It’s quite something seeing the (long) list of people who claim to work on social justice issues in archaeology who are prepared to go to EAA in Athens this year, sometimes sharing sessions with people involved in illegal excavations in the West Bank. bdsmovement.net/news/europea...

European Association of Archaeologists Is Welcoming Scholars Knowingly Participating in a War Crime

The EAA is welcoming scholars from Hebrew University, which is partially built on land illegally expropriated from Palestinians in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, to its annual meeting, Sept 2-6.

bdsmovement.net

Really delighted to say that our article critiquing the Cass Review from Archaeological, Historical, Mythological, and Heresiological perspectives has been published in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. You can freely read it below 👇 bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org/article/5/1-...

I finally made a website to bring together all my projects, papers, talks, and more: serayelozer.com Making a website with zero coding knowledge was very challenging, not gonna lie 🥲 So now I'm hoping to make it worth the effort by writing regular blog posts.

Dr. Sera Yelozer | Dr. Sera Yelozer

Prehistoric archaeologist specialising in personal ornaments, identity, craft, and material culture in prehistoric Anatolia and the wider Mediterranean.

serayelozer.com

The US/UK-led war in Iraq altered lives, monuments, museums and academia. In 'War Essays', Zainab Bahrani argues for an alternative account of Iraq's cultural heritage losses during and after the war. Reviewed in the latest #NewBookChronicle 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

🧪 Fashion is at the heart of economic, social, and environmental issues, several countries are seeking to regulate ultra-fast fashion practices. Yet when did the first fashions emerge? shorturl.at/veUgl with F. d'Errico @cnrsecologie.bsky.social @univbordeaux.bsky.social @pacea.bsky.social

The Origins of Fashion

This paper reconceptualizes fashion as a deep-time system of bodily communication rather than a byproduct of modern consumer societies. We define fashion as a socially transmitted system of bodily di....

shorturl.at

And the second news: my project "PRE-CRAFTS: Body Adornment Technologies, Craft Specialisation, and Social Identities in Anatolian Prehistory" received funding from TÜBİTAK for a 2-year postdoctoral research at Bilkent University in Türkiye.

I have two great news to share! First one below: This semester, I am teaching two new courses in the Core Program at Kadir Has University. I am super excited to share insights from archaeological material culture and its public reception with students from diverse backgrounds and departments.

Currently advertising: PhD project on Neolithic waste, based with Henny Piezonka. Project focuses on spatial analysis and the Neolithic. Deadline is 9th Feb. A chance to work with a cool range of sites from Serbia to Poland and you get to live in Berlin, so what's not to like! Link in next post.

The article grew out of a sense of unease we had while reading debates over decolonisation in archaeology, especially about where the conversation is being shaped. I’m really glad to finally see it out in the world. 🧵 I highlight in this thread some of our core arguments.

Small Things Big Stories@pre-identity.bsky.social · 7mo ago

📢 New article out in Public Archaeology: Invisible Archaeologies of Decolonization: Western Asian Archaeology, a View from Türkiye 🔓 Open access: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

📢 New article out in Public Archaeology: Invisible Archaeologies of Decolonization: Western Asian Archaeology, a View from Türkiye 🔓 Open access: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

🏺 Loved this fresco when I was a child with a Minoans fascination but it's not so much 'restored', as mostly imaginary. Look closely, only one figure has substantial original parts, and all the heads are made up! The real fragments however share precise costume elements with more complete frescos.

Antiquity Journal@antiquity.ac.uk · 7mo ago

For #FrescoFriday here's a classic: 'Ladies in Blue' is a restored Minoan fresco from Knossos. The colour blue often appears on frescoes in garments worn by the elite, indicating blue was a status symbol in the Bronze Age Aegean and East Mediterranean. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

For #FrescoFriday here's a classic: 'Ladies in Blue' is a restored Minoan fresco from Knossos. The colour blue often appears on frescoes in garments worn by the elite, indicating blue was a status symbol in the Bronze Age Aegean and East Mediterranean. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

Melted marbles from Moria, the largest migrant camp in Europe, which burnt down in 2020. The material culture of border crossings is often intentionally erased. Preserving and studying it is essential to understanding this contemporary #archaeology 🏺 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

We make a strong start to 2026! 🎉 Our new chapter “Bodies and behaviours: archaeological material culture & the interpretation of identity at the Neolithic transition” critically revisits how identity has been approached in Neolithic SW Asia. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

New paper. Recording the female experience of UK archaeology 1990-2010. Anne Teather and I document how an industry EDI agenda evolved in the 1990s and was dismantled, uncovering the ramifications of that for women archaeologists over the next decade. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #openaccess✅

NEW Finds from 13,200–10,700 cal BC Eşek Deresi Cave in the Central Taurus Mountains 🇹🇷 The material culture shares features from both Central Anatolia and the Levant, indicating Epipalaeolithic connections via the Taurus Mountains. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

One other I’d add is that this means that senior people—and many already do—need to grasp the mettle and act like this is no longer business as usual.

Helen Lovatt@helenlovatt.bsky.social · 12mo ago

We are at risk of losing a generation of researchers. It’s worse than the 1980s. I’d say: only do a PhD for its own sake. The work you do s as an ECR is itself important work. But this period of contractions is going to be incredibly hard for all career stages, & impossible for ECRs.

'It is so cataclysmically bad' for #ECR now. So painfully true. It's abt historians, but has been like this in #archaeology since yrs. I'm one of the privileged ones, and has taken me 10 ys post-PhD to land a permanent position after changing countries eight times. frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/6691/

A separate but equally important point: we *still* need to get rid of the unilineal evolutionary narratives! You can’t rope in later people on the other end of Europe in order to recreate a narrative that patrilineslity replaced matrilineality as some kind of universal process. 16/

There is a lot going on here but these results are wonderful (even if I find some of the archaeologists’ comments problematic). Here are a few notes to be followed up with a blog post at “Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives” 1/

Stone Age farmers’ households passed from mother to daughter

Moms and daughters were at the center of the family in ancient Çatalhöyük, ancient DNA and archaeological evidence suggest

science.org

Since our big Science paper on female lineages at Çatalhöyük is out now, it seems like a good time to repost our related paper that we published earlier this year on material and biological ties🙂🌼

“A Network of Mutualities of Being”: Socio-material Archaeological Networks and Biological Ties at Çatalhöyük - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

Recent advances in archaeogenomics have granted access to previously unavailable biological information with the potential to further our understanding of past social dynamics at a range of scales. Ho...

link.springer.com

💥 Job Alert 💥 We’re currently seeking a Heritage Science Technician to join us in the Department of Classics & Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. Closing date July 24th 2025. Details here: jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... #archaeology #archaeologicalscience

Job Vacancy at the University of Nottingham: Heritage Science Technician (Fixed term)

Following £1.6 million UKRI-investment in our Archaeological Science Laboratories, we are delighted to offer this exciting opportunity to bring specialist technical expertise to our new AHRC-funded cl...

jobs.nottingham.ac.uk

Matrilocal not matriarchal. I’m really unsure how comfortable I feel about returning to this type of a power/hierarchy discussion laden with a strict gender binary—esp when considering how far we finally managed to come along thanks to intersectional feminist perspectives.

LBV Magazine@labrujulaverde.bsky.social · last yr.

A Matriarchal Society Existed in Çatalhöyük During the Neolithic More Than 10,000 Years Ago, Researchers Find www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/06/a...

Obsidian tools from c.8300–7900 BC Balıklı (modern Türkiye) 🏺 They are different to those nearby, suggesting despite cultural connections, the early sedentary community did not participate in wider obsidian-exchange networks in South-west Asia. Learn more 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🧪1/2 Here’s a sample of words flagged by US agencies for restriction/avoidance, according to government documents as Trump seeks to purge the federal government of progressive initiatives. Archaeology has never been so disruptive! shorturl.at/dka55 #sciencenotsilence @standupforscience.bsky.social

The Words Federal Agencies Are Discouraged From Using Under Trump

Federal agencies have issued guidance to employees on hundreds of terms to limit or avoid using. An analysis of government websites shows many of the same words being removed.

nytimes.com

I'm very proud to have contributed to this new paper led by Camilla Mazzucato, which combines aDNA and material culture data in order to understand social organisation and kinship systems at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, Türkiye 🏺

“A Network of Mutualities of Being”: Socio-material Archaeological Networks and Biological Ties at Çatalhöyük - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

Recent advances in archaeogenomics have granted access to previously unavailable biological information with the potential to further our understanding of past social dynamics at a range of scales. Ho...

link.springer.com

We had a lovely time yesterday in Leicester talking about how we can create a decolonial, feminist perspective for Neolithic archaeology in Türkiye. Many thanks to the Wednesday Seminar Team for organising this! @emmabaysal.bsky.social @archanchistleic.bsky.social

🧪The Oxford Handbook of Mesolithic Europe is available, featuring my chapter on Identity, Gender, and Social Dynamics. Happy to contribute to this comprehensive volume alongside valued colleagues @univbordeaux.bsky.social @cnrsecologie.bsky.social #Archaeology shorturl.at/VfnRU

Don't Panic! How to fight fascism as an archaeologist. Hey, archaeologists! As archaeologists, we tend to be the doing sort, the busybodies shoveling and sorting, keeping and caring, custodians of time, places, people, it's time to lean into that! blacktrowelcollective.wordpress.com/2024/11/13/d...

Don’t Panic! How to Fight Fascism as an Archaeologist

Hey, archaeologists! As archaeologists, we tend to be the doing sort, the busybodies shovelling and sorting, keeping and caring, custodians of time, places, people. It’s time to lean into that, to …

blacktrowelcollective.wordpress.com

Individual people making the decision to leave academia because it’s not feasible with their financial/caring responsibilities happens every day, and it doesn’t select for the most excellent people to stay in academia & become profs, it selects for those that can socially and financially afford it🧪