Melissa Kutner

It’s ALWAYS someone like that

Allergic to anyone who uses the word “workflow”

Tchernia, "The Romans and Trade," 2016, p. 94

🏺 Nice study, though not surprising there are differences since cuneiform evolved out of symbols that seem related to administration, eg seals on jars.
Palaeolithic & Aurignacian markings maybe closer in context/meaning to Chinese late Neolithic/early Bronze Age symbols eventually used in pyromancy

Making Money in the Early Middle Ages by Rory Naismith

Now in #paperback, @rorynaismith.bsky.social's Making Money in the Early Middle Ages is an examination of coined money and its significance to rulers, aristocrats and peasants in early medieval Europe.

Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

#History #ReadUP

Sign the Petition Keep the Classical Languages Major at the University of Iowa

Hi friends. As I previously noted, the U. of Iowa is planning to get rid of African American studies; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, & the Classical Languages major—along with others. If you wish, please sign the classics petition: www.change.org/p/keep-the-c.... I will add more as I find out.

...the costs entailed in off-loading and reloading and eventually brought down transport costs to a level that was almost economically negligible. For a mode of transport combining see and land, these costs had been masking those deriving from institutions and the drawing up of contracts."

This quote by Andre Tchernia is striking in light of the fascination of ancient historians with NIE: "It may not be coincidental that the transaction-costs theory emerged after the other transport revolution, the one caused by the advent of containers in the late 1960s. They drastically reduced...

Cover of book with text in yellow reading: The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, overlaid on an image of an angel in seventeenth-century dress with wings and a long gun.

Hello Bluesky! My new book, THE FIREARM REVOLUTION, is out on 14 April. It’s about how a new technology changed society, and how hard it was to control. Here’s a little thread of what’s inside:

And why is the “legionnaire” in the Colosseum?

I don’t know those programs, but I did the UT-Austin one back in the day & I heartily endorse summer intensive programs in general. It was amazing. Extraordinarily good foundation for my Greek.

The long 2010s are finally over

Wilful Imprecision – Irregular Measures in Graeco-Roman Antiquity / L'imprécision volontaire - L'irrégularité des mesures dans l'Antiquité gréco-romaine (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique) (French version follows) Call for Papers: Wilful Imprecision – Irregular Measures in Graeco-Roman Antiquity We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the international conference Wilful Impre...

I didn't realize this was already out, and the deadline is near, but here's the CFP for a really interesting conference on "Willful Imprecision" (aka non/failure/gap standardization) in Louvain in September.
www.fabula.org/actualites/1...

Signs on Stone Age objects: Precursor to written language dates back 40,000 years

#Paleolithic sign sequences as information #recording system?

This is quite a fascinating re-evaluation of the "ornaments", i.e. repeated lines, notches, dots and crosses, on 34,000 to 45,000 y/o artifacts from #Swabian Jura caves:

🏺 nachrichten.idw-online.de/2026/02/23/s... via @idw-online.de

Three terracotta statues of Orpheus, sitting on a stool and playing his instrument, and two sirens, half human and half bird, standing in front of him.

Three terracotta statues of Orpheus, sitting on a stool and playing his instrument, and two sirens, half human and half bird, standing in front of him.

A highlight of early Hellenistic Taranto is the stunning terracotta group of Orpheus and the Sirens, recently returned from the Getty to Italy. While striking, their original setting, possibly on a funerary monument, remains a mystery.

Taranto, late 4th c. BCE, 📷 by me #Archaeology 🏺

Just chillin’ at the glue factory

Chapter 1 of Moby Dick, page 1 The phrase ‘Call me Ishmael’, the first sentence of the book, is highlighted in blue, with careful highlighting on the very big C at the start. Above this, written in ballpoint pen ‘His name’

Love the glimpse into the beautiful mind that notated this used copy of Moby Dick I got

The big picture: Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. Why it matters: The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement. Anthropic's Claude is the only AI model currently used for the military's most sensitive work.

There's a lot going on.

But it deserves FAR MORE ATTENTION that Whiskey Pete is going to seize the means of AI production so he can 1) engage in mass surveillance of Americans and 2) shoot without human intervention.

Dystopias this bad would be deemed unrealistic.

www.axios.com/2026/02/24/a...

we may have cultures that are matrilocal, or matrilineal, or that celebrate female freedom, or sexual agency, or have lots of little goddess-statues...

but we must also ask "what about the violence." is violence or the threat of violence used to extract reproductive labor from women.

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

AI is going to put LMS systems out of business because it will be impossible to have any work or materials online, ever, and there’s something a little beautiful about that companion.ai/einstein?fbc...

An advantage of having kids in your late 30s/early 40s is that there is no universe in which you could ever be intimidated by such a woman

Once a student brought a friend to class who took my Roman Archaeology quiz for funsies. Was perplexing!

Screenshot reads: She and other publishing specialists question whether LeapSpace’s limited reach is worth the cost. Users will need either an institutional subscription (based in part on the institution’s size and amount of research) or an individual one, which costs $32 a month. Many libraries are already struggling to afford existing subscriptions. And if users want to read the cited content, they will need a separate subscription to that content’s publisher—akin to paying for multiple video-streaming services.

The inevitable next stage of academic publishers profiting from academics' work is here - scraping it for AI then charging subscriptions for access to the AI summaries, and then again for the citations. Academic content assetization as we called it in a recent paper. www.science.org/content/arti...

A big proofs day!!! I worked on this chapter for a long time and it’s so exciting to finally see it in this form! This is part of a wonderful volume edited by @chrissieplastow.bsky.social and @hilarylehmann. Shoutout to @dominicmachado.bsky.social @antiquethought.bsky.social

Me (in a draft paper): "Surely only a fraction of Roman society was literate."

Student providing feedback: "This statement is meaningless. Anything less than 100% is a fraction."

Lol, harsh but fair!

Schließung des Instituts für Archäologie an der HU-Berlin Die Archäologie gehört seit fast 200 Jahren zur wissenschaftlichen Tradition der Humboldt-Universität. Ihre Schließung bedeutet den Abbruch einer gewachsenen Forschungstradition und eine dauerhafte Sc...

Please support the petition against the planned #closure of #Archaeology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Archaeology has been a part of Humboldt-Universität academic tradition for almost 200 years, so closing it would break a long-standing research tradition

weact.campact.de/petitions/sc...

...Instead, a Tiber absolutely full of fresh human waste rising into the city with every flood. I would prefer the cesspits, I think.

..increase the human waste going into the Tiber, rather than human waste being carted outside the city after having "composted" a bit in cesspits (as Nissin argued for Pompeii) & perhaps used as fertilizer (its own health risk of course)...

...if this is true, I think we are looking at a more disgusting Rome, not less: "On the basis of solid archaeological evidence, [Jansen] demonstrates that rather than being attached to cesspits (as at Pompeii), most toilets of Rome were connected to sewers under the streets..." Because this would..