Rachel King

THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR LET’S GOOOOOO

Our first speaker for the series will be Hiba Alkhalaf (Voices of Heritage/Aswat Alturath). She'll be speaking about "From Destruction to Recovery: Syrian Heritage, Fourteen Years on". Link to book below.

www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event...

There is nothing better than Robert Lloyd Parry reading a ghost story in a chapel in December. It is as much a part of Christmas as carols, presents and watching It's A Wonderful Life for the forty-first time.

The emergence and diversification of dog morphology Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been con...

In the immortal words of Sir Mix-a-Lot: "And ugh, double-up, ugh, ugh".

2 doggy papers are so much better than 1. Both studies a testament to slow science & international collaboration between brilliant people. What it's all about.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Job Vacancy: Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Islamic Archaeology The UCL Institute of Archaeology currently has a vacancy for an Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Islamic Archaeology (Ref.: B03-02751).

🚨 Job Klaxon! 🚨

@ucl.ac.uk Institute of Archaeology currently has a vacancy for an Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Islamic Archaeology (Ref.: B03-02751)
The post is available from 1 Jan 2026 & is funded until 31 Dec 2028 in the first instance, providing cover for Corisande Fenwick

bit.ly/4oxQgfp

Making cutting-edge archaeological science accessible to others Archaeological scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries with regards to increasing the resolution of analyses and decreasing the masses of what can be analysed. But being cutting-edge is not e...

Super excited to use this fabulous ‘Behind the Paper’ article by @petravaiglova.bsky.social and @kjkillackey.bsky.social to teach my undergrad theory students about how good visualisations are well-theorised ones. Such a wonderful piece of sci comm! 🏺🧪

communities.springernature.com/posts/making...

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!

Look on my UNESCO World Heritage list works and advance neoliberal governmentality!

I’ve mostly stopped listening to podcasts these days. My sensory input is maxed out most of the time and I just can’t cope with added audio, so I’m not sure anything could make me listen to any sort of podcast for fun. I make a single exception for ‘If Books Could Kill’, though

The politics of milk: how a simple drink got caught up in power, culture and identity Milk is never just milk. It’s saturated with meaning, emotion and contradiction, and provokes strong responses in people.

The latest output from my milk research with Johanna Zetterström-Sharp @uclarchaeology.bsky.social published in @theconversation.com

theconversation.com/the-politics...

Flyer for book, IN THE SHADOW OF EL TAJIN: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico. "Immensely important.... Sam Holley-Kline reframes the archaeological site of El Tajín as a location of recent, rather than just ancient, Indigenous history. In the Shadow of El Tajín makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of the history of archaeology in Mexico and beyond, as well as to our understanding of Mexican political economy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." -LISA PINLEY COVERT, author of San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site. Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site's relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange. In the Shadow of El Tajin tells the story of how a landscape of ancient mounds and ruins became an archaeological site, brings to light the network of actors who made it happen, and reveals the Indigenous histories silenced in the process. By drawing on the insights of Indigenous Totonac peoples who have lived and worked in El Tajín for more than a century, Sam Holley-Kline explores historical processes that made both the archaeological site and regional historical memory. In the Shadow of El Tajín decenters discussions of the state and tourism industry by focusing on the industries and workers who are integral to the functioning of the site but who have historically been overlooked by studies of the ancient past. Holley-Kline recovers local Indigenous histories in dialogue with broader trends in scholarship to demonstrate the rich recent past of El Tajín, a place better known for its ancient history. SAVE 40% with code 6AF25 at nebraskapress.unl.edu

Just over a week out from publication day for my book, In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico (@univnebpress.bsky.social). Read more below or at www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978....

🗃️📚🇲🇽🏺 #skystorians #Mexico #archaeology #heritage

Look at the cool things my colleagues are doing! ✨

So very excited to be a panellist at #UAD25 @uclarchaeology.bsky.social! Come ask me anything (and entertain my kids who will be on their own half term adventure) 🏺

Book cultures in archaeology YESPLEASE!🏺

Reviewer 2 says I need to ‘engage with Rachel King’s work more’ in this paper and 1) right on, but also 2) do I not have a distinctive writing voice?! Is this a hidden superpower?

Remains of a destroyed building: the Amara West archaeological storeroom (credit: Shadia Abdrabo, National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums).

NEW Sudan is a diverse country with a rich cultural heritage that is under threat from conflict. In a guest editorial, Habab Idriss Ahmed & Geoff Emberling discuss the brave efforts of the Sudanese antiquities department (NCAM) to protect Sudan's #archaeology 🏺

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Are you a student at a UK university and looking for support to come to TAG York? Did you know the Royal Archaeological Institute Cheney Bursary is available to support you?

You can find more details here: www.royalarchinst.org/grants/bursa...

@royalarchinst.bsky.social

Critique topples Nature paper on belief in gods Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the ot…

Teaching the 2019 Big Gods paper (retractionwatch.com/2021/07/07/c...) as a cautionary tale in archaeological theory, and also in how not to use excel

Super excited for this! And what excellent timing now that we’re putting together a module on (among other things) gaming 🤗

🏺🗃️

The British university mess is so clearly what happens when the incentives of the people administering and consulting on the system bear no relation to those of anyone actually working in it

🏺Putting together an exercise using field diaries for my archaeological theory class and wondering whether anyone knows of any digitised/archived *laboratory* diaries that would be good to teach with? 🙏🏻

(Before anyone asks the Catalhoyuk research portal search isn’t working 🙃)

Today is August 1.

Asking an academic how their book is going is a felony.

Aaahh I had an MA student do their final project on human-cat heritage, so will pass this along!

New scientist headline critics of de extinction hit by mystery smear campaign

Like science? Then you better be interested when *someone* starts putting out hit pieces on scientists. This is beyond the pale ethically and honestly anyone who doesn’t want to slide to hell on a slick of ai generated content that benefits billionaire business, maybe now is the time to get angry.

Artefact by Jack Harrison A game of legendary items & transient heroes.

A table top game rather than a board game (hair splitting, I know) but Artefact is wonderful mouseholepress.itch.io/artefact

What the dismantling of USAID means for world heritage As development agencies have become increasingly entangled with heritage projects, the end of USAID raises the question of who will fill the funding gap

2/ On that direction of travel, I wrote this earlier this year: apollo-magazine.com/usaid-abolit...

I have it on good authority that there’s an excellent study on the junk methodology of teacher evals in the pipeline so yes to this episode in like >2 months or so!

My children have complementary approaches to birthday cake

Me, photographing archives in 2023: I really should get these catalogued and onto a hard drive now so I’m not scrambling to do this when I need to write a talk

Me, scrambling to write a conference talk in 2025: curse these totally foreseeable consequences!