Excitedly to log on and listen this morning! Always a really excellent conference, and it being online makes it easy to access...

I think that standing stones have such an effect on me because it's one of those things that I can look at and think yeah, a bunch of medieval people looked at this, it stood in their world, they passed by it and touched it, it was part of their experience of the day. And now I'm looking at it.

Here’s Hamish Henderson’s “Freedom Come-All-Ye”, sung by Karine Polwart in the Italian Chapel, Orkney. The chapel was built & decorated by Italian POWs during WW2 using scraps & reclaimed materials, & is still in use today www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Phu...

Are you interested in the history of rivers? Do you wonder how historians and environmental scientists can work together? Join the EDHS seminar to hear from the ARTEMIS team about their amazing project exploring the histories and ecologies of the Scheldt. #envhist #histsci #skystorians #dh

I just met my own book. We're getting on very well.

Good article! Many people don’t realize the coal mining begets water pollution, not just air pollution from burning the coal. www.alleghenyfront.org/monongahela-...

15,000+ searchable charters from the early Middle Ages...

I have joked that if I was able to teach my own specialist class on my research focus I might well call it Lochs & Brochs.

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

📣 The Earlier Middle Ages seminar @ihr.bsky.social is now on Bluesky! Here's our autumn term schedule. First up is @rorynaismith.bsky.social on 8 October, giving the annual David Wilson Lecture (with @uclarchaeology.bsky.social). All welcome! Please sign up here: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

The Govan Stones is one of the most important historical sites in Scotland. It's one of the few surviving places that has material evidence for this lost kingdom and culture of that most elusive early medieval people, the North Britons and I'd love to see it preserved for the future

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bEv... For decades we've worked to enhance the Sheffield Zooarch Lab & to see years of dedication destroyed by corporate executives who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing is heart breaking @watchingbrief.bsky.social #savesheffieldarchaeology

I would be endlessly grateful if you were to support this crucial fundraising effort for Govan Old's 1,500-year-old graveyard and the @govanstones.bsky.social museum! 💲❤️ tghts.enthuse.com/cf/graveyard...

Exciting book launch event!! Dr Victoria Whitworth: The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma is finally out, and you can celebrate it (and snag a copy) at the Tarbat Discovery Centre on 11 October. Tickets at www.tickettailor.com/events/tarba... (1/2)

Welp here we are again, fresh out of Archaeologists for Skype a Scientist matches. This fall, we have matched 248 groups with Archaeologists for online Q&As. I have 38 more groups who need a match, but I'm out of Archaeologists! Archaeologists! Please volunteer www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html

It's crazy but I think I worry about this more than students who actually use it to cheat - one innocent, etc. etc. But mostly I really don't like that it's put us into an adversarial relationship, an arms race of cheating and catching that helps nobody and accomplished zero learning

A wonderful short documentary on the National Park Service, the recent challenges it's faced, and the local protests at the NPS site I functionally grew up in, Cumberland Gap. vimeo.com/1113427549?s...

🔴 Could this be the face of an ordinary Pict? Aberdeen University student makes 'special' Fife discovery www.scotsman.com/heritage-and...

Save 40% on the paperback edition of The Medieval Pig which examines the role of the pig in medieval society in material and textual sources. Ends 29 Sept 2025. 🐷 Buy the book > buff.ly/cJs8ee6 #medievalsky @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social

Just to add that the conference is fully online, not (per the link below) in Brechin. We look forward to seeing you there!

Have you got your ticket yet? The Pictish Arts Society's 2025 online conference is on 4 and 5 October, focusing on sculpture and metalwork in Pictland. 8 expert papers including finds from Burghead and Rhynie, Pictish bull carvings, Pictish weapons, the 'tower' on Sueno's Stone and more. Link below.

Marine shells from common winkle & European flat oyster (native to Ireland coastal waters) from a Later Medieval Irish archaeology site, I worked on recently. We can tell a lot about the site and fishing/coastal foraging from recording info from marine shells with edible shellfish. 1/2 🏺 #zooarch

Second this method, which worked for me to be able to go in and delete my account!

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

Reading deeply about animals for the chapter I hope to finish this semester, thinking about how they created early medieval landscapes with their communities. What are folks favorite articles/chapters/books on horses, pigs, cows, sheep or goats? Any period or field! #medievalsky 🏺 #academicsky

It is 2035. My students work to craft a perfect prompt to generate an essay in their tone and submit it. I take it and am forced to carefully feed it to the same LLM that generated it, which spits out feedback. Nothing of value is made or learned.

Celebrating a successful guest lecture with a little reading by the Charles on this beautiful day.

For #StandingStoneSunday (though this might be more of a sitting stone), I had to go back a couple years to a visit to the Neolithic Carrowmore cemetery in County Sligo. This worn stone sentinel - Tomb 52 - silently declares the memory of those interred in and around it, 5-6,000 years on.

A #StandingStoneSunday morning with some of the Medway Megaliths. A🧵 Started the morning braving the bonkers road to get the Kits City House.

My latest book – Wild Edinburgh - has now been published. This is a book for those who love Scotland’s capital city and are keen to delve deeper into its natural riches. Available in bookshops and from online sellers

For #FindsFriday I offer this gorgeous 15,000 year old engraving of a reindeer calf, nervously standing next to its mum. Found in the Madeleine rock shelter in the Dordogne, France. Part of the excellent Ice Age Art exhibition at the Cliffe Castle Museum in Keighley, Bradford. 🏺

Join us on 4 and 5 October for our 2025 online conference! Two days of expert talks on Pictish art and craft - from recycled Roman silver to metalwork at Burghead and Rhynie, plus insights into Pictish weaponry, Sueno's Stone, two Caithness cross-slabs and Pictish bull carvings. Booking link below.

Want to hear about 1st century Roman Scotland? Then join @classicalalan.bsky.social and myself at @waterstones.bsky.social in Perth next Wednesday as we discuss the earliest Roman invasion of Scotland www.waterstones.com/events/roman...

Do any lovely medievalists know of good medieval descriptions of hangovers? Thank you!

It's the mosaics like this that always make me wonder if the Pictish beast, with the similar snout and whirls where the fins are, was drawing from this iconographic pool

Pictish Arts Society forthcoming conference online #medievalsky #scotland

vimeo.com/1113427549?s... if anyone needs an uplifting glimpse of some of the folks who protect our parks

A wonderful short documentary on the National Park Service, the recent challenges it's faced, and the local protests at the NPS site I functionally grew up in, Cumberland Gap. vimeo.com/1113427549?s...

My delight in such connections between ancient points in time and space goes in the opposite direction too – like in how the Roman writer Claudius Aelianus wrote a passage in Greek centuries later that unintentionally includes our only Graeco-Roman mention of the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh.

The Medieval Scriptorium is now available in paperback! 😊 reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-med... #bookhistory #medievalsky #skystorians #medievalmanuscripts @reaktionbooks.bsky.social

“Where did we put that cross”

This week marked the return to classes and what I think will be my most exciting semester yet. TA'ing for a pre-modern environmental history core course, finishing chapters and an article draft, guest lecturing and conferencing all to come...

A wonderful and insightful piece! Imagination and, through it, connection to the past are utterly essential, and imaginative and speculative fiction are a wonderful way to encourage that. I don't think I'd be doing what I do today without reading Sutcliffe at a younger age...

medievalists will be like 'if Bede were alive today, he'd breathe the true passion for learning we need back into the humanities and save them', no, he'd have started running his own Mastodon instance about railways and started getting in fights about rolling stock on the Brussels metro

Day conference celebrating Glasgow's 850th anniversary. Celebrating with scholarship, and doubling as a commemoration of the work of Norman Shead. Thursday 4 September 2025 -- 10.00 am- 4:30 pm, City Chambers.

Both the school I went to for my master's degree and my current university for my PhD share the motto "Ever to Excel" which is fitting given the amount of time I spend in MS Excel

Re-posting my upcoming lecture details - plus I am now reasonably confident that it will include a newly-identified early medieval source for the Moray Firthlands, which is quite exciting.

The possibility that this records a son with a Celtic name and a father with a Latin name is a nice inversion of the 5th c. Latinus Stone, commemorating Latinus, descendant of Barrovados, and a good reminder that we should be careful ascribing essentialist identities based on language/names!

Join us in signing and sharing this petition to prevent layoffs of over 400 people (both academic & professional services staff) at Lancaster University. We are all at risk and it's a scary time.