Nathaniel Erb-Satullo

One thing social media platforms do is meld the British and US higher ed crises into one. I think there are similarities but, tbh, the UK feels much more like a catalogue of shambles and poor policy decisions than a real ideological attack—even if the consequences remain the same.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of opening up the results from a big batch of radiocarbon dates, and having them confirm all things you hoped and suspected but weren't quite sure about. Kudos to the amazing #ProjectARKK team for capturing all the stratigraphic and chronological subtleties

Combined with the number of cyclists pulling dangerous moves through traffic, and pedestrians blindly stepping off curbs in front of you, it makes the experience truly harrowing.

I've been cycling in the UK for 8 years now, but having started cycling in London regularly for the first time, I am stunned by the number of people cycling through heavy rush-hour traffic with headphones in (even over-ear noise-cancelling ones), sometimes while simultaneusly taking calls.

Pretty irresponsible reporting as the other article makes it sound like they did exactly the right thing. I feel like every BBC article on detector isn't finds should have boilerplate about reporting to the relevant FLO so people know.

As someone interested in archaeological metals, this is quite interesting. It seems they have carefully considered diagenesis, but I don't know enough about heavy metal uptake into enamel/dentine to independently assess.

In art history, does this have a connotation of "this is definitely a forgery" analogous to the connotation of "this was definitely looted" in the archaeology version?

👀

Was having a hard time coming up with something until the perfect one came to me:

"Said to be from"

Thousands more university jobs cut as financial crisis deepens University workers will vote on national strike action this month over a 1.4% pay offer made in the summer.

'Universities have collectively announced more than 12,000 job cuts in the last year, new analysis from the University and College Union (UCU) suggests.'

UKHE is a world class export sector, but has financial problems because the state both doesn’t want unis charging market rates to domestics and doesn’t want to subsidise them. To make up for this, unis have been forced to take on more foreign students, and the gov response is to punish them for it

Ah yes, wells. Famously flammable.

Good luck trying to smelt metal with that "furnace." 🤔

AI-generated furnace image with multiple impossible/inaccurate features, notably any natural or forced draft, and a width far wide for its height. A structure like this would not be capable of smelting metal.

Thrilled with the coverage our recent paper on copper metallurgy and iron invention is getting. Not so thrilled with this definitely-AI generated furnace image that was used to illustrate one of those pieces.

Link to our article: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A 3,000-Year-Old Furnace May Have Accidentally Started the Iron Age, Scientists Say This global shift may have come as a result of smelters looking for ways to increase copper yields.

My recent work covered in Popular Mechanics! Excellent furnace photo (not even mine).

www.popularmechanics.com/science/arch...

This ‘funny-looking rock’ holds 3,000 years of Iron Age secrets Experimenting with copper may have led to our eventual breakthroughs with making iron.

I'm all about "funny looking rocks"! Nice to see press coverage of my recent paper. www.popsci.com/science/iron...

Researchers have long suspected a link between bronze metallurgy and the invention of iron smelting, but direct evidence has been elusive. Our work help substantiate that link.

We show that copper smelters in the Early Iron Age were deliberately collecting and adding iron oxides to the furnace to help them smelt copper. They recognized iron oxides as a discrete material and were experimenting with its behavior in at high temperatures in the metallurgical furnace.

New paper out today, showing how a little known site first excavated nearly 70 years ago helps us understand the origins of iron. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Currently writing the report for my @gerda-henkel-stiftung.de "Surviving the Crisis Years" grant, centred around our excavations of a LBA-EIA fortress in the Caucasus. It's amazing what we've accomplished in two years--so proud of my team! Photo: @shmills.bsky.social excavating the fortress gate.

Got a question on Elgar wrong on my Life in the UK Test. Ironically, I only knew them from Peep Show, which I would argue is cultural knowledge essential to life in the UK.

I will never get over how sharply the Greater Caucasus range rises from the Alazani plain.

Very cool. We found an Abbasid dirham in my excavations in the Caucasus last summer.

Day 3: "I've made a terrible mistake, but it's too late to turn back"

Day 2: "OK, so this guy's Central Caucasian Culture is entirely different from the other guy's Central Transcaucasian Culture, but the Georgians' Lchashen-Tsitelgori Culture seems about the same (but not quite) as the Armenians' Lchashen-Metsamor sequence"

A short drama in three parts:

Day 1: "Would be cool for this paper to make a quick diagram to summarize the different Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani chronologies and cultural groupings for the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age, seems like no one has ever done it."

Wow, the Etruscans must have really liked khinkali.

What can we learn from trafficked finds? Revealing the results of neutron tomography of Iranian swords | The Past Recovering an assemblage of trafficked prehistoric swords from Iran presented an opportunity to undertake scientific analysis of these weapons. The results ...

Nice piece by my PhD student Alex Rodzinka, covering our work with the ISIS Muon and Neutron Source. the-past.com/feature/what...

Our excavations at Dmanisis Gora have literally put it on the (Google) map. With a 5 star review! (and not by me). Google maps image was annoyingly taken during backfill, juuuuust too late to get us an end-of-season final photo from space.

Outsider Bronze/Iron Age specialist here. My biggest issue with these
terms is not confusion between Mesolithic/Epi-paleolithic, but that Mesolithic in European context means an entirely different thing than Middle Stone Age in African contexts.