can we identify children's cave art without anatomical measurements? We present a new framework using universal features of young children's drawings 🏺 www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3...

Everything I read by @izzywisher.bsky.social is just so incredibly interesting. This one is about how recent discoveries at the Rising Star cave system in South Africa can help us think about art, meaning, so-called human exceptionalism, and the fundamental question, "What makes us human?"

A Rising Star: Does Homo naledi Challenge our Ideas of Human Exceptionalism? By @izzywisher.bsky.social #Anthropology #Paleoanthropology #HumanEvolution #Cognition #Naledi iconema.com.mx?lang=en

A new Palaeolithic female figurine from Piatra Neamț, Romania sciencedirect.com/science/articl…