Lasse Lukas P Herskind

I'll take two!

Just finished a well-executed #DIALPAST course on 'AI in Archaeology' in lovely Paris 🌟
GenAI & LLM ethics, AI in archaeological prospection, data mining legacy data - i understand this stuff better now.
Thanks to my #phd colleagues who participated, and thanks to
@uio.no for hosting DIALPAST

"[The] rich ornamentation", he continues, "[...] was probably produced at different times, when the owner felt like further adorning his tool in his spare time. The main motifs in this ornamentation are purely geometric figures, carelessly placed and quite casually thrown together."

Artefact drawing of the Skalstrup Mose axe. From Plonka 2003 'The Portable art of Mesolithic Europe', fig.124

Here you see the entire surface decoration. Lots of stuff going on - note also the snake(s)?! Broholm (1924) writes: "Perhaps one dares to see a fumbling attempt to portray a snake or worm".

Photograph of one side of the Skalstrup Mose axe (Photo: Anne Vad Christiansen, Nationalmuseet, CC-BY-SA), with close-up and redrawn detail of the fish-and-net-like engravings

The Mesolithic people evidently depicted fish exactly as any of us would today. But what is the fish swimming towards? Could it be a net? We don't know of course, but if you were to argue for Mesolithic art as a storytelling practice, this axe from Skalstrup Mose would be relevant to bring up

Big tubular bone. Don't think there is a species ID, but perhaps red deer?

"All the bands are very superficially and inaccurately engraved, as is the case with the engravings on other older Stone Age artefacts. It is probably correct to say that these engravings are more likely to be the result of idle hands than to be regarded as a specific ornamentation."

Old photograph of fragmented comb, Ertebølle culture. From Madsen 'Affaldsdynger fra Stenalderen i Danmark, undersøgte for Nationalmuseet' (1900), Plate VII

It's not an aggressive hand gesture sent from the distant past, but rather a comb with broken-off teeth from the eponymous Ertebølle shell midden.
Neergaard (1900) found the object itself to be 'probably the most charming of all the [Ertebølle] combs', but he is super underwhelmed by its decoration

(PDF) Meaningful Mesolithic Martens? A Multispecies Reassessment of the Mustelid remains from Tybrind Vig, Denmark PDF | The presence of pine martens at prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlements has predominantly been interpreted as evidence of fur harvesting. In line... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

If you enjoy furry mustelids, throwbacks to famous archaeological sites and theoretical discussions on Mesolithic human-animal ontologies, you might enjoy this fresh article, with christmas greetings from @sofiefh.bsky.social and I
❤️🐾

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Close-up image of a sand coloured stone, with a diagonal crack. The sand rock has a textured surface, and small spots of blue can be seen towards the centre of the stone. The background is grey.

Microscopic photo of the blue spots, that are irregular in shape and size and positioned diagonally across the image. The rest of the photo shows the rough sand coloured texture of the stone.

Time to update your Palaeolithic palettes... 🔵

Very proud to share our new research on the OLDEST use of blue pigment! We identified traces of azurite - a vibrant blue mineral - on a stone object around 14-13,000 years old. Why is this so exciting? 👇🏺

doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Back 🏡 again from #MESO2025 in Ferrara, Italy, where I finally got to meet the faces of the field.
A Mesolithic-specific week like this only comes along every 5yrs, so I appreciated every minute of it. Now it's back to the Paternity bubble 🫧🌷

This aurochs radius mattock-head was found 100years ago 🎉

Brøndsted 1934: "... the three long lines with the transverse zigzag is an unusually precise and well-executed motif for Mesolithic ornamentation, demonstrating that the art of this period was capable of deliberately stylised geometrisation"

Drawn by A.Andersson, from Schmitt 1995: The West Swedish Hensbacka: a maritime adaptation and a seasonal expression of the North-Central European Ahrensburgian

"Transgressional phases, between 10.000-7.000 BP, may have caused a certain amount of inconvenience!"

The results of the 𝗝𝗔𝗦 / 𝗦𝗔𝗦 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 are out, and we are excited to announce the winner for 2024 is Lasse Lukas Herskind from Aarhus University! | The Society for Archaeological S... The results of the 𝗝𝗔𝗦 / 𝗦𝗔𝗦 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 are out, and we are excited to announce the winner for 2024 is Lasse Lukas Herskind from Aarhus University! Lasse received the award for his ...

Oi, I won an Early Career Researcher award for this neat paper doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...
(go read it plz❤️)
Thanks a lot to SAS & JAS!

lnkd.in/ee37g7-r

So long and tschüss to Grabow, the iconic Late Palaeolithic amber workshop. Great campaign on all parameters, run by top-notch @au.dk @auarcher.bsky.social students 🚀

Off to the field with @ll-herskind.bsky.social and a group of awesome students - four weeks teaching excavation and my @erc.europa.eu project CLIOARCH’s very last field season. And we’re going to excavate the world’s oldest amber art workshop from the Late Pleistocene 🤩

Nerve-racking day of sampling from these precious artefacts, but the results will be equally invaluable.
Let's get those radiocarbon dates!
⏳🦴🏺

Photo: Nationalmuseet Site: Øgårde, Zealand, DK

Take a moment to appreciate this stunning photo of a fragmented, perforated, neatly decorated artefact made from an aurochs radius ✨🏺

But how old is it, you ask? Time will tell!
#archaeology

I know full well that ResearchGate achievements are just a gamification gimmick that annoyingly fills our inboxes, but sometimes I have to admit it works. The 1000 "reads" of my 2023 MA thesis at least suggests that it lives its own life on the www.

Wonder how many actually read the thing though

Velkommen til vores første alumnedag på Moesgård - med bl.a. den helt store fredagsbar. Vi glæder os. Sign up here lnkd.in/dswV5fSw

Lige mine ord!

From Brinch Petersen 2016: Afterlife in the Danish Mesolithic – the creation, use and discarding of »Loose Human Bones«, fig.11a-b

This heavily used #Maglemose amber pendant depicts a group of people. Brinch Petersen gives a spooky interpretation:

"...four geometrical and standing persons with upright arms with a fifth floating above while a severed head is being presented by the last standing figure to the right."
#prehistory

From Larsson 1988: Ett fångstsamhälle för 7000 år sedan : boplatser och gravar i Skateholm, p.93

First pummeled by a wild boar, later killed and dismembered. The #Ertebølle man from Grave 13 at Skateholm had a rough life.

Perhaps it would have been a comfort for him to know that, ~7000 years later, archaeologists would make a comically morbid cartoon out of it 🏺

More on this here ➡️https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2023.12

Contemporary judgements of #prehistoric #art influence how we research and disseminate it.

Mesolithic art has, in implicit comparison to more famous traditions, often been described as “sparse and poor, without much care… As a whole, a hasty, random frippery without independent worth or bearing”

Bluesky is emerging as the new platform for science - Mike Young Academy Scientific Twitter is about to find its true successor. And it is not X. This, our latest release, shows that the Bluesky network of scientists is growing — and growing.

🌍 We have just released a NEW global top 100 list of scientist and science communicators on Bluesky. @lassehjorthmadsen.bsky.social and I map out the new emerging community: How are the research fields clustered? All likes, reshares, and love 😍 is appreciated! mikeyoungacademy.dk/bluesky-is-e...

I enjoy the humour of it - a rare thing in academic text! And it immediately caught my eye, which I guess is the essence of what a title should do.

But of course, it's a quite informal 'festschrift' piece, so maybe that's why old Cornelius allowed himself a bit of fun

Best article title I've seen in a while

' Megaliths ☹️ '

#academicsky #PhD

Foto: Åke Nilsson, Blekinge museum © 2014.

The Beautiful Rotten-Fish Bone-Knife:

This ~9430yr-old slotted bone tool (arguably a stylized depiction of a fish/fish skeleton) from Norje Sunnansund was excavated in relation to a ditch used to store and ferment fish - the world's earliest evidence of fermentation. Swedish tradition runs deep!?🐟💚

Photo: Nationalmuseet Object: Snedsted NM A54533

Two Mesolithic butterflies - A moment of artistic expression? Animist magic? Or a meaning-laden, communicative symbol?

#StoneAge #Art #Magic #Symbolism 🏺