www.researchgate.net/journal/Ethn...

Ethnoarchaeology - Editor Pick by Francesca D'Agostini

This Editor's Peak highlights three recent studies spanning diverse cultural and environmental contexts. Stewart et al. examine settlement and land use in Arctic Canada, Politis et al. explore the mat...

researchgate.net

📢 After quite some time working on this, our new paper is finally out! We propose an updated framework for Anthropic Activity Markers, showing how compositional data analysis and geostatistics can help us make more robust archaeological inferences from soil geochemistry. doi.org/10.1007/s108...

Anthropic Activity Markers 2.0: A Shift Towards Compositional Data Analysis - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

Anthropic Activity Markers (AAMs) were formalized over 10 years ago as a toolkit to infer human activities from biological and geochemical signatures preserved in sediments. This paper presents AAMs 2.0, a revised analytical framework that integrates compositional data analysis (CoDA) and geostatistics, as the appropriate statistical foundations for this approach. We first outline the theoretical motivation of this framework, demonstrating that treating geochemical concentrations as absolute values generates statistical artefacts that limit analytical reliability. Using the ethnoarchaeological dataset of Rondelli et al. (2014) as a test case, we illustrate how CoDA principles can be applied to revisit established interpretations. With this approach, we can identify meaningful compositional relationships without relying exclusively on heuristic element combinations, yielding results that are more statistically robust. Ultimately, AAMs 2.0 reframes activity markers as relational, ratio-based signals in space, providing a more rigorous foundation for archaeological inference.

doi.org

Our PhD candidates did a great job presenting the preliminary results of the project at #SAfA2025. Hope you enjoyed the conference and see you soon 😁

Session #55 on "Mapping African Archaeology" just started at #SAfA2025! Come by to hear about @camp-erc.bsky.social work by PhD candidate Antonios Koutrompas!

This morning, our PI Stefano Biagetti presented an overview of our work in the general session of the #SAfA2025. Come by the presentations by K. Rix (session #33) and A. Koutrompas (session #55) to learn more about our project!

AI “thinks” in the same way a mirror looks at you

Faro contrasts.. #SAfA2025

Just arrived to Faro for #SAfA2025 with the @camp-erc.bsky.social team.and some friends! hope to see you around😁

Windows of Córdoba.

From the creators of double-bagging in Botswana and Oman, let me introduce you to the wonders of Kenya cup preparation! 😁

#Sorghum is cultivated by #Turkana farmers in the banks of Turkwell river. They burn-and-slash to open land for cultivation and use earthen canals to irrigate the fields.

⚠️ #PhD opportunity⚠️ If you are interested in #Archaeology and #Pastoralism, ERC-project CAMP offers a fully-funded PhD position in UPF (Barcelona) to study plant microremains and geochemical signatures in pastoral contexts. Apply by July 10th! More info. below 👇🏼 euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/346669

HUM-PIPF-2025-02 ERC-Funded PhD position on (Re)Constructing the Archaeology of Mobile Pastoralism (CAMP) Bringing the site level into long-term pastoral narratives

One ERC-Funded PhD position on (Re)Constructing the Archaeology of Mobile Pastoralism (CAMP) Bringing the site level into long-term pastoral narratives

euraxess.ec.europa.eu

After a few days of #fieldwork, we have already sampled 3 ethnographic sites and 1 abandoned camp. #Turkana people are really amazing! #Ethnoarchaeology #Kenya @camp-erc.bsky.social @sdrecercaupf.bsky.social

📢 New publication: "The genomics of t’ef and finger millet domestication and spread" by Mekonnen D.Z., Gomes A.I., Machado R.S.R. & Oliveira H.R., in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025, Vol. 380, Issue 1926). 🔗 More info: doi.org/10.1098/rstb...

The genomics of t’ef and finger millet domestication and spread | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

The Northern Highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea (NHE) were a centre for food production in Africa, hosting one of the earliest agriculture-based complex societies on the continent. The NHE’s geographic...

doi.org

Yeah so... The view from the Turkana Basin Institute right there for you

After about 48h, we are here!! TBI feels like paradise 🤩🤩 @camp-erc.bsky.social @sdrecercaupf.bsky.social

On our way to Lake Turkana! 💥💥

Cute Nairobi couple 🥰

⚠️ @camp-erc.bsky.social fieldwork season starting! ⚠️ We're off to Kenya this time — expect stunning pics on your timeline soon! 🤩

A massive study of 50,000 households over 1,000 archaeological sites provides ample evidence that inequality is not a "natural" outgrowth of sophistication. Instead, it is a political choice. Which means, kids, that we don't have to choose it. archaeologymag.com/2025/04/stud...

New study reveals wealth inequality was never inevitable

A recent study published in the journal PNAS is overturning traditional wisdom regarding the origins and inevitability of wealth inequality

archaeologymag.com

I contributed to the special issue of PAGES magazine, "Early Human Traces: Landscape Openness Proxies Across Space and Time," with a short article on the identification of charcoal from archaeological sites to detect human-induced vegetation openings 🪵🔥🌳🌴🌿 1/5 pastglobalchanges.org/publications...

All the soils of the world put together in one image! They are categorized into their main defining traits. Do you have a favourite one?

@amgc-vub.bsky.social @brusselsbioarch.bsky.social

Delighted that this paper came out as part of a PNAS special feature on “The Global Dynamics of Inequality over the Long Term” where together with a team of 27 scientists we collected and analysed a sample of over 53,000 houses from all five continents. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Also out in @nature.com today, our research showing that hunter-gatherers understook substantial Mediterranean sea crossings during the Mesolithic. This research also documents the first evidence of pre-Neolithic peoples in Malta! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands - Nature

Archaeological discoveries from Malta suggest that humans were present on the Maltese islands from around 8,500 years ago, providing evidence that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers made sea crossings as lon...

nature.com

Trunks #photography #nature

We are happy to share our pre-print on dating bone using a novel non-destructive protocol we developed. The paper is on the Biorxiv here (Luftensteiner et al. 2025): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Non-destructive radiocarbon dating of bone

Since the 1950s, radiocarbon measurements have anchored archaeological chronologies dating back to 50,000 years, with bone collagen being a commonly dated material. Despite advances in collagen extrac...

biorxiv.org

Yohannes Haile-Selassie wants to shift the trajectory of palaeoanthropology in fossil-rich Ethiopia away from its long colonial heritage https://go.nature.com/4iEQTkE

Why Africans should be telling the story of human origins

Yohannes Haile-Selassie wants to shift the trajectory of palaeoanthropology in fossil-rich Ethiopia away from its long colonial heritage.

go.nature.com

New article published in #ScientificReports! 🔥 In this paper, we use random survival forest to model the transition from foraging to plant cultivation globally. Check it out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Environmental constraints and diffusion shaped the global transition to food production - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Environmental constraints and diffusion shaped the global transition to food production

nature.com

In a world of Matts, be a Derek.