Dan Lawrence

Last paper from Deborah's (excellent) PhD project is out in Antiquity today. I'm still not sure about the adaptive cycle, but if you're gonna do it, do it with clear a priori hypotheses and actual data...

What did people in China eat for 8,000 years after the arrival of farming? Meng Zhang, Andrew Millard and I used c. 6,500 isotope samples from humans and animals to find out. Open Access article here: doi.org/10.1016/j.qu... Come for the C3 plants, stay for the pig husbandry...

Forging a Bronze Age City: The Next Chapter at Semiyarka Recent excavations and analysis at Semiyarka uncover even more exciting information about this early urban centre of the Kazakh steppe

You may have seen the recent #ProjectGallery on Semiyarka: a Bronze Age permanent settlement on a scale previously unknown for the Eurasian steppe! 🏺
In our latest #AntiquityBlog, the authors discuss the first excavations there & next steps for the research:
www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

I should mention all of this was funded by a @britishacademy.bsky.social and @leverhulme.ac.uk small grant, way back in 2018. Thanks guys!

Thanks to the @antiquity.ac.uk team for making this cool video summarising our recent paper, featuring drone footage from the steppe hero @peterjbrown.bsky.social himself!

Nice write-up of our recent paper @antiquity.ac.uk paper in New Scientist - thanks to @chrisnsimms.bsky.social for taking an interest!

The social behind the physical - Assessing tie formation processes of ancient route systems Analysing and understanding connectivity of human social networks of (ancient) societies offers new perspectives on their functioning. However, social…

New paper out! 🥳

We use MCMC-MLE Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models (MTERGMs) to assess which network patterns and social processes explain the formation of the ancient hollow ways.

Read the full open access paper here:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#Archaeology #NetworkScience

Delighted that our paper led by Deborah Priß "The social behind the physical" on connectivity of Bronze and Iron Age societies is now out in Journal of Archaeological Science. It's available Open Access at authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

📣 We are sponsoring a session at the next #LAC2026
Our team members Michele Abballe and Dan Lawrence‬ ‪
@dl-arch.bsky.social are co-organising with Alessio Palmisano and Francesca Chelazzi a session on Archaeodemography🎉
Why not join us? The call for papers is out until 31 October 2025! 🕑

Postdoc Job! Come and work with me in Durham, and a bunch of @sse1k.bsky.social heroes in Venice and Basel, doing agent-based modelling of socio-environmental systems in the Ancient Mediterranean...
durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

1 month to apply for a cool postdoc position in my team!

Journal of Urban Archaeology: Vol 11

New volume of Journal of Urban Archaeology Vol. 11 (2025) www.brepolsonline.net/toc/jua/2025... @brepols.net Archaeological Perspectives on Urban Sustainability @dl-arch.bsky.social

This is the most hot dog guy meme coded thing I have seen in my entire life. Actually feel the hot dog guy could take lessons from this

Nice short write-up of some of the outcomes of my CLaSS project here. Looking forward to telling the @erc.europa.eu Scientific Council about it all in a couple of weeks!

Open Letter to CBA, CIfA, FAME, and UAUK, in relation the Supreme Court Ruling and EHRC Interim Guidance If you are in any way involved in UK Archaeology (in its broadest sense), and you would like to sign this open letter then please fill in GOOGLE FORM LINK. Responses will be manually inputted. The for...

UK ARCHAEOLOGISTS

Please sign this open letter to UK Archaeological associations to urge solidarity with trans archaeologists and action in light of the horrendous EHRC guidance:

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Inequality, Endurance, and the Shape of Human Settlements A new archaeological analysis reveals that wealth disparities and long-lasting settlements often went hand-in-hand—but not for the reasons you might think.

Thanks, Maurits! The @anthropology.net team did a great explainer which you can listen to in about ten minutes www.anthropology.net/p/inequality... They did a couple of the other papers from the SF too...

Large rich houses and small cramped poor ones on either side of a divide, image by Johnny Miller photography

The paper I led on looks at how inequality affects settlement longevity. More unequal sites last longer, especially in more complex societies with cities and states. That sounds depressing, but we find no causal link between inequality and duration - we can reduce inequality without causing collapse

Publication day for our @pnas.org Special Feature on inequality in the deep past bit.ly/WInqSF How do the transitions to agriculture, urbanisation and hierarchy impact wealth inequality? What social forces produced sustainable, equal societies in the past? Some answers (and more questions) inside!

Article information including DOI, title, authors, abstract and keywords.

Long-term trends in settlement persistence in Southwest Asia: Implications for #SustainableUrbanism, past, present and future by @dl-arch.bsky.social @mwdegruchy.bsky.social et al

https://buff.ly/4jQ4s1x

#OpenAccess #archaeology #Mesopotamia #sustainability

Please follow our new Contemporary Archaeology account - showcasing the work being done exploring the archaeology of the contemporary world by students in the Dept of Archaeology, Durham University
@ducontemparch.bsky.social

New paper! What did people use as fuel in Southwest Asia over the last 8,000 years? authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... TLDR - mostly whatever was lying around, including pruning waste, dung and olive cakes when population pressure meant they ran out of decent wood

A multi-proxy reconstruction of anthropogenic land use in southwest Asia at 6 kya: Combining archaeological, ethnographic and environmental datasets Land use and land cover (LULC) changes have important biophysical and biogeochemical effects on climate via a variety of mechanisms. Several climate m…

New paper reconstructing land use across Southwest Asia 6,000 years ago, plus comparisons with standard models www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
TLDR: incorporate archaeological data in your reconstructions, kids!