Emily Tour

CAA Australasia 2025 Online Conference A free online conference on digital archaeology hosted by CAA Australasia.

Mark your calendars! The 2025 CAA Australasia Online Conference is coming Oct 2nd-3rd with 21 talks by speakers from across Australia, the Pacific, Asia & Europe discussing a variety of interesting digital #archaeology projects! 🏺 Get your FREE tickets here:
events.humanitix.com/caa-australa...

Congrats Joey!!

Just today and tomorrow left to submit your abstracts for our free online digital archaeology conference (2-4 October)! We're accepting both 15-minute papers and 5-minute lightning talks.

Submit your abstracts here: docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLS...

A fun online conference coming up for all the #digitalarchaeology peeps in the Oceania region!

Close up of tan painted rectangles with impressed cuneiform

New cuneiform pieces coming soon!
I’m trying a new technique to make them look more worn and aged. And they are tiny! The earring charms are just 1x2cm.
#crafting 👩‍🎨✍️ #sumerian #cuneiform #archaeology #history #mesopotamia #akkadia #uruk

Zotero has changed my life for the better. What a marvelous piece of software.

Next Wednesday 23 July: Check out CAA Australasia's upcoming panel on digital recording techniques in the field! Completely online and free to attend (and if you can't make it live, a recording will be made available on our YouTube channel after the event!) www.youtube.com/channel/UCdb...

A cylindrical wooden beehive with each end closed by a wooden disc. It is decorated with a pattern which has been burnt into the surface of the wood. Cracks have been repaired with plant fibre loops.

It’s #WorldBeeDay, so we're taking a look at this bee-utifully decorated beehive! Made from a hollowed out a tree truck, care has been taken to repair the hive when cracks appeared in the wood.

A small black cat is laying on a desk in front of a laptop, preventing the ability to complete any work.

A chunky ginger and white cat is marching across a cobble surface, on a mission (to get cuddles, presumably).

PhD-ing at the Knossos Research Centre this week, under the strict supervision of Naomi and Dakos, the work-life balance police 👮‍♀️⚱️🫡☀️😾

Metal Guru It’s always interesting to realise how much I’ve unconsciously and unquestionably absorbed a set of assumptions. To judge from this week’s visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with…

Holiday snapshots: out of the frying pan into the… forge.

thesphinxblog.com/2025/05/15/m...

It's always such a joy and privilege with any conference to get to visit new places, present my research, gather new ideas and tools, reconnect with old colleagues, and make new friends – and #CAA2025 ticked all those boxes and more 😊 Can't wait for Vienna next year!

CAA Australasia member Corey Noxon standing at a lectern in a lecture theatre, with a large slide presentation behind him reading 'Multiscalar Digital Recording of Archaeological Features and Pottery Remains at the Suwahara Site, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan'.

CAA Australasia member Emily Tour sitting at a table and presenting, with a slide presentation behind her reading 'More than just pretty faces: Exploring shape data derived from 3D models of artefacts.'

CAA Australasia members Aleks Michalewicz and Brian Armstrong standing in front of a slide presentation with images showing the UNESCO Budj Bim cultural landscape and its location within Australia.

Looking back at the amazing week that was #CAA2025 in Athens! Our Australasia crew repped with some great presentations, and there was an excellent program of panels filled with digital ethics, archaeogaming, network analysis, digital field recording, 3D modelling, machine learning, and more!

Can't wait for #CAA2025 (even though I'm madly rushing pack AND finish my paper before jumping on the plane this evening 😭). I'll be presenting my PhD research on Bronze Age Aegean administrative devices, aided by #photogrammetry, #shapeanalysis and #phylogenetics. Hope to catch some of you there!

Only one week to go until #CAA2025, folks! Head to the program page to check out the sessions and papers, and start planning out your conference schedule: 👉https://2025.caaconference.org/program/. See you in Athens for an exciting week of #digitalarchaeology research! 🏛️💻🏺

Excited to finally have my first 'first author' paper out in the world, and thrilled that it combines my two loves of ancient scripts and digital technology 🥰 And a huge thank you to my wonderful @mdap-unimelb.bsky.social co-authors Kabir Manandhar Shrestha and Rob Turnbull, who made this possible!

We have officially published Potnia in @joss-openjournals.bsky.social 🐍👁️👉🏽 doi.org/10.21105/jos.... Potnia is a #Python library for the conversion of transliterated #ancienttexts into Unicode. It currently supports Linear A and B, Arabic, and Hittite cuneiform, with many new languages on the way!

Just published in JOSS: 'Potnia: A Python library for the conversion of transliterated ancient texts to Unicode' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07725

@lisarandisi.bsky.social we worked with quite a bit of #ephemera for this project, so it would be cool to chat about what you're up to at the Petrie with the Archaeological Ephemera project!

For V Day this year, the universe gifted me with the publication of my first co-authored article, on material from Lahun at the AIA, Melbourne 🥰 My main contributions were the sections on the seal impression + stamp seal, but I also shed many tears learning how to use QGIS, so please admire fig. 1 😂

🚨 Early Bird Registration Now Open for #CAA2025! 🚨

🚨 Early Bird Registration Now Open for #CAA2025! 🚨

Exciting news! 🗓 Early bird registration for CAA 2025 is officially OPEN!
🔗 Register now: 2025.caaconference.org/registration/

#CAA2025 #EarlyBird #ConferenceRegistration #Athens2025 #AcademicEvent

📢#booklaunch alert for my wonderful PhD supervisor, Robert Turnbull 📢If Bayesian phylogenetics, manuscript studies or textual criticism are up your alley, you should definitely tune in this coming Thursday 13 Feb @ 3pm! In-person at UniMelb, or on Zoom.

The wax seal of a prominent 19th century palaeontologist, Ebenezer Emmons (1799–1863) of a Trinucleid trilobite. 🪳

Six Cookies in the shape of the Venus of Willendotf lined up.on a baking tray

And ready to bake! Replicating Gravettian iconography in cookie dough. 🦣🏺

Two large volumes of "The New Documents in Mycenaean Greek", edited by John Killen, each with a photograph of a Linear B tablet on the cover. Volume 1: Introductory Essays and drawings of selected tablets; volume 2: selected tablets and endmatter

My review of New Documents in Mycenaean Greek is now out in BMCR! Tldr: essential reference work for Linear B studies, but I've tried to give some tips esp for new students/researchers on how to use it productively & a few things to watch out for

bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2024/2024.12...

#AncientBluesky 🏺

Very excited (and a bit nervous) to announce that I will be hiring two Postdocs for my new group(!) in Copenhagen to study the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA which survives in present-day humans. Retweet will be much appreciated :)

Link for application:
candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Picture of "Doban-kun" in a display case. This clay tablet figurine is decorated with a pattern of impressed dots, with a large distinctive mouth, two deeper set eyes, five dots running down the center of the figurine with three dots to the left of the centerline and 4 dots to the right.

Really cool #Jomon artifact of the week from the Oyu Stone Circle site in Akita. This little clay tablet is Doban-kun, and they're dated to about 3,500 years ago during the Late Jomon period. There's an interesting pattern used in it's design that's pretty special...
#archaeology #Japan

Photo of a very tired Emily on the left, with a slightly pained smile/grimace, and a poor quality photo of some a poor quality taxidermy of a primate (?) on the right, also with a slightly pained smile/grimace

End of the academic year got me feeling like a bad quality photo of some even worse taxidermy ✌🏽 #spotthedifference Running on no sleep and all adrenaline, but excited for one more presentation today at the fabulous De/Coding Digital Archaeology Symposium 😍 www.unimelb.edu.au/mdap/events/...

Details of Emily's talk at PyCon AU 2024, titled '"Introducing Potnia: A Python language library for the conversion of ancient texts to Unicode". PyCon AU is being held at the Melbourne Convention Centre from 22–26 November 2024. Speakers are Emily Tour and Kabir Manandhar Shrestha, and talk will be held at Eureka 2, Saturday, 1:30pm. Registration link is pycon.org.au/attend

This Sat @ 13:30 AEDT, I'll be presenting at my first programming conference, on a little Python library I've been working on with some colleagues 🐍 Nervous about speaking in front of a technical audience, but excited to show 'Potnia' off to the world (or Melbourne, at least 😅) #digitalarchaeology

a cat is sitting on a couch looking at a laptop computer . Alt: Cat in clothes typing furiously on a laptop computer

Don't forget, this is the last week to get your paper, poster or workshop abstracts in for #CAA2025, being held next year in Athens!🗓️ Due 24 November 2024 🗓️Select your session and get typing! 2025.caaconference.org/call-for-pap... #digitalarchaeology #archaeology #cfp

Two scribes depicted in an ancient Assyrian low relief, using styluses to write on clay tablets.

A cuneiform tablet with writing on it.

For me, the most incredible artefacts from the ancient world are the letters people wrote on clay tablets and sent to one another over thousands of years in Mesopotamia, going back to more than 5,000 years ago.

They contain recognisable humanity, warmth and humour. Here's a thread of my favourites.