Look I know there's a lot of *waves hand* going on right now, but it's come to my attention that William "Worst Poet Ever" McGonagall composed in 1899 an elegy to "The Ancient Town of Leith" in his own, inimitable style. So if you care to gather round, I shall now retell it for the whole class 🧵🗣️🪑

Great new study on early medieval foodways, specifically a lack of fish in cooking pots! Glad it's not just our #ArchaeoFINS pots that lack 🐟! Implication with the human isotopes is that the Vikings adapted to local cuisine & left their fishy ways behind! doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.

!!! a new manuscript was recently discovered written in the Syrian Monothelite community in the early 700s that describes the end of the Roman / Sassanian war *and the rise of Islam in the Levant!* www.medievalists.net/2026/02/prev...

It is so important to keep hammering in this point. People always ask me why I would have to go visit archives - why not just look at a scan? Because they haven’t been scanned! And they are never going to be! There are millions & millions of pieces of paper in every archive.

RIP unnamed medieval people buried at Lundin Links, you would have loved quick oats

Some key topics covered in @fortrenn.bsky.social's 1949 Gaelic phrasebook ✅️ dirty forrin sandwiches ✅️ the unhelpfulness of moccasins ✅️ gruel/butter etiquette ✅️ gurnet v. dogfish

Hey, Bluesky history nerds! Who are your favorite pre-modern historians on here?

Pictish cross from a broch alert! From Crosskirk Broch, Caithness

Texts about/from the Iron Age/Early Medieval North: "They feasted on venison and cattle, or hunted the swift boar" Repeated studies of actual last meals/recent diet: porridge porridge porridge

Keeping quite comfortably at the edge of both the archaeologists and classicists, as befits a medieval historian!

Fun Winter Olympic fact – all the stone for Olympic curling stones come from the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig.

Update on our archaeological excavations on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and the first direct evidence linking the island to the Bronze Age tin trade. www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

I promise not to seal post all day but I DO promise to use "no scrolling, just rolling" or a variation for the foreseeable future. 🦭 #SeaSky

If you haven’t seen it, there’s a cunning plan underway to refight the Battle of Hastings at a scale of 1 man = 1 miniature. This is the Peter’s Paperboys ‘Hastings 960’ project, using units of around 200-300 18mm minis to put 16,000 figures onto the gaming table in October 2026. #spreadthelard

Some homes hold their ghosts with quiet forbearance. They do not boast of their phantoms nor advertise for psychic researchers to poke and test them. They accommodate both living and dead residents, afford privacy to both sides. Places of gentle spectral tolerance. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

Calling all archaeology students 🎓 The Scottish Student Archaeology Society Conference takes place from the 21st - 22nd of February. Organised by University of Aberdeen Archaeology Society, the conference is a fantastic opportunity to hear new research & connect with peers 👉 tinyurl.com/8bd4eu7w

Had a great time today talking about my (incredibly wildly messy) working research map in QGIS at our department Digital Humanities showcase. 2,000+ sites, 26 layers, and a lot of time spent data cleaning, but a personal resource I return to again and again!

An excavation at Hilton of Cadboll by Kirkdale Archaeology began #OTD in 2001. It would culminate in the discovery of the lower section, pictured, of the famed Pictish cross-slab. The upper section - it may have detached in a storm - resides in Edinburgh.📸Ewen Weatherspoon #medievalsky

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out. As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class. Here's what happened:

Someone should do a piece about golf course prehistory!

If you like books about linguistics and languages (perhaps you'd like to write your own?), here's a free talk for you! On the 27/1, I'll be putting questions to four fabulous authors over Zoom, getting their experience of writing linguistically for the public. Link: us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Join us on Thursday, January 22, 2026 at noon in the John Carter Brown Library Conference Room for a viewing of JCB copies of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense featuring Dr. Joseph Adelman. Registration is required. Please register at forms.gle/iWKYHdfb5dQm....

Roman sites in Scotland dating to the first century - the initial Roman invasion of Scotland

Another visit from yesterday - the grave of Horace Kephart, author of Our Southern Highlanders and instrumental part of the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, resting on a hill surrounded by the mountains he lived in and protected.

Took a hike on the "Road to Nowhere" in the Smokies today, an unfinished road which was supposed to supply access to areas cut off by the flooding of Fontana Lake, which submerged several smaller Appalachian towns. It was never finished, leaving the promise unfulfilled. (1/3)

A cold stream in the Smokies slowly melting and rushing down into Deep Creek.

Ripples in sand, Wester Ross.

Seeing this in the flesh blew my mind. Please go down the rabbit hole if you don’t know about this beautiful 7th c. depiction of Mary holding baby Jesus, on St Cuthbert’s reliquary, held in beautiful Durham Cathedral. Mary’s fingers can be seen around Jesus’ left shoulder and his feet dangle. Ctd..

If anything can solve writer's block, it has to be an early morning sky in the mountains.

WOW! This late Roman blue glass cup made an epic 12,000 km journey! Made in the eastern Mediterranean, it was excavated from the Cheonmachong Tomb, a royal tomb of the ancient Silla Kingdom in Korea! 🤯 Early AD 500s. Gyeongju National Museum, South Korea. 📷 by me #FindsFriday #Archaeology

Are you an author of a new #history book published in 2025? Consider applying for our #BookPrize! The deadline for the receipt of the nominated monographs is 28 February 2026. ecclesiasticalhistorysociety.com/2026-book-pr...

Good to wake up to a news headline that has the words #IronAge #WarTrumpet and #Boudicca in it www.theguardian.com/science/2026... PreConstruct Archaeology reveals a complete carnyx plus other martial objects from #Norfolk Wow 😲 We need a lie down @theguardian.com @theduncanmackay.bsky.social

i’d get some good energy flowing, subfield. and i grew up when chain letters were a thing. can we do the obverse? what if we all email one person today to tell them we like their work or otherwise appreciate them (non-creepily)?

JOINT ONLINE EVENT: Care-full: An Examination of Care in Archaeology and Heritage On 22 January, Prof Hannah Cobb FSA FSAScot discusses how care can be an act of radical and transformative resistance in archaeology at our free event with @antiquaries.bsky.social: www.sal.org.uk/event/care-f...

Not assessed. Online. Open to everyone. If you can't read all the books no problem (I'll provide extracts) If you can't come every week, no problem (I record my talk) If you can't do extra work, no proble Everyone interacts at the level they have time for.

Let’s make 2026 the year of the bog. The world’s most unique and interesting plants, clean water, cooler climate. Bogs deserve our thanks, care, and deep respect. Please join me and love a bog today.

My favorite date to provoke a good argument is always 1918!

🌟New Year exciting new OA paper🌟 doi.org/10.1080/0076... from myself @hcaatedinburgh.bsky.social, @shakenbeck.bsky.social & TC O'Connell @cam-archaeology.bsky.social "Large-Scale Isotopic Data Reveal Gendered Migration into Early Medieval England c ad 400–1100" using #isotopes & #aDNA🧵⬇️ 1/

Does anyone else take great pleasure in printing out vintage line-hachure drawings of prehistoric monuments? Sometimes I mount them on card, sometimes I create handouts for field trips from them. I just love the detail and tangibility of these beautiful, evocative, technical works. 🏺

🧬 ⚛️ Want to learn how biomolecular analyses such as #isotopes, ancient #DNA, & proteomics are changing the fields of #medieval history & #archaeology? Then this is the paper for you! We hope it'll be particularly useful for teaching arts & humanities students - so please share & use widely! ❤️ 🔁

I hope everyone is spending this holiday season comfortable and happy, with the people you most want to be with. Beginning in on some newly acquired Christmas reading in a warm sweater, myself.

hey i made a starter pack of cutting edge humanists (broadly defined) doing cool stuff inside and outside academia. check out these folks and repost to signal boost! let's see if we can't "network" better than conferences!

My main point when bringing up historical accuracy in movies isn't that I, an archaeologist, am demanding 100% accuracy at all times always, it's because I want to see something good and not the same cheap shit we see over and over again when things are set in Rome, Greece, etc.

Very excited to see this out in the wild 👀🏺 It's a real collaborative monograph which details the excavation of the Bowl Hole & provides a wider overview of the excavations at the castle. The first chapter, co-authored with Graeme Young & Barbara Yorke, is freely available to read 👉

My absolute favorite of the OE poems as well, and this is a lovely set of thoughts on it. Was a joy to recently revisit it for the baþian brimfuglas - bathing sea-birds - part of the coastal world imagined by the poet (from experience?)

☠️ I'm in a 1,500-year-old graveyard at Govan Old to tell you about ⤵️ A WHOLE LOT OF HISTORY! It's written by me, Dr Tom Horne, and brought to you on Substack by History Hit. Out 2x a week, on Mondays and Fridays, it showcases the most interesting #history and #archaeology from around the globe.