Simon Ramsden @sjramsden - Bluesky Profile

Something that I have been thinking about with attribution of "PhD level intelligence" or "PhD level expertise" to a machine is that it reflects an increasing trend among these AI bros and their sycophants to want the products of highly skilled training without actually doing any of the work.

09.08.2025 08:52 — 👍 2083 🔁 483 💬 58 📌 115

Creating 3 cord wrapped dowels using hemp twine.

Current activity. #ceramics #archaeology

10.08.2025 05:22 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

When you get woken up by this from the bedroom window #Bristol

10.08.2025 06:05 — 👍 15 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0

#OtD 10 Aug 1680 the Pueblo Revolt (aka: Popé's Rebellion) began in the Spanish colonial province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México as the Indigenous Pueblo people rose up against the colonizers. 400 colonisers were killed and the remaining 2000 expelled stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1258...

10.08.2025 06:26 — 👍 63 🔁 16 💬 0 📌 2

Gravestone inscribed: Alistair Stephen Fabian Mitchell. 13-6-1957, 10-2-2019. Barrister of the Middle Temple. My brain, socialist. My heart, anarchist. My eyes, pacifist. My blood, revolutionary. Around the edge, the legend: The only man in British legal history to be convicted of biting a policeman with someone else’s teeth.

A tombstone in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, photographed by Andy Darby.

Note the border inscription.

09.08.2025 16:50 — 👍 3173 🔁 1124 💬 61 📌 100

An antenna-hilt dagger displayed vertically against a dark background with a small bronze fibula beside it. The corroded blade is partly enclosed in the remains of its sheath, with bronze fittings and traces of degraded organic material. The handle features a distinctive looped “antenna” pommel and a decorated crossguard.

A so-called antenna-hilted dagger, dating 6th century BC, found in a burial mound at Niederraunau. The corroded blade is partly enclosed in the remains of its sheath, with bronze fittings and traces of degraded organic material. The name of this type of daggers...🧵1/2

📷 me

🏺 #archaeology

09.08.2025 08:35 — 👍 227 🔁 40 💬 3 📌 1

Met Museum photo of an Ancient Egyptian artist’s painting of a swallow on a flake of limestone, dated to the New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, c. 1479-1458 BC. The sparrow stands in profile with head to the right. It is delicately painted with a pinkish body. The outline and details are highlighted in a reddish/brown pigment. It’s legs, eye, and beak are painted black. Limestone flake dimensions H. 6.6 cm x W. 10.6 cm. This may have been a practice drawing of the sparrow hieroglyph which was used for words meaning ‘small’, ‘poor’, or ‘bad’. Egyptian artisans who decorated tombs and temples made practice sketches on flakes of limestone which are known by egyptologists as ostraca (singular: ostracon). Sometimes the drawings were used as a template when transferring an image to the wall of a tomb or a temple. Limestone flakes were readily available for this purpose as by-products of the construction of temples and rock-cut tombs. A number of ostraca were recovered at Deir el-Bahri during the 1922-23 MMA excavations.

Artists have always loved to sketch!

Sketch of a sparrow from Egypt dated c. 1479–1458 BC.

Some 3,500 years ago in Egypt, artists used small flakes of limestone as sketchpads!

MMA excavations 1922-23, Deir el-Bahri. 📷 The Met www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

#FindsFriday
#Archaeology

08.08.2025 13:21 — 👍 3308 🔁 693 💬 50 📌 34