Kenny Brophy

Poster. Pen and ink image of an opening in a stone cliff face to left. Text to right giving notice of the third conference on quarries and rock cut sites, archaeological perspectives, University of Edinburgh 14 to 15 May 2026. The conference examines human-stone relationships through quarries, rock-cut architecture and rock art.

Poster. Call for papers to left including conference themes. Facing risks, Cuting into Living Roack, Heritage and Recent and ongoing research. Deadline 31 December 2025. Text to right giving notice of the third conference on quarries and rock cut sites, archaeological perspectives, University of Edinburgh 14 to 15 May 2026. The conference examines human-stone relationships through quarries, rock-cut architecture and rock art.

📣 Call for Papers! International Research Network on Quarries and Rock-cut Sites, third conference.

The deadline is 31 December 2025 for conference on 14-15 May 2026 at University of Edinburgh.

The four wide-ranging themes offer broad scope from #archaeology, #geology, #history, #envhums 🏺

The stones have been tomb, cattle shelter, childhood dare and ley-hunter nexus. They have been and continue to be anchor for folklore and mystery. To reduce our telling of them to one thing reduces them and the power of the Long Neolithic. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

Cover of 'Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany,' depicting a seventeenth-century illustration of Stonehenge.

If you live in the UK, you can now pre-order 'Stories of the Stones' directly from Reaktion Books or your favourite bookseller. Publication date is 1 February, 2026!

Pre-order here: reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/stories...

Another beautiful example of how archaeology and heritage knowledges and their unique deep time affordances can transform understanding and drive action. 🙌

Trowel and Error A Public User Needs Survey for Archaeology

New report on how people engage with archaeology is out - Trowel and Error: A Public User Needs Survey. Lots to digest but key conclusions are: 1) archaeologists risk undervaluing and hiding ourselves, our practices and the role we play in society... www.archaeologyuk.org/our-work/tro...

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage and Creative Practice The Routledge Handbook of Heritage and Creative Practice explores the role of creativity as a tool for critical engagement with heritage. It provides a comprehensive study of ways in which heritage an...

Out now! The Routledge Handbook of Heritage and Creative Practice explores the role of creativity as a tool for critical engagement with heritage. It explores how heritage and creative practice intersect, in research, in practice and in a transnational context.

www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

#UrbanPrehistory

Gravity warpers!

This is also represents a perpetuation of a weird obsession with big monuments & sites that were totally anomalous in the Neolithic. That tell us virtually nothing about the everyday lifeways of people who lived in the 3rd millennium BCE.

What mysteries remain at Stonehenge? What about the hundreds of sites that have barely warranted any attention from archaeologists and are never afforded University press releases? Aren’t they more mysterious? Just saying!

2 high profile Neolithic stories in the media today. Yet again focused on the Stonehenge landscape & Orkney. As usual everything in between receives a fraction of the investment, time & media coverage. Neolithic studies in Britain is no better balanced now than it was 50 yrs ago

Amazing news, very well deserved!

Shelf unit filled with Blu-rays.

Really pleased with this set of shelves I made from old scaffolding boards to hold my Blu-ray collection. It’s a bit rudimentary but it does the job!

Last year‘s Archaeological Conference of Central Germany was on „A Stone Age History of Clothing“. We had the honour to welcome great colleagues to Halle - roughly one year later, the proceedings are hot off the press!

Soon available also in OA on books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/c...

Old photo original. Class photo

AI versions

Sample of the same child, showing how different AI apps have interpreted the data completely differently

Somebody posted an old photo in a Facebook local group and asked if anyone could clean it up. Well-meaning people turned to #AI. Lots of responders seemed happy with the results, but this is how you destroy historical records.

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...

#UrbanPrehistory

Ooft. Probably not up here as we have minimum pricing laws for alcohol but I’ll check!

One from the vaults!

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/...

Very pleased and proud to announce 📣 that we have another prehistorian in our midst! Dr Sally Longworth passed her viva today with very minor corrections. Her thesis, a contextual study of Bronze Age Farming in Scotland, will be submitted for publication (once she’s had a rest)!

#UrbanPrehistory #StonehengeAnything

Stonehenge ✅
‘Early man’ ❌

A rare opportunity: Professor of Cultural and Natural Heritage @durham.ac.uk. Part of the impressive Heritage 360 program: tinyurl.com/33bt5mu3

TAG 2025 Worldbuilding Sign Up This form is for you to sign up to participate in the TAG2025 Worldbuilding session. The session requires a 3 hour commitment and the slots are limited to 30 people. We will be playing an archaeology-...

Re-opening our sign-ups for the @tag2025york.bsky.social Archaeology as Worldbuilding game-playing session. It's on 15 December from 9-12, so it doesn't conflict with other sessions. Hope to see you there:

forms.gle/bcMCZNZUJPUq...

Udo Kier - cinema’s fallen angel and an embodiment of the screen’s delicious power to corrupt - is gone. "I would live like the hero of Huysman's A Rebours,” he once told me. “Have no clocks, and hire two nuns to go by my window and pray at 12 o'clock each day."

University teaching income ‘£6.4 billon less’ than 10 years ago UUK says shortfall in teaching money is ‘baked in’ to higher education funding system as institutions brace for new tax in upcoming budget

'Ahead of the autumn budget on 26 November, Universities UK (UUK) has calculated that funding per student for teaching in 2025-26 is at 64 per cent of the level it was in 2015-16.' 1/3

If in need of a harmless Christmas film ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ with Cary Grant and David Niven is on BBC I-player.

The TARDIS and Stonehenge

A hugely popular and internationally recognised symbol of Britishness, associated with time travel & outlandish speculative fictions. And the TARDIS.

Sharing a landmark TikTok moment for my Archaeodeath public education and engagement project. After 5-and-a-half years posting daily videos, I've just hit 150k followers!