Lasse Lukas P Herskind

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 🏺

One of the finer things to come out of Amager - an island otherwise known for Copenhagen's waste storage and 19th century decapitations - is this decorated axe from the middle #Kongemose, ca.6150-5800 BC 🏺

Site: Carstensminde
Photo: Nationalmuseet

Good question. It was originally interpreted as elk, then reassessed in the 80s. Here is a Skalk article www.skalk.dk/artikel/fisk...

Bone and antler was the common medium for #Mesolithic #Art, usually red/roe deer, wild boar & aurochs. But there are a few exotic exceptions:
Surprised zoologists declared that this dagger was made from the bill of a #Swordfish. There is archaeological consensus that its owner must have had style🏺⚔️🐟

In South Scand. #Mesolithic imagery, human depictions are rare, but all in a similar style: geometrically stylized, always showing people in motion - and a bit ominous if you ask me 😬
Meet 'Dansarna från Bökeberg', two figures engraved on separate objects from a Swedish inland settlement. Wild stuff

Treated myself to THE palaeontology textbook - the equally cool sister of archaeology

But I fear this bookshelf addition will also add fuel to the 'digging-up-dinosaurs'-confusion among friends & family

Mesolithic people were big on geometrics. But was this 'merely' aesthetic decoration, or were there other intended purposes? I'm working on it.

#StoneAge #Art
Site: Holmegård IV. Photo: Nationalmuseet

This was both an inspiring workshop and a fitting celebration of Kristian Tylén - I feel refueled and happy to be working in this dynamic #archaeology & #CogSci intersection 🔀. Special thanks to @izzywisher.bsky.social

3rd day of "Celebrating eSYMb: The Evolution of Symbolic
Behaviour - A Workshop in Memory of Kristian Tylén" workshop.
Murillo Pagnotta on the makapangsat cobble: this face-like pebble is a controversial archeological finding, but can we test the idea that it's attention grabbing because of 1/

Major JOB ALERT! I and close colleagues have 4 (!) positions open. So if you're looking for a postdoc or PhD, do read on: