Andrew Millard

The first meeting in Ancient Biomolecules in Latin America is here! 🤩 and it will be held in Peru 🇵🇪 on Nov 2026 . More info 👇

Medieval Diets Varied by Social Status in England, Study Finds - Medievalists.net New isotope research reveals how social status shaped medieval diets in England, showing differences between friars, townspeople, rural residents, and hospital burials.

📰 Chemical signatures preserved in human bones show how social inequality in medieval England could be "measured at the dinner table" 🍽️

🏺 #AntiquityResearch #ArchaeologyNews via @medievalists.bsky.social

www.medievalists.net/2026/02/medi...

🏺 Brilliant stuff Harry! Genetics of people inhabiting the Lower Rhine-Meuse area through prehistory highlights the variable dynamics and regional diveristy in the interactions between groups carrying disparate ancestries. Lots of complicated stuff to unpack. Rhine-Meuse ancestry associated with...

🚩première conférence de la CRABi (Communauté de Recherche en #Archéologie #Biomoléculaire et #isotopique) à Bordeaux les 12 et 13 novembre prochain.
toutes les informations sur crabi.sciencesconf.org

L'appel à communication est ouvert jusqu'au jeudi 2 avril (23h59 CET).

📢Fellowship alert! We are recruiting 6 ECR Addison Wheeler Fellowships starting 01 Oct 2026 (for 36 months). Any discipline, any nationality. Details at www.dur.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/advanced-study/fellowships-funding/addison-wheeler-fellowship/ and durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

The Gefrin Trust is delighted to announce the publication of a landmark volume by Roger Miket entitled "Ad Gefrin: Brian Hope-Taylor and His Quest for the Early Medieval Kingdom of Northumbria." Get your copy at the Ad Gefrin Shop in Wooler! #Yeavering

They do point out that their methods recover damaged aDNA and will probably not pick up currently active bacteria, so we can't really say whether any of the species are active or not.

I finally found time to read this. They don't discuss that their major identifications are soil-dwelling bacteria and not gut bacteria, which represent different hypotheses of the causes of bioerosion. Perhaps soil bacteria are what one would expect under both hypotheses after centuries of burial.

PhDs being offered across the Iapetus DTP for an October 2026 start:
www.findaphd.com/phds/program...

Please broadcast details of our Diversifying Talent Scholarship scheme too:
www.findaphd.com/phds/program...

@ukri.org #BlackAFinSTEM #firstgen

New paper out, mostly the work of my brilliant PhD student Meng Zhang!
Isotopic evidence for changing diet and agriculture in China from the Neolithic to the Early Han period (10-2 ka BP)
doi.org/10.1016/j.qu...
Changing exploitation of millet & rice, and animal husbandry regimes over 8 millennia.

Help deliver a unique FreePROBATE search service – Big Give Free UK Genealogy provides free online access to over 500 million family history records, so anyone can build their own …

The #BigGive #ChristmasChallenge is in progress! This is your chance help Free UK #Genealogy deliver its FreePROBATE service – and to have the value of your donation doubled by those (including the Society for #OnePlaceStudies) who have pledged match funding. To find out more and to donate... 👇🏻

📢 IMEMS and University College (Durham Castle) are delighted to invite applications for the 2026/27 Slater Fellowship, a three-month residential, senior fellowship at @durham.ac.uk during Epiphany Term 2027.

✉ Read more and apply here: www.durham.ac.uk/research/ins...

My department has an opening for a Professor of Cultural and Natural Heritage as part of Durham University’s strategic Heritage 360 initiative durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

Lessons learned: Recommendations for reproducible paleogenomic data analyses Souilmi et al. propose essential guidelines to improve the reproducibility of paleogenomic data analysis. As ancient DNA research often relies on the destructive sampling of finite resources, these re...

www.cell.com/ajhg/abstrac...

Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The scientific literature has seen a resurgence of interest in genetic influences on human behaviour and socioeconomic outcomes. Such studies face the central difficulty of distinguishing possible cau...

Full OA paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

A composite image of vegetation change at the Sevilleta LTER site in New Mexico USA, illustrating how grass landscapes on the left of the image are progressively invaded by shrubs, leading to a shrub-dominated landscape on the right. Image by John Wainwright

Anyone interested in a PhD project modelling resilience of dryland ecosystems in a changing climate, led by @ecogeo.bsky.social and with @blindmath.bsky.social, Denis Patterson and Roy Sanderson, please apply to our
@iapetusdtp.bsky.social PhD position iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

Computational innovation for the energy transition: Bayesian stratigraphic correlation of subsurface data

Funded PhD opportunity at Durham University. Bayesian approaches to stratigraphic correlation. With me, @palaeosmith.bsky.social & Kilian Eichenseer. See the Iapetus site for details of eligibility and widening participation scheme. iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

Now out on Early View: "U/Th Dating of Secondary Carbonate Deposits in Underground Galleries of Fourvière Hill (Lyon, France) Reveals a Water Supply System in Operation From the Roman Period to the Middle Ages" buff.ly/76PpH8q

Was descent in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe patrilineal or bilateral? | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Many studies have attempted to gain insights into the kinship systems of past human populations using ancient DNA data. Several studies focusing on Neolithic and Bronze Age European sites reported a h...

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Probably posted a preprint version of this before but good to see some formal testing of different hypotheses of descent/residence in prehistoric cemeteries of Europe, rather than just eyeballing the trends.

I'm hiring!⭐ As part of the DFF Sapere Aude-funded project MiddleEarth, I am looking for 1 postdoctoral researcher and 1 research assistant.

StratoBayes: a Bayesian method for automated stratigraphic correlation and age modelling Abstract. Stratigraphic correlation and age modelling are fundamental to reconstructing Earth's history, biological evolution, and palaeoclimate, and underpin the exploration for subsurface resources....

Our new paper is out: StratoBayes: a Bayesian method for automated stratigraphic correlation and age modelling doi.org/10.5194/gchr... with @palaeosmith.bsky.social Kilian Eichenseer & Matthias Sinnesael

detailed poll results for selecting Radiocarbon 26 Conference host. 58% Tokyo, 28% Cologne, 16% Ottawa, 1% other

The poll for selecting the host city of the Radiocarbon 26 in 2028 is closed.

The winner is Tokyo, receiving 58% of all votes!

Congratulations to Tokyo team!

Thanks to the Cologne and Ottawa teams for their excellent proposals.

Thanks to Kim from @14cjournal.bsky.social for running the poll.

👋 Hello, Bluesky! We’re Radiocarbon, an international peer-reviewed journal (since 1959) dedicated to advancing radiocarbon research, from calibration and chronology to applications across archaeology, geology, environmental science, and more. We’re glad to be here. #Radiocarbon #Geochronology

On the Identity (and Individuation) of Proper Names Though this blog has been rather quiet for rather longer than we might have liked, this doesn’t mean work isn’t being done…it’s just quiet, background work. But there’…

New blog post! We're not dead!

"On the Identity (and Individuation) of Proper Names"

dmnes.wordpress.com/2025/10/02/o...

New paper by Tamsin O’Connell:

This is a MUST read for all archaeologists who include isotopes in their projects.

“The signal and the noise: inherent challenges for isotopic studies in bioarchaeology”

doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...

#stableisotopes

Contextualizing descent in Neolithic northern Europe Introduction Our ability to investigate kinship practices in Neolithic communities has been revolutionized by combining measurements of biological relatedness through ancient DNA analyses with oste...

🏺

A fine new article by Chris Fowler discussing the complexities of genetic relatedness at Neolithic funerary sites across Europe. Argues the emphasis on patrilineal patterns and fitting established kinship/marriage schemes means subtle complexities are missed.

journals.openedition.org/bmsap/16175

Free UK Genealogy, the charity behind FreeBMD, FreeREG and FreeCEN, has started a crowdfunder for a new free probate records website:

www.whodoyouthinkyouaremaga...

To celebrate the start of the 2025 excavation season, we've just released the Gefrin Trust's recent conversation with Professor Sarah Semple. Read on for more! gefrintrust.org/conversation...

Professor Sarah Semple (Durham University) and team are readying to lay out the trenches at Yeavering for another fantastic season of fieldwork. We can’t wait to see what they get up to! #Yeavering #DurhamArchaeology #GefrinTrust

Skoglund Lab - Ancient Genomics Skoglund lab

Now recruiting for two positions in my lab:

Postdoc in computational analysis of ancient human genomes www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Bioarchaeology staff scientist supporting human aDNA projects www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Background: sites.google.com/view/skoglun...

Applications welcome!