Tessera

"A ritual meant to recognize dispossession becomes a form of reassurance instead. History is named and then absorbed." Reid Walker on the inadequacies and unintended outcomes of land acknowledgements. @b-thom.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/o...

Opinion | I’m Native American. Land Acknowledgments Are Infuriating. (Gift Article)

Conservatives who critique land acknowledgments aren’t acting in good faith, but they do have a point.

nytimes.com

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists @thebulletin.org · 2w ago

Monumental New Mexico land art is almost finished (again), but now views more satellites than the intended target of Polaris. Impressive effort for a LoFi observatory which addresses archaeological themes more than it perhaps intends. 🏺🔭 www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/a...

He’s the Last Great Land Artist You’ve Never Heard Of (Gift Article)

Charles Ross spent 50 years building “Star Axis,” a naked-eye observatory in New Mexico. Now his masterwork is ready. How to share it with a changed world?

nytimes.com

"When we talked to the relevant French minister, he said their bombs were perfectly safe, so Jim replied 'Well, blow them up in the Mediterranean.' The French minister’s face blanched and he replied: 'There are too many people living around the Mediterranean.'" —Helen Caldicott

How the movies (and the rest of the media) made me into an anti-nuclear weapons campaigner

What effect can movies and other media have on raising public awareness and inspiring public activism? Perhaps there is no better person to ask than Helen Caldicott, who—after first reading the 1957…

thebulletin.org

A New Yorker in Victoria BC, 1868, unimpressed by the hospitality of then colonial Governor Frederick Seymour, takes it out on the Brits, aka a "DARN BLARSTED DIRTY SET OF BLARSTED ASSES." 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇧 #canadianhistory

Screenshot of a typescript portion reading "So we started with our pants turned up through the mud and mizzling rain back to the ship. Having had rain for four days past, and having on our thin boots, you can imagine how we enjoyed it. The distance we had to walk was over a mile. The English are a "GREAT & MAGNAMINOUS PEOPLE" but you never catch this "chile" in one of their HOSPITABLE houses again. "No, no! Not for Joe." They are a DARN BLARSTED DIRTY SET OF BLARSTED ASSES.

qmackie @qmackie.bsky.social · 3w ago

They don't make archaeology book covers like they used to. 🏺 publications.gc.ca/collections/...

Cover of the book PRELIMINARY ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDY,
MACKENZIE CORRIDOR
by
Jacques Cinq-Mars
Archaeological Survey of Canada
for the
Environmental-Social Program
Northern Pipelines
July 1973

Cover is a mosaic of drawn images of moose, fish, fox, etc made in an organic pop-art idiom, brightly coloured in blue, red, white and black.

Informative brass plaque on the Ok Glacier in Iceland. @historicalmarker.bsky.social #climatechange 🇮🇸🧊🫠

Image of a bilingual Icelandic/English sign at the Ok Glacier in Iceland. English text reads:

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know
what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.
Photo credit: Dominic Boyer

qmackie @qmackie.bsky.social · last mo.

Carefully written piece on how overly-reductionistic zooarchaeological work focused on "survival" leads to "epistemic violence" #openaccess www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🏺

Counting on kin and Country, not just calories: Beyond subsistence thinking in GunaiKurnai zooarchaeology, southeastern Australia

Zooarchaeology recognises that animal remains can register social relationships, ritual, identity, memory, and place, yet in Australia zooarchaeological interpretations have historically tended to ...

tandfonline.com

[DFO] announced a 55 per cent increase in allocation for Northern cod from 38,000 tonnes to 59,000 tonnes – but according to the government, Labrador Inuit will only get 3.3 per cent of that under the “Indigenous and Special Allocations” label. 🇨🇦 www.aptnnews.ca/national-new...

Giving allocation of cod to non-Inuit a sign of ‘reconciliation gap’

While the federal government is celebrating a recent boost in the amount of northern cod...

aptnnews.ca

Gretchen King@gbtking.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Really interesting article, also reinforces how quickly salmon could have re-colonized coastal streams after last glacial maximum (likely very quickly indeed) @judeisabella.bsky.social 🐟

I mean, always read @bengoldfarb.bsky.social but read this special fish story to really understand the resilience of salmon & what a little bit of flow can encourage. "Fish, it turned out, just needed water." For @highcountrynews.org www.hcn.org/articles/the...

Carl Zimmer summarizes a new paper which surprisingly (and thoroughly) suggests a deadly Plague outbreak ca 5000 BP in Lake Baikal area, millennia before it was thought the infectious agent was deadly (gift link) 🏺 www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/s...

A Deadly Outbreak of Plague, Nearly 5,000 Years Before the Black Death

nytimes.com

Checkmate, anthropologists 🏺

Image from twitter asking "why do humans have 206 bones and not just one?", with the image showing one anatomically correct human skeleton and another with all the bones fused into a human-shaped blob.

New depths in cynicism as Facebook/Meta plans to roll out AI enabled facial recognition in wearable glasses during times of political turmoil, to suppress anticipated opposition (3 month old article here: archive.ph/9tHvo) #AI

Screenshot from linked NY Times article reading: Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses."

Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"If it can't be quantified it must not be valuable" - a droll, yet entirely accurate, video from Dr Jean Fan: "University Professors in the Neoliberal Academic Ecosystem" www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGO4.... #highered

University Professors in the Neoliberal Academic Ecosystem

YouTube video by Prof. Jean Fan

youtube.com

It's good that universities are making six-figure payouts to people who got fired for their comments about Charlie Kirk, but now the universities need to do some new firing, of administrators who carried out those illegal actions. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/u...

Fired for Criticizing Charlie Kirk, They’re Now Getting Big Payouts

nytimes.com

“The authenticity of the wolf species [is going] missing, with all its cultural, ecological, and evolutionary value.” 🐺🍆🐶 www.biographic.com/nearly-half-...

Nearly Half of Italy’s Wolves Are Part Dog Now. Is That a Problem? - bioGraphic

Wolf-dog hybrids are taking over Italy, raising scientists’ concerns for the future of the country’s wolves.

biographic.com

Now this is how to start off a short subject review "Zooarcheology is a Frankenstein hybrid, born from the ribs of a myriad of disciplines." 🏺🐟🧠 #archaeology library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Screenshot of the title and abstract of the linked document PDF. Text reads: Zooarcheology: animals talk, just to complete
the story
Paul Mazza
Abstract: Zooarcheology is a Frankenstein hybrid, born from the ribs of a myriad of
disciplines. Its research focuses on animal remains from archeological contexts under an
anthropological perspective with the primary and ultimate object of gaining information
about human behavior. It has been, and often still is, considered a subdiscipline of
archeology. And yet, it has the potential to greatly contribute to the advancement of
knowledge in archeology. By using a variety of analytical methods, it provides independent
lines of complementary scientific evidence from archeofaunal, geological, and sedimentary
archives. It can yield detailed information on the environments in which past peoples
lived, as well as on the intensity of human impacts on landscapes, on past human diets
and on their evolution through time. It can also provide insights into the nature of the
social organization of the people. All this reveals zooarcheology in a role that has not
often been recognized

Alex Hanna@alexhanna.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Students at Glendale Community College in Arizona www.gccaz.edu roundly boo when use of AI at their graduation ceremony omits hundreds of graduates. Students must use AI perfectly/not at all, or face expulsion, but Admin gets to "learn their lessons" in realtime. #highered #AI

Sir, another graduation ceremony in which the students booed AI has dropped. "College graduates were pissed after their school used AI to announce graduates’ names and missed hundreds of names" (via @/FearedBuck on Twitter)

Geologists in movies: an analysis of gender, cause of death, etc. 35% of them die. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🏺🪨⚰️⚒️

From the linked article, Figure 3, as described below:

The manners of geologist deaths fall into eight categories (Fig. 3), described below:

Category 1: Murder. A good example is the fatal elimination of ‘baddies’ by heroes such as James Bond, such as in the movie Dr No (1962), where ‘007’ kills the evil petrologist, Prof. Dent.
Category 2: Work related. Typical examples are being hit by a volcanic bomb, falling into a crater or an opening fault, drowning in quicksand or lahar, and incineration in an oil pit. Grim stuff.
Category 3: Killed by or because of Extra-Terrestrial encounters. That is, being killed directly by aliens or assimilation by aliens and consequently killed by former colleagues, such as the geologist in Prometheus (2012).
Category 4. Miscellaneous accidents. Such as being crushed by falling crates as in Deep Star Six (1989).
Category 5. Traffic accidents. Killed in exotic events like crashing with a spaceship on the asteroid in Armageddon (1998).
Category 6. Health issues. Such as heart attack suffered by the geologist in Equinox (1970).
Category 7. Suicide. Where it all gets too much, as in Walkabout (1971).
Category 8. Unknown. A good example is the fate of the geologist in Gold (2016): suicide, or did he fake his death?

The causes of eternal passing are highlighted in the bar plot in Fig. 3. Murder is the most common, with 30 of 69 deaths. The numbers for the second and third reasons are close together, with deaths caused by interaction with extra-terrestrial creatures and unforgiving objects leading to 12 of 69 deaths, and with geological hazards (work related) coming in at 12 of 69 deaths. Accidents, traffic accidents and health issues make a total of 9 of 69 deaths. Notably, we count only one clear case of death by suicide, though in three cases, the fate of the geologist is unknown.

Images from Dutch doctor Willem ten Rhijne's 1683 work on Japanese and Chinese acupuncture techniques, which he had witnessed. via @publicdomainrev.bsky.social 🪡🇨🇳🇯🇵 publicdomainreview.org/collection/d...

Copperplate engraving derived from Chinese diagram showing acupuncture and moxa points, featured in Willem ten Rhijne’s De Acupunctura (1683) - front side

Copperplate engraving derived from Japanese diagram showing acupuncture points, featured in Willem ten Rhijne’s De Acupunctura (1683) - back side.

The Jimmy Fallon show is "a ghostly simulacrum, merely rehearsing itself for its eventual, more profitable existence as a series of clips." An informed critique of the vapidity of complicity 📺. www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-ban...

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

Under the sterile blue lights of his studio, Fallon laughs endlessly at the same pseudo-jokes, rubs elbows with Trump and Sam Altman, and ushers in the death of culture.

currentaffairs.org