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Phil Riris

@thearchaeologist.bsky.social

Senior Lecturer in Archaeological & Palaeoenvironmental Modelling. Tropical Americas, Indigenous history, computational modelling & rock art. πŸ‡³πŸ‡΄

138 Followers  |  150 Following  |  100 Posts  |  Joined: 10.10.2023
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Posts by Phil Riris (@thearchaeologist.bsky.social)

Among the foremost concerns of @thearchaeologist.bsky.social's research into the prehistoric artistic record, are what people chose to depict in rock art – one of humanity’s most ancient and enduring forms of material culture – and why. www.flipsnack.com/leverhulmetr... @bournemouthuni.bsky.social

26.02.2026 16:16 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Horsemen carrying items looted from a village raid, including chalices, briefcases, crosses and a woman, riding across a plain at dawn with a storm brewing in the background.

Horsemen carrying items looted from a village raid, including chalices, briefcases, crosses and a woman, riding across a plain at dawn with a storm brewing in the background.

The Trust’s February Newsletter is out now! Read about the hidden value of bat guano, linguistic justice efforts in secondary schools, professional mobility at the time of the Crusades,1099–1291, and much more: leverhulme.ac.uk/newsletter

26.02.2026 14:48 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 4
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From margins to mainstream: understanding the Amazonian Polychrome Tradition Expansion through spatial and chronological modelling | Antiquity | Cambridge Core From margins to mainstream: understanding the Amazonian Polychrome Tradition Expansion through spatial and chronological modelling

🚨 πŸ“œ finally out! 🚨 From margins to mainstream: understanding the Amazonian Polychrome Tradition
through spatial and chronological modelling

The end result of a beautiful collaboration between @bournemouthuni.bsky.social and colleagues across Brazil. ParabΓ©ns!

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

23.02.2026 13:43 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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The fact England had a crappy stone tool culture when everyone else around Eurasia had moved on to a better one is endlessly funny to me

22.02.2026 09:07 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Comparison of three temperate rainforest climate envelopes for Britain and Ireland: Where could our rainforest be? There are multiple methods for creating climate envelopes for temperate rainforest, and these climate envelopes result in different extents across Ireland and Britain. An awareness of these differenc...

How much temperate rainforest could there be in the UK and Ireland, and where? Despite campaigns calling for restoration in both countries, these questions have been difficult to answer. In our new paper we assess the evidence base 🌏πŸ§ͺ🌐🌳🌲 1/9

04.02.2026 10:31 β€” πŸ‘ 81    πŸ” 41    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 2
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Time to baffle the students once more

10.02.2026 08:15 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Goonhammer Reviews: Hide, Stone, and Bone, a Prehistoric Skirmish Game Today in (Pre-)Historicals we’re going all the way back to the Paleolithic Era to look at Hide, Stone, and Bone.

www.goonhammer.com/goonhammer-r...

Not every day you get a shout out in a tabletop wargame review

06.02.2026 16:57 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Research Fellow in Biomolecular Archaeology as part of the AHRC-funded PELLIS (Investigating the manufacture, trade, and economy of Roman leather via multi-analytical approaches) project co-led by Rhiannon Stevens.

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

04.02.2026 15:38 β€” πŸ‘ 8    πŸ” 9    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Rock engravings of a human and several animals, including a ~42m-long snake.

Rock engravings of a human and several animals, including a ~42m-long snake.

Happy #SnakeDay! This is probably the largest engraving of a snake in the world 🐍

Measuring ~42m long, it would have been visible from a great distance, suggesting it was a prehistoric territorial marker.

πŸ†“ doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

01.02.2026 11:01 β€” πŸ‘ 44    πŸ” 6    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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The upper Orinoco at sunset. Missing fieldwork a lot.

25.01.2026 19:48 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Our Open Access special issue on "An Ontological Turn for Archaeology?" in the EAZ journal is now complete and can be accessed via the link below!

This is a small but precious collection of papers.

Hope that you will find it useful and inspiring.

www.eaz-journal.org/index.php/ea...

/1

25.01.2026 07:54 β€” πŸ‘ 11    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe Geochemistry of stone tools reveals unprecedently large social ties among European hunter-gatherers during the Last Ice Age.

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

24.01.2026 18:19 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100 How did people create and live in their own worlds in early medieval Ireland? What did they actually do? And to what end did they do it? This book investigates and reconstructs from archaeological evi...

Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100. The evidence from Archaeological excavations

Only €9.99 as an ebook from @ria.ie

shop.ria.ie/products/ear...

23.01.2026 18:51 β€” πŸ‘ 46    πŸ” 20    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 5
An image of rock art, with overlay text that reads: Assessment Report on Transformative Change Summary for Policymakers in German. Available now! This is accompanied by the Transformative Change Assessment Summary for Policymakers cover.

An image of rock art, with overlay text that reads: Assessment Report on Transformative Change Summary for Policymakers in German. Available now! This is accompanied by the Transformative Change Assessment Summary for Policymakers cover.

πŸ—žοΈGood news!

The IPBES #TransformativeChange Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers is now available in German.

Access it here: https://zenodo.org/records/17940757

19.01.2026 12:20 β€” πŸ‘ 11    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

neolithic guys get pissed if you tell them their cultures are organized by the type of pots and jewelry they made. "we called ourselves the blood hunters" "we conquered villages far beyond this horizon" sorry bud you're the western linear pottery culture now

17.01.2026 14:52 β€” πŸ‘ 8189    πŸ” 1510    πŸ’¬ 113    πŸ“Œ 59
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Enduring Traditions of Indigenous Mound Building along the Upper Paraguai River (Mato Grosso, Brazil) This article presents the results of participatory research on Indigenous mound building technology in the Pantanal region of South America. In the Pantanal, the GuatΓ³ people maintain a long-standi...
14.01.2026 08:25 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Royal Society president reignites Elon Musk row by defending lack of action Society should only eject fellows for fraud or other defects in their research, says Paul Nurse

Musk's X has turbo-charged the anti-science movement & amplified misinformation, racism, misogyny & hate. It permits the creation of digital child porn at one click.

If these aren't grounds to eject him from the Royal Society, then what are?

Shame on them.

www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

14.01.2026 07:33 β€” πŸ‘ 396    πŸ” 107    πŸ’¬ 19    πŸ“Œ 7
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Doctoral Research Fellowship in Archaeological and Palaeoenvironmental Geochemistry (293027) | University of Oslo Job title: Doctoral Research Fellowship in Archaeological and Palaeoenvironmental Geochemistry (293027), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Sunday, March 1, 2026

EcoArch has a PhD position open! Please spread the word. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

12.01.2026 13:38 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1
Field of green plants (soy) stretching to the horizon. In the foreground, a slope of red soil rises up to the field. In the background, a small patch of forest (surviving Atlantic Forest that once covered the entire region) is visible.

Field of green plants (soy) stretching to the horizon. In the foreground, a slope of red soil rises up to the field. In the background, a small patch of forest (surviving Atlantic Forest that once covered the entire region) is visible.

A soy field in Eastern Paraguay. During and after the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989), Atlantic Forest was destroyed and Indigenous communities displaced to supply the global soy market, harming ecology and people under the guise of progress.

πŸ†“ doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

12.01.2026 21:15 β€” πŸ‘ 15    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Redirecting

A new ✍️ πŸ“œ from our project, led by sterling PhD student Antonia Reinhardt:

"Late Holocene vegetation dynamics, fire regimes, and human impact in Southern Brazil: A multi-proxy palaeoecological record from the Matematico Lake"

doi.org/10.1016/j.pa...

Very pleased to see this come out 😁

12.01.2026 18:37 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Absence of botanical European Palaeolithic cave art: What can it tell us about plant awareness disparity? Cave art has been an integral part of human history, providing a glimpse into the lives and cultures of our ancestors. Prehistoric botanical art is an important medium that can help us to redefine ou...

Biologists boldly tackling some important questions that archaeologists rarely do.

doi.org/10.1002/ppp3...

11.01.2026 21:06 β€” πŸ‘ 12    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 2
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πŸ“ˆ Registrations now open!
Time Series Analysis & Forecasting in R
πŸ—“ 20–24 July| 🌍 Online

A very hands-on course on dynamic GLMs/GAMs for ecological time series using {mvgam} & {brms}. Bayesian models, nonlinear effects, forecasting & live coding in R.

www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...

07.01.2026 09:19 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Beowulf: The Epic in Performance - Benjamin Bagby, voice and medieval harp YouTube video by The 92nd Street Y, New York

Hear me out: ONLY lyrics

www.youtube.com/live/2WcIK_8...

08.01.2026 10:33 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Postdoctoral Fellow (290375) | University of Oslo Job title: Postdoctoral Fellow (290375), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Tuesday, January 20, 2026

3-year postdoc fellowship in #Archaeology @uio.no as part of an interdisciplinary project to investigate societal, economic, and climatic effects of major 6th-10th-century volcanic eruptions through a comparative interdisciplinary lens on regional #resilience.
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

16.12.2025 07:55 β€” πŸ‘ 8    πŸ” 6    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Increasing human ecological impact over the Holocene (11,700 - 150 years ago) led to biodiversity gains in Europe.

Why? From ~8,500 years ago, the spread of farming created heterogeneous, habitat-rich landscapes that enhanced biodiversity.

Read our new paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/geb....

🌏 πŸ§ͺ

15.12.2025 12:52 β€” πŸ‘ 44    πŸ” 19    πŸ’¬ 5    πŸ“Œ 1
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Features - Top 10 Discoveries of 2025 - Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2026 ARCHAEOLOGY magazine’s editors reveal the year’s most exciting finds

archaeology.org/collection/t...

10.12.2025 13:47 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Lots of contemporary debate back and forth over whether archaeology is a science or not, but having seen some petty squabbles over joint *final* authorship, I feel I can safely say we're worth including in those hallowed halls

08.12.2025 15:02 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Soup in the classic Neolithic-inspired crockery

04.12.2025 10:29 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Takk for sist, Arkeologisk

04.12.2025 10:22 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Pulled the trigger and bought basic sync functionality

02.12.2025 09:22 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0