Enjoyed a recent visit to 'Barbury Castle', an Iron Age hillfort near Swindon. Very impressive banks and ditches! Hillforts were some of the first archaeological sites I became interested in, and I still find them fascinating.
Dr Huw Groucutt
@huwgroucutt.bsky.social
Archaeologist, Senior Lecturer at University of Malta, PI: TerraForm ERC project.....posting about old stones, and occasional bones. Exploring human responses to climate change, particularly in Malta and Arabia. http://www.huwgroucutt.com
The 2020-21 Over Needingworth excavations revealed an area of preserved wooden stakes/posts and stake/postholes, with 58 being fully excavated and recorded. Dating to the Roman period the stakes and posts reflected use of the land when the area had transformed from a prehistoric dry land to fen.
Another lovely visitor to site today. Love her eye movements :)
Excavating a 500,000 year old elephant in the Nefud Desert with Prof. Eleanor Scerri and pals a few years ago, happy times!
After over 100 days without rain, and a long hot summer that felt like one long heat wave, the clouds have gathered and the first rains come.
Nice new paper, showing human presence at the site by 55 thousand years ago, consistent with other evidence the arrival of humans in Australia. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Was just reminded of this figure i'd made in a paper from 2014. I like it. Illustrations of stone tools made by Neanderthals in SW Asia, some 55 thousand years ago. The darker the colour the later the flake removal in the sequence of preparation.
Fieldwork Friday.....flashback to a few years ago, this is the remains of an ancient lake in the Nefud Desert, dating to about 100 thousand years ago. We found interesting fossils at this site.
Today the Prime Minister of Malta, the Minister of Culture, and many other dignitaries came to visit our excavations at Latnija. timesofmalta.com/article/mell...
Mellieħa dig helping reconstruct 300,000 years of Malta’s climatic history
Ta’ Latnija cave excavations continue to reshape understanding of Malta’s earliest human history
timesofmalta.com
We have a lot of rocks to deal with in our excavation. So I enjoy building a wall behind which we can pile smaller rocks.
A long fieldwork season coming up, means it's time for an official team hot sauce. Introducing 'Brain Attack by Red Dragon Hot Sauce Ltd
#FieldworkFriday. Modern terracing in construction (but to store rubbish rather than soil for agriculture).
Neanderthals may have trekked through the Saudi Arabian desert 55,000 years ago, farther south than experts thought possible www.livescience.com/archaeology/...
Neanderthals may have trekked through the Saudi Arabian desert 55,000 years ago, farther south than experts thought possible
Stone tools from a lakeside site in Saudi Arabia hint that Neanderthals were adapted to the arid Arabian interior, not just to cold places.
livescience.com
Nice new article on our work www.livescience.com/archaeology/...
Neanderthals may have trekked through the Saudi Arabian desert 55,000 years ago, farther south than experts thought possible
Stone tools from a lakeside site in Saudi Arabia hint that Neanderthals were adapted to the arid Arabian interior, not just to cold places.
livescience.com
New paper just published: "Bayesian modelling of the latent human influence field in archaeological urban sediments at Koh Ker, Cambodia". Began life when Chris was a postdoc in my group, nice to see it published :) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Bayesian modelling of the latent human influence field in archaeological urban sediments at Koh Ker, Cambodia
Reconstructing the spatiotemporal trajectories of massive ancient cities remains difficult because archaeological excavation offers temporal depth but…
sciencedirect.com
We conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis to support this argument, which both suggests that the Neanderthals were more ecologically flexible than had been understood, and that we have a poor knowledge on where admixture between sapiens & Neanderthals could have happened.
Hot sauce time! Nice little harvesting of three of my chilli plants
Behind this innocuous little gate on a hillside in South Wales lies the 33 km long Agen Allwedd cave system. Digging efforts are currently underway deep beneath Mynydd Llangatwg to connect the cave to the neighbouring Ogof y Daren Cilau. This will make a cave system more than 60 km long.
This looks great! Just downloaded it.
Catherine Frieman@cjfrieman.bsky.social · 2mo agoCan confirm (it's OA)
A short video explainer on our new paper; Neanderthals in the Desert! youtu.be/AHcaIbBG42g
Neanderthals in the desert!
YouTube video by Huw Groucutt
youtu.be
Dr Huw Groucutt@huwgroucutt.bsky.social · 2mo agoGreat to see our new paper out; evidence for Neanderthals in Arabia! Time to stop imagining our hominin cousins as only being found in cold northern forests! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Great to see our new paper out; evidence for Neanderthals in Arabia! Time to stop imagining our hominin cousins as only being found in cold northern forests! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Neanderthals in the desert? Population history best explains Middle Palaeolithic technological heterogeneity in Arabia
Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia present a rich record of hominin occupations between ca. 100 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) at a critical biogeogr…
sciencedirect.com
Jimbob Blinkhorn@jblinkhorn.bsky.social · 2mo agoNew paper klaxon! Neanderthals in the Desert? Our new paper suggests that Neanderthals may have been responsible for producing MIS 3 Middle Palaeolithic Levallois blanks in northern Arabia! Have a look at this: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Great to see our new paper out; evidence for Neanderthals in Arabia! Time to stop imagining our hominin cousins as only being found in cold northern forests! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Neanderthals in the desert? Population history best explains Middle Palaeolithic technological heterogeneity in Arabia
Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia present a rich record of hominin occupations between ca. 100 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) at a critical biogeogr…
sciencedirect.com
Looking forward to returning to Latnija,Malta, in August - and our new modelling paper suggests forager occupations from 8.5-7.5ka were only possible through sustained, long-distance seafaring in the Mesolithic Mediterranean! (Image: (C) Huw Groucutt) academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
