Bob Muckle

@bobmuckle.bsky.social

Archaeologist. Broad experiences and interests in archaeology. Currently focussed on arch of recent and contemporary times. Written several books, incl textbooks. Series editor for Teaching Archaeology (U of Toronto Press). Now also trying to write fiction

Was giving a presentation on some of my recent and ongoing archaeological work at a conference today and unexpectedly came across this promotional poster for my forthcoming book ‘Once Upon This Land: Archaeology in British Columbia and the Stories it Tells’.

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Men walked on the Moon - but women made the guidance computers that got them there and back. At the landing sites and command module crash sites the computers are evidence of a unique women's lunar heritage. 🧪🏺

The Apollo core rope memory and women's heritage on the Moon

Between 1969 and 1972 there were six Apollo human spaceflight missions to the Moon, each leaving a complex site behind. A common joke now is...

zoharesque.blogspot.com

It may be a bit "inside baseball," but I'm wildly excited about the promise of palaeoproteomics -- not quite as much info as DNA, but can give us info from millions of years ago. This new paper out today shows they were able to figure out biological sex of an A. africanus specimen (2-3.5myo). 🏺🧪

In a 1st, ancient proteins reveal sex of human relative from 3.5 million years ago

Researchers have extracted ancient proteins from australopithecine fossils and determined whether they were male or female — a first for human evolution studies.

livescience.com

The juxtaposition of a mammoth reduced to the barest line, with the most human of symbols in blood-red ochre. Yes, there is probably something to decode, but first it's important to share the awe that human art can persist for such spans of time. That we can still encounter it. Chauvet ~32,000 🏺🦣

The trunk, head and dorsal hump of a mammoth drawn in black outline. A silhouette of a hand, painted in red placed within and partially over it. On the beige, scratched wall of a limestone cave

Today I registered for the 2025 Honolulu marathon. I started recreational running in 2022, and nobody is likely to be more surprised than me that I like it. I’m slow, but I get there.

Reviewing the copyeditor’s comments and suggestion on my latest book ms. I almost always find myself in awe of copyeditors, and this is no exception. The ms is for ‘Once Upon This Land: Archaeology in British Columbia and the Stories it Tells.’

Colin Renfrew has passed away. A hugely influential figure in archaeology throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. Here are a few photos of him from about 15years ago, when I was working on his Keros Project.

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Foundation of an oforu (Japanese bathhouse) from early 20th c Japanese settlement in Canada. Very cool site. No historical documents mention it. Very little arch visibility on surface. Excavations revealed evidence of about a 14 small houses, a garden, and a shrine. Sudden abandonment.

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Except for now looking older, I don’t think I’ve changed much at all. This photo of me is from a long time ago, on my first paid arch project. My fashion sense hasn’t changed at all and I still enjoy a beer once the day’s work is done.

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Publisher: Do you want to put an LLM clause in the copyright statement? Me: Definitely. How specific can we get? Publisher: As specific as you like.

The copyright statement from Ephemeral City which reads in part: No part of this book may be used as data for ‘training’ any large language model or as part of any machine learning or neural network architeture. Human creaivity cannot be replicated by doing maths with stolen art. Altman, Andressen, and all their cronies can get fucked. Enquires should be made to the publisher.

Some artifacts from my long-term archaeological project excavating largely unknown/forgotten early 20th century small settlements of Japanese Japanese Canadians in the forests of western Canada

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