Trevor Wiley

Cuisine and culture-contact: lipid residue analysis reveals lack of aquatic products in pottery from Viking Age England | Antiquity | Cambridge Core Cuisine and culture-contact: lipid residue analysis reveals lack of aquatic products in pottery from Viking Age England

Great new study on early medieval foodways, specifically a lack of fish in cooking pots! Glad it's not just our #ArchaeoFINS pots that lack 🐟! Implication with the human isotopes is that the Vikings adapted to local cuisine & left their fishy ways behind! doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.

Previously Unknown Medieval Chronicle Discovered - Medievalists.net A newly discovered chronicle from the early eighth century is giving medieval historians a rare new window onto the political shocks and religious debates that reshaped the eastern Mediterranean in th...

!!! a new manuscript was recently discovered written in the Syrian Monothelite community in the early 700s that describes the end of the Roman / Sassanian war *and the rise of Islam in the Levant!*

www.medievalists.net/2026/02/prev...

It is so important to keep hammering in this point. People always ask me why I would have to go visit archives - why not just look at a scan? Because they haven’t been scanned! And they are never going to be! There are millions & millions of pieces of paper in every archive.

Sounds like a compelling high-level character or villain! A story where the weaker party is forced to save their (actually pretty fine) god or patron from a plane-walking vengeance-driven divinity stealer sounds like a hell of a game

Ooh, the creeping doubt is great! I suppose the darker and more cynical route would also be to rebuke the patron, but adopt a "servant to no power" jadedness that takes them out of the world of paladinism or warlockism altogether

Weaker but still good, or powerful in the service of evil...

I love the idea that this could build to a mid-campaign climax where the player has to decide whether to Break Their Oath (a.k.a. their contract) and lose those abilities, but perhaps embrace a new Paladin oath, or to abandon their lofty ideals and fully submit to the power of their patron...

RIP unnamed medieval people buried at Lundin Links, you would have loved quick oats

What the Saxon calls sandwiches are here What kind are they?

Hand me over those moccasins They will not help you much They are like a singed cat

I shall take a mouthful of hot gruel with butter in it Go to your bed first

The gurnet is plentiful to-day It is not so plentiful as the dogfish

Some key topics covered in @fortrenn.bsky.social's 1949 Gaelic phrasebook
✅️ dirty forrin sandwiches
✅️ the unhelpfulness of moccasins
✅️ gruel/butter etiquette
✅️ gurnet v. dogfish

Hey, Bluesky history nerds! Who are your favorite pre-modern historians on here?

PICTURES: Winter stroll leads to historic find: Thurso mother and daughter uncover ancient cross near St Mary’s Chapel A casual winter stroll along the Caithness coast led a mother and daughter to discover an archaeological marvel hiding in plain sight.

Pictish cross from a broch alert! From Crosskirk Broch, Caithness

A meme from the format of several armored warriors putting their swords into the center of a table, with the three visible figures labeled "tollund man," "me," and "the picts." In the center of the table is the label "yum oatmeal."

Flavours of Pictish life: using starch grains and phytoliths to trace late Roman and early medieval culinary traditions Understanding the seasonal and daily aspects of late Roman and early medieval life in northern Britain has been hugely challenging due to a dearth of …

We obviously know that they ate animals too from the zooarchaeology, but between this and the Prado and Noble paper which used phytoliths to look at Pictish foodways, it's really obvious that a large part of most people's diet really involved porridge. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Texts about/from the Iron Age/Early Medieval North: "They feasted on venison and cattle, or hunted the swift boar"
Repeated studies of actual last meals/recent diet: porridge porridge porridge

Keeping quite comfortably at the edge of both the archaeologists and classicists, as befits a medieval historian!

Fun Winter Olympic fact – all the stone for Olympic curling stones come from the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig.

Excavating the British tin trade that shaped the Bronze Age « Archaeology# « Cambridge Core Blog In 2025, we published an article in Antiquity, demonstrating through chemical and isotopic analyses that, c. 1300 BC, tin ingots made from tin ores in southwest Britain are found on shipwrecks off the...

Update on our archaeological excavations on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and the first direct evidence linking the island to the Bronze Age tin trade.

www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

The absolute lambasting most medievalists could give Bede...

I promise not to seal post all day but I DO promise to use "no scrolling, just rolling" or a variation for the foreseeable future. 🦭 #SeaSky

If you haven’t seen it, there’s a cunning plan underway to refight the Battle of Hastings at a scale of 1 man = 1 miniature. This is the Peter’s Paperboys ‘Hastings 960’ project, using units of around 200-300 18mm minis to put 16,000 figures onto the gaming table in October 2026. #spreadthelard

Some homes hold their ghosts with quiet forbearance. They do not boast of their phantoms nor advertise for psychic researchers to poke and test them. They accommodate both living and dead residents, afford privacy to both sides. Places of gentle spectral tolerance. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

Calling all archaeology students 🎓

The Scottish Student Archaeology Society Conference takes place from the 21st - 22nd of February. Organised by University of Aberdeen Archaeology Society, the conference is a fantastic opportunity to hear new research & connect with peers 👉 tinyurl.com/8bd4eu7w

A screenshot of a crowded QGIS map with many different overlapping symbols and points, clustered around the Firth of Forth.

Had a great time today talking about my (incredibly wildly messy) working research map in QGIS at our department Digital Humanities showcase. 2,000+ sites, 26 layers, and a lot of time spent data cleaning, but a personal resource I return to again and again!

Lower section of the Hilton of Cadboll Pictish cross-slab.

An excavation at Hilton of Cadboll by Kirkdale Archaeology began #OTD in 2001. It would culminate in the discovery of the lower section, pictured, of the famed Pictish cross-slab. The upper section - it may have detached in a storm - resides in Edinburgh.📸Ewen Weatherspoon #medievalsky

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.

As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.

Here's what happened:

Someone should do a piece about golf course prehistory!

Poster for "An Authors Guide to: Public Linguistics and Publishing Books", an online talk on Zoom, with details of the event on January 27th, and four framed pictures of the speakers

If you like books about linguistics and languages (perhaps you'd like to write your own?), here's a free talk for you!

On the 27/1, I'll be putting questions to four fabulous authors over Zoom, getting their experience of writing linguistically for the public. Link:
us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

the image contains the title page from Common Sense, the JCB logo, and the text "The John Carter Brown Library presents Dr. Joseph Ademan on Common Sense."

Join us on Thursday, January 22, 2026 at noon in the John Carter Brown Library Conference Room for a viewing of JCB copies of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense featuring Dr. Joseph Adelman.

Registration is required. Please register at forms.gle/iWKYHdfb5dQm....