James Harland

Two great scholars of the early Middle Ages having a chat about @alexharvv.bsky.social’s cracking book!

A new interview blogpost from me! This time talking to @alexharvv.bsky.social about his book "Forgotten Vikings". We also touch on the importance of promoting academic history outside academia.

Interviewed by the one and only @karanthir.bsky.social

Read on for chats about Frisians, vikings, Frisian vikings, and more Frisians…

It’s not gate keeping to use adherence to professional standards (and evidence of training in them via means of qualification) to decide who is or isn’t a practitioner of that profession.

People qualifications or none can write good history, but when historical evidence is deployed in a flawed way it’s reasonable to make a point about qualifications. It is a profession one trains in the skills for, like law, chemistry or physics.

People have for a very long time been expressing their reservations about Holland in this respect. I’ve not done so much recently but I used to rather more frequently on Twitter.

All I’ll say on this point is keep your eye out for a forthcoming issue of Climatic Change, where a response to an egregious example of this will be out soon…

People are allowed to have different reactions. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

In fact much as with Nixey’s Darkening Age I suspect it will sell rather well.

I don’t think it will sell badly.

Arrrgh *should take it.

This isn’t to say that plenty of people who didn’t go through that process haven’t become historians, of course, but there is a particular approach to arguments and evidence that to do so requires and it usually comes from that training…

I am not religious. I suppose I’m bordering on being an atheist. But good history, when it approaches the issue of belief, and why it works as it does beyond the most cynical reading of it possible, should it take seriously.

Because what we do involves reading things, thinking very hard about them, and then writing those thoughts down, there’s this odd perception that anyone who can do that is/can be a historian, and doesn’t (usually) need to have gone through the requisite training to be one.

Who’s off to TAG this year?

Bang on the money:

(A real achievement, bravo!)

This sort of project that, when it comes into being, its importance is so clear that the reaction is amazement that no one had managed to bring it into being already.

XRONOS is an open data infrastructure for the backbone of the archaeological record – chronology.

As described in our paper out today in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology (https://journal.caa-international.org/articles/10.5334/jcaa.191), XRONOS is the most comprehensive […]

Well, now it isn't!

I went to Ulm once and even went up the spire, and I was quite puzzled because, don't get me wrong, it was high, but it really didn't seem *that* high.

Will dm you for context hahaha.

Depressingly, a smooth, beautiful written style out of-kilter with what I'd expect in a given context or at a given level of training is now one of my main red flags. But I still *can't prove it*.

The reason LLMs reproduce language the way that they do is that they've identified what is statistically most likely: they write that way because, on average, people writing in a style identified as good write that way!

A common trope here is that AI-written material is easy to spot for everyone. Please, please, dissuade yourselves of this notion. Material written entirely by AI is getting through: in BA and MA theses, in job applications, in journal articles. Probably in PhD theses. And this should trouble us all.

Also depressing to see that video of the Chew Valley Hoard getting dug up, & the BBC failing to highlight that this is atrocious archaeological practice, thereby simply encouraging others to behave similarly, & go out and destroy the contextual information that is how we learn best about the past.

Troubling. I knew the PAS was under financial pressure and has always faced an uphill task, but I hadn't quite realised the scale of the problem.

Hard Times and Trial Approaches: Old Norse-Icelandic Studies Between Precarity and the Future Dr Rebecca Merkelbach reflects on her keynote speech at the most recent Saga Conference. Held every three years, Saga Con is the most important meeting of Old Norse scholars, bringing together acad…

My blog post with the ADAM network has now been published. It's about precarity, the future of small subjects, and communal approaches to academic work. I hope it will resonate with some. #IchBinHanna #KleineFaecher #SkandiRetten
difficultmedieval.com/2025/10/23/h...

(The various Samaritan uprisings that took place in late antiquity are certainly quite interesting though…!)

suffice to say that the concept of “popular rebellion” as we’d understand it in the sense I think you mean is a really difficult phenomenon to apply to almost all of it.