David Roberts

22, 2025 If I must starve, let it be with dignity in my children's eyes, not with my hands tied by silence. Let the world witness that I did not bow to the hunger but stood, even as the sky emptied and the earth closed her mouth. If I must starve, let it be while I still cradle my child's hope, not as a number lost in footnotes. Let the sea carry my name to shores that forgot my people, and let the wind whisper: she fed love when bread was gone.

If I Must Starve by Nour Abdel Latif
(from Reefat Writes Back)

Machine Bullshit: Characterizing the Emergent Disregard for Truth in Large Language Models Bullshit, as conceptualized by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, refers to statements made without regard to their truth value. While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and...

“While previous work has explored LLM hallucination and sycophancy, we propose machine bullshit as an overarching conceptual framework that can allow researchers to characterize the broader phenomenon of emergent loss of truthfulness …” arxiv.org/abs/2507.07484

As the archaeologist who worked with the detectorist and land owner to properly lift this hoard, I'm thrilled it is headed for a brilliant museum that really punches above it's weight.

Please support their bid to secure this hoard. Every little helps.

Great to launch it on #FindsFriday!

In light of this, I want to share some resources on trans people in the medieval and early modern period, for anyone who might be interested. There is a thriving field of research into the lives, identities, and experiences of trans people globally before the advent of modern medicine (a 🧵)

Alternatively, y’know, you could get an AI trained on 20th century potboiler pop sci to generate you a chest-beating Neanderthal. 🤷
If you want your work to be taken seriously, invest in serious interpretation. 🏺

By their new Terms Of Service:
"WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for."

A reminder that an annual salary on minimum wage is now £25,396.80

It's such an indictment of the heritage sector, though, that this doesn't even look like an especially low wage compared to other opportunities. For a job based in Zone 1, which requires significant experience. It's getting harder and harder to do these jobs without independent wealth.

Thanks to an incredibly generous former student, we have some wonderful news for archaeology at Birkbeck: a new institute.

The Carena Institute of Sustainable Archaeologies will enable research projects, support global collaborations, and fund studentships as well.

www.bbk.ac.uk/research/cen...

Test match cricket. Best game in the world. Brilliant finish today to five days of superb cricket by India and England. Ravi Jadeja and Ben Stokes, what wonderful all rounders.

We at @instituteforgovernment.org.uk have coordinated a letter in @thetimes.com today in which numerous individuals and organisations call on the government to withdraw its mistaken rules which are having a serious chilling effect on civil servants speaking in public…

Incidentally I've arranged a geophysical survey next week and the area my team are working is forecast its first wet day since... our last geophysical survey.

Don't worry everyone, I'm arranging not one but two excavations next summer, so that'll guarantee a wet summer 2026.. this sunny summer is surely because I've taken a year off excavating, and the sun is getting rid of a backlog from all those wet july & august weeks I've dug through in recent years.

Are you a doctoral student working on medieval history who'd benefit from a stay in Paris?

Good to see this in the news, and to see the legend that is Buzz Busby, with whom I spent some formative time in a ditch at Whitby Abbey a dozen years ago. Well done HE Archaeology and Cotswold, looking forward to the publication in due course.

Volunteers working at tables on stratigraphic recording practice.

Projector screen showing the introductory slide of a PowerPoint for a stratigraphy workshop

Volunteers being shown around Salisbury Museum’s Wessex gallery by a Roman pottery expert

Had a great time teaching Teffont Archaeology NLHF funded Stratigraphy workshop with our volunteers last week, and some keen souls made it two days in a row and attended our Roman Pottery workshop the following day. Really rewarding teaching and engagement, upskilling the team ahead of next summer..

Screenshot of the research reports map, showing part of southern England

Happy to report that colleagues at Historic England have recently added over 300 older reports to the map of RCHME/AML/EH/HE research - the easiest way of finding archaeological surveys and other work on historic places across England: historicengland.org.uk/research/res...

This might have passed English colleagues by, but academic and development-led (preventative) archaeologists are united in protests across France today against changed heritage legislation in the government.

Solidarity with their struggles and I hope to join them later this afternoon. 🖤

New pop-up exhibition on display in the ICS Lobby, Senate House: Women of Romano-British Archaeology

Curated by Tatiana Ivleva focusing on women archaeologists who dedicated their lives to the study of various aspects of Roman Britain, including material culture, art and archaeology.

Visitors of the Harwell Heritage Network meeting observes Dr. Susan Nehzati explaining a data collection setup inside a beamline laboratory. The room is filled with scientific equipment, metal piping, cables, and control systems.

🧬 Our first blog post for HSDS has been written by Dr Ewan Chipping.

Ewan travelled to the Harwell Heritage Network to understand how they aim to connect different parts of the heritage sector and supporting the use of advanced spectroscopy tools.

To read more visit: buff.ly/KpXPPaH

"Where’s Walh-y? Searching for ‘Invisible Britons’ in Early Medieval England".
Strong title game by James Chetwood eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/22...

Arts & Culture in the UK is worth more than food manufacturing; 3x the value of car manufacturing. It employs 2.1 million people. But this Government, ostensibly focused on stabilizing the economy, is so uninterested in it that there isn't even gossip about the also ran ministry in charge.

Great to see UK gov announce £86bn for RnD, but how about they paid even the slightest bit of attention to the collapsing UK universities sector which underpins that research and development, through research and teaching the next generation of research professionals?

BHO is having intermittent downtime at the moment.

We're being hammered by AI bots and scrapers, overloading our servers. Our server engineers will be back on the case after the long weekend.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is due to third-party bad actors.

Promotional image titled 'Roman Britain from Cambridge' featuring two people walking along the remnants of Hadrian's Wall in a lush, green landscape.

Published in #Cambridge's #ClassicalStudies and #Archaeology journals, articles in this free-access collection bring together recent scholarly research on the #history, archaeology and cultural dynamics of #RomanBritain: ✅➡️ cup.org/3YMP1hO

Universities need to hire whiever is lobbying for the fishing industry.

This is a brilliant and deeply disturbing thread. Essential baseline data and it's totally unreliable.

Photo of lecture theatre at conference

Another incredible day of breaking news & cutting edge research at the #IronAgeDialogues conference at Cardiff University

Plenty of new ideas & topics for future discussions & research 🛖👍

Roman soldiers in front of cardboard gateway

The Leicester Roman festival #AncientBluesky ⚱️🦋

As the mum, I am the one who needs to look after her during that week. I don't have the luxury of going on my own, but I also can't be in control of my own plans. And people wonder why women leave academia? It's the 10000 small things, made unnecessarily challenging by people who don't get it.