Penny Bickle

Given the choice, my border terrier, Hutton, would also happily get 83% of his calories from blueberries!

A first toast in Kuyavia: New evidence for drinking rituals in Neolithic Europe from Sławęcinek, Poland Excavations at Sławęcinek in central Poland, have yielded evidence for the Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture, concurrent with a sweeping set of changes that occurred across much of Europe in the mid-fou...

New paper! Led by Łukasz Kowalski, on drinking milk in the Funnel Beaker Culture, arguing for the complex interplay between gender, burial rites, and potentially ritual drinking of dairy products.
Open Access in Praehistorische Zeitschrift www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Always lovely to make a trip to Cambridge to chat to the great staff and students. This time speaking to the BioAnth crew :-)

We are looking for a research project manager for the upcoming FORAGER ERC Synergy Project. Based at the University of York, this is an exciting opportunity to work in a team of 37 researchers from the UK, the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia and Japan. Join us!
jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

This PhD project forms part of our AHRC-DFG funded project, based at York and Berlin. Although the job advert has been published in German, English language candidates without German knowledge are also welcome to apply. The scientific community at the institute in Berlin mostly works in English.

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.

Evidence for contact between LBK and hunter-gatherers, it grows at every turn, but we are no closer to really understanding the range and scope of relationships. The site of Eilsleben gives us more evidence of just how close interaction could have been. Plus that deer antler mask 🤩

Wonderful study on a cow called Veronica and her use of tools! The video abstract is a treat, as is this thread. Definitely using in future lectures to talk about how we approach animal sociality and mutuality of being in the past. We all know how good it is to scratch that itch!!

not only is this wonderful, it also involves the far side. so cool.

TAG - Group Self-Portrait Poem We are… Here. We are quite stupid, but curious We are disillusioned and anxious But we are many We can… Find ourselves. We can listen, observe and speak. We can think. We can come together. We can change and adapt and help and remember. We will… Learn and theorise. Prevaricate. We will act. We will take some rest (especially after a three day conference). We will join together And drink. We will hold space. We will return.

Our Don Henson Prize runner-up, Lizzie Lovejoy (@lizzie_lovejoy_illustration @lizzielovejoy.bsky.social) also produced a poem during the conference, a TAG Group Self-Portrait.

We hope you enjoy it.

And TAG will return. At Exeter on 14th-16th Dec. Save the Date and look out for more details soon.

This marks a rather lovely way to wrap TAG in York and formally pass on to Exeter for this year's conference! Announcing the Don Henson Prize winner and some runner ups, as the panel had such a tough time deciding.

Congratulations to Liz, Max and Lizzie!!

Best part of getting back to work emails - seeing all the Christmas and New Year messages from former students with updates on what they are doing. It really is joyful.

Also I walked over 43,000 steps across the three days (just around the venue)!

Thank you to everyone for coming! I have loved this conference ever since my first TAG in 2003. I really hope there were people at York having the same brilliant experience I had in Lampeter. It feels so good to have given my part to keep the theory flames going. Now to sleep till January...

Wonderful to see you both after so long! Hoping I can make it over to McMaster at some point. Enjoy the rest of your visit, especially the panto 🤗

Absolutely delighted to give this year's TAG prize to the Trowelblazers. Great way to kick off TAG!

Funerary Practices Among Central European First Farmers in the Light of New Radiocarbon Dates: The Case of Southern Moravia/Western Slovakia - Journal of World Prehistory This paper examines the temporal dynamics of Linearbandkeramik (LBK) mortuary practices in south-eastern Czechia and western Slovakia, focusing on the emergence and development of funerary traditions....

New article published today! Funerary Practices Among Central European First Farmers in the Light of New Radiocarbon Dates: The Case of Southern Moravia/Western Slovakia
Open access: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Chronology matters when comparing different funerary rites.

The surprising things ancient rubbish can tell us about our ancestors Researchers said ancient waste could tell us whether our ancestors were keen recyclers

Some lovely coverage of the new project in the independent :-) www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

@uoyarchaeology.bsky.social

Here’s the press release for our new project on Neolithic wastescapes in English from the university of York. The project is funded jointly by the UK and Germany, allowing us to effectively collaborate Internationally. Can’t wait to get started with Henny and the team :-)

There are also some amazing sites we will be collaborating on, with partners from Serbia, Romania, Austria, Slovakia and Poland. So a huge thanks to the DFG-AHRC for making a long held dream project come to reality.

I've wanted to do this project since my PhD, but methods developments since (cough) 2008, mean we can investigate so much more now. Exciting analysis to come from Dr Bruno Vindola-Padros on automated analysis of sherd wear and, in York, we are working with Physics to analyse microstructure of bone.

Uralter Müll zeigt, wie Steinzeitbauern erstmals lernten, mit Abfall zu leben

So very excited to announce our new project - From Reuse to Resource - joint with the Freie Universitaet Berlin, funded by DFG-AHRC. Starting early 2026, we're going to be analyzing the wastescapes of Neolithic settlements to rethink ontologies of rubbish nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/11/25/u...

New open access publication: Moving to Stay in (a Woman’s) Place: Was Patrilocality the Dominant Mode of Postmarital Residence across Later European Prehistory? Current Anthropology.

Thanks to Wenner Gren for funding the workshop it emerged from!

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A great account of the brilliant Kiel team's work at the LBK site of Vrable here. Andrew does such a good job of teasing out the complexity of that century of the LBK.

Only a month to go - alternating with excitement at everyone coming to York and sheer terror of how much there is to do in the next month 😱🥳😵‍💫😆

What a fantastic day yesterday was! Such a rich set of data and perspectives on kinship. I learnt so much. Huge thanks to everyone who made it happen. Also good showing from @uoyarchaeology.bsky.social with my paper, and Sophie Charleton speaking later on about the curious site of Banbury lane.

Want to help more people come to TAG - help us by building a bursary fund.

TAG 2025 Bursary Application Thank you for your interest in applying for a bursary to present at TAG 2025 in York. Please complete the form below to help us assess your eligibility and better understand the context of your applic...

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