#goodmorning en route to #jordan for a short but exciting #fieldwork season. We'll be trying to get samples of ancient sediment that contain recoverable #AncientDNA... if we're lucky, including that of the first domestic crops.

#archaeology #environment

@mrundkvist Ooh that's fantastic. I've also heard that a lot of that data for Denmark is available, it's just not been put together and/or made public. Hopefully the new version of F&F will take some lessons from across the Öresund!

@mrundkvist I’ve always been impressed by Fund og Fortidsminder. Haven’t looked at the Swedish equivalent, though — what extra info does it give?

**“They Can’t Even Copy and Paste”: One Month Into School, Teachers Are Dumbfounded by How Badly Students Struggle With Basic Tech**

"_According to data from France’s National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique), over 13 million people in France are affected by illectronisme—a term […]

@felwert @stefan_hessbrueggen @proghist Perfect, thanks!

@stefan_hessbrueggen @joeroe The Minimal Computing group is famous for their use of static site generators, and they have some think pieces, although they don’t explicitly mention SSGs that much: https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/
The classic @proghist article on the topic has some […]

@cthoyt Thanks, I see you mention SSGs but I’m looking for something more in-depth/promoting of them. Your recommendation that “projects that only need a simple website” whilst others use a containerised Python API on AWS is, I have to say, quite the opposite of what I had in mind. I’ve wasted […]

Can anyone point me to literature on static websites in open science/open data? I feel like the advantages are obvious and I'm sure I've read bits here and there, but I'm struggling to find a good reference for a grant application...

#staticweb #opendata #openscience

@mrundkvist It's a funny one. But I suppose we have to bear in mind that at that time, the other options available (cereals, etc.) weren't nearly as palatable as they are today. People were used to having to heavily process plant foods to get a decent meal.

It also wasn't actually one of the […]

Is there some way I can make "paste as plain text" my default at all times in all applications on all devices forever and ever until the end of time?

I've been off #academiaedu for years now—I post my papers etc. on my own homepage (https://joeroe.io)—but since many colleagues are now dropping it in favour of Knowledge (neé Humanities) Commons, I've taken the opportunity to activate my profile there too:

https://hcommons.org/members/joeroe/

@electricarchaeo The latest here is that applying for grants is bad, actually, because it costs money for the university to be given money. The management can actually say that with a straight face.

@mrundkvist It's very sad. When I visit contract excavations (in Europe) I'm always blown away by the amount of manpower, resources, and tech they can bring to them. Meanwhile in research excavations (in the Middle East) we're squeezing what we can out of shoestring budgets or else writing yet […]

@Yolande @EAAarchaeology The letter was also circulated here by @BlackTrowel.

I signed it, have already ended my membership and won't have anything more to do with them. I'm not sure what else there is to say!

Today I'm #teaching my first class of the new semester (and of my new job), on finds processing in #archaeology

I'm quite pleased that I've prepared a 3 hour class with zero powerpoint, and starting to wonder if I can pull it off for the rest of course too...

#edchat #highered

A few years ago I used to transcribe data from printed gazetteers by propping the book next to my monitor, putting on a TV show, and spending an afternoon clacking away on my keyboard.

These days I do it by spending an afternoon stringing together a fancy computer vision and document AI […]

This should have been big news!

Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals:
FWF 🇦🇹
RCN 🇳🇴
Forte 🇸🇪
ARIS 🇸🇮
SRC 🇸🇪
FCT 🇵🇹
CSIC 🇪🇸
DFG 🇩🇪
Formas 🇸🇪
ANR 🇫🇷
Only two of them issued press releases in […]

How decentralized are the deployments of the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) and the Atmopshere (Bluesky, etc.)? I'm starting a project to track this!

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

Great that data availability sections are becoming the norm in #scientificpublishing, but maybe authors need more guidance on what should go in there?

In the past few weeks I've seen:

- "Not applicable" on a paper describing a dataset
- "No data was generated or analysed for this study" – then […]

🧵 from Martin-Perea
Olduvai Gorge is one of the most iconic paleoanthropological sites in the world.
Despite this, the stratigraphy and dating of its most recent Beds—where MSA and LSA archaeology is found—are poorly constrained.
We studied the type localities of the Ndutu and Naisiusiu Beds to […]

@mrundkvist I wonder if this is why self-conscious 'paradigm shifts' in archaeology dried up after the 90s. Young scholars from Binford's and Hodder's day were in a position to stick around and follow through on their manifestos, later generations weren't?

...there are some problems, though.

The pathologies used to identify working animals are rare in the archaeological record and can also be caused by illness.

Castrates are distinguished by comparing measurements of their bones to modern animals, but we can't be sure this is a valid comparison […]

Instead, archaeologists have relied on indirect evidence of ploughing (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44870382). The main source is cattle bones, which can display work-related injuries or signs of castration (oxen are usually castrated to make them easier to work with).

If we accept this […]

In each case the date coincidences with, or is shortly after, the arrival of agriculture in that region. This implies that ploughing was part of European #farming from the beginning. In other words, like agriculture itself, it must have been brought there from the Middle East.

Unfortunately we […]