You’ve heard of Neanderthals, of course. But have you heard of… ? From “The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution” (1955)

Ready to talk stone tools with Yale first-years and give them a chance to try making their own

I find the title of this 1993 article hilarious — it’s just so bizarrely blunt. My wife, though, doesn’t see the humor (“Explain to me again why you think it’s funny”). What do you think?

Let’s count the clues in just this part of the email that this is super dodgy: 1. This person doesn’t exist and has a nonsensical affiliation. 2. Which scholarly society, hmm? 3. Their US headquarters address is mangled… And as a bonus, 4. I have never asked for an author’s WhatsApp number.

Actual dire wolves.

Here's the free-for-50-days link for my new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews: "Scales of toolstone transport in the Armenian Highlands during MIS 3: The contribution of Ararat-1 Cave (Ararat Depression) to reconstructing opportunities for social interactions" authors.elsevier.com/a/1kt3c-4PSD...

Et tu, LEGO?

What's new in obsidian artifact sourcing? This link offers free access (for 50 days) to my new article – Archaeological obsidian sourcing: Looking from the first 60 years to the next – for the 50th anniversary special issue of Journal of Archaeological Science – authors.elsevier.com/a/1koEW15SlU...

I didn’t expect to see my favorite demonic Mesopotamian deity appear on “Saturday Night Live” in a sketch with Lady Gaga, but sure enough, they invoked Lamashtu, featured on my favorite stone amulets! 😍

Well, now I'm hungry for soft-serve vanilla ice cream – and it would go great with the Babylonian Collection tablet cookies

Doing some Saturday morning reading for research and teaching — yes, comic books count

Nature Editorial Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere. US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It’s gonna be lit 🔥 in Experimental Archaeology class today as we start fires the *really* old-fashioned way: flint, pyrite, and tinder fungus — Paleolithic archaeologists are really just undercover survivalists

An entry that I wrote on XRF and #obsidian sourcing for an #archaeology encyclopedia was published at a such limited subscription level that even Yale doesn't have access – and our libraries have almost everything! Anyway, I've posted a free preprint version – enjoy! doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/khpx9_v1

My freeze-dried mammoth meat has arrived 🦣🥩

Re: the JHE situation – Just to be sure that I was being factual and that my impressions were indeed correct, I reached out to my contacts at Elsevier, and the answer was exactly what I thought and consistent with the statement that Elsevier put out yesterday: there is NO use of AI in copyediting...

This multi-year (well, multi-decade) work on the excavations at the Middle Paleolithic site of Lusakert-1 Cave in central Armenia is finally online (only early view for now) and will be open-access when the final, nicely formatted, PDF version becomes available: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out the brand-new, kid-friendly, condensed “Smologies” version of my Ologies podcast interview with the delightful Alie Ward of @ologies.bsky.social ! www.alieward.com/smologies/fi...

Today I oversaw returning 63 boxes of excavated materials from the Eli Whitney Gun Factory to the Eli Whitney Museum, including this box of firearm parts (note the bayonet and the revolver component). The museum plans to exhibit the materials, including the finds from the employee barracks.

Me twinning with #Neanderthals, occasionally having a brow ridge contest on the side

I have apparently become an extra-credit meme in my friend @jaysongillpaleo.bsky.social’s class… I approve.

100+ more followers, so here's another fantastic obsidian artifact I've studied: an Old Babylonian cylinder seal carved out of obsidian. I couldn't find a geochemical match to Middle Eastern obsidian until I started looking at East African sources. It matches to an Egyptian artifact! That's a first!

I’ve seen a lot of reproduction movie posters for “The #Neanderthal Man” (1953), but I’d never seen this before, so I had to have it — it’s the left side of a newspaper-thin duoble-bill poster (the other side seems to have been torn off, possibly thanks to a cinema manager who was showing this film)

#Archaeology students... If you have questions about pXRF of obsidian, ceramics, or other materials, I’m happy to try and answer them, even chat with you, and not charge $100+ for access to a recorded 2-hour SAA webinar. I’m not RPA-certified, but my sourcing research is published in Science & PNAS.

Molecular modeling meets brutalist sculpture 🧪 I love walking past this handmade model, built in the 1970s by biochemist Dr. Ann Korner, of E. coli transfer RNA in Yale’s Environmental Science Center. She completed her MPhil here in 1972 and her PhD in 1974. It's built to scale too: 2 cm equals 1 Å!

#Textiles aren’t my specialty (they rarely show up at sites after millennia), so these fabric pieces in custom frames are a bit of a mystery to me. Attempts at ID using Google Lens haven’t been terribly insightful. Any ideas as to origin or age? Can you help a stone-tool-loving #archaeologist out?

The obsidian bowl was a hit, so here is another special item. This is, to my knowledge, one of only five known Mesopotamian obsidian amulets, inscribed with spells to protect the wearer from Lamaštu, a demon who tormented pregnant women and kidnapped babies. The obsidian came from central Turkey.

I have many new followers since I last introduced myself. I'm an #archaeologist at Yale, and one of my specialties is identifying the geological origins of obsidian artifacts using nondestructive chemical tests. This carved obsidian bowl, for example, originated from a source in northeastern Turkey.

It’s real! As mentioned in the latest issue of “New Scientist” i think we’ve all felt this way at some point. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“But, this is impossible!! It’s a Neanderthal man—! Alive and at large in beastly fury—!”

Me a couple months ago: Okay, THIS time I will keep better track of my references and build the bibliography as I write. Me today: Shit.

There are still a few days left (until Dec 9) for totally free access to my new paper on the use of portable XRF instruments in #archaeology via the link below: "Protocols, pitfalls, and publishing for pXRF analyses: From 'know how' to 'best practices'" authors.elsevier.com/a/1jzEM,rVDB...

It is worth noting that, while Kirk is simply looking for rocks to throw, the Gorn captain has collected cobbles of various lithic raw materials, assessed their suitability, and knapped an entire obsidian spike. #StarTrek meets #Archaeology

The cover of “Unknown Worlds” Issue #7 from 1961

Was “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” on TV last night? Yes, it was. Did I watch it? Yes, I did. Did I check if it could be a full moon, as shown in the film, on December 14, 1989? Yes, I did. Was it? Well, close enough, it was a full moon on December 12-13, 1989.

All of these are wrong… It’s WALL-E. That’s it. Just WALL-E.

What do we do on our days off from excavating in Armenia? Check out more recent ruins, of course. We couldn’t help but explore the abandoned “Palace of Culture” in Jermuk during our visit this summer.

Do archaeologists ever encounter cursed objects during our excavations? No. Do we ever find cursed faunal assemblages when digging through old collections? Definitely. This is from Yale’s 1980s excavations at a historical Connecticut site.

Hello #Science & #Archaeology, BlueSky! I'm an archaeologist at Yale University. My research focuses how humans made use of resources distributed across the landscape, how they responded to challenges in their environments, and how their actions shaped the spread of innovations and social changes.