Dr Stephen O'Brien

Open letter from UK university staff: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. We, the academic community hoping to welcome these scholars, ca...

An open letter has been launched today (27/7/25) for members of the UK academic community (academics and other university staff) to sign, to press the UK Home Office to facilitate safe passage out of Gaza for 40+ students with offers for UK universities.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I'm just back from a week of carrying out portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry in Greece. 🏺🏛

If I were in charge of a small liberal arts school, I would start thinking about aggressively marketing my institution as a "knowledge-first" college. One where students can escape the intrusion of constant AI and focus on deep learning and engagement.

I've often wondered if the primary benefits of elite education are knowing when to be quiet for personal gain and how to manage or avoid cognitive dissonance while ignoring injustice. It sure seems like elite universities are going all in on punishing their students who haven't learned those lessons

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...

Small museums respond to UK Supreme Court gender ruling - Museums Association Vagina Museum and Crab Museum pledge their support for trans community

"There is immense variation between individuals within a biological sex. Biological sex itself (not just gender) is a spectrum – and it really shouldn't be a big deal. If you don't like trans people then just be honest about your prejudices."

Museums in the UK are increasingly having to deal with requests to access or get information on human skeletal remains from Britain in their care because the people requesting access have been told they have a specific genetic connection to an ancient individual.

There is an academic job market / labor mobility if you're a tenured prof at an Ivy. The rest of us will have to suffer the end of the American university system as we know it.

I was going to say Uroš Matić, but it turns out he's based in Austria.

YouTube video by Celluloid Justice A Statement by Colonel The Right Honourable Mark Antony

A Statement by Colonel The Right Honourable Mark Antony Will Follow Shortly. 🏺🏛
youtu.be/fytCo8YQf0k?...

My response to Cambridge University Press wishing me to sign away my work to train AI.

As a human rights scholar, I've read countless reports where both Western media + prominent human rights organizations term this as an "enforced disappearance" when this happens in other countries. Wild (and completely unsurprising) how the same terminology is missing when it's happening in the US

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is an original and provocative reconstruction of 1,400 years of classical antiquity. Sharply written, it is a major intervention in Marxist theories of cl...

Now available for preorder - The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World by G. E. M. de Ste. Croix

YouTube video by Cambridge Archaeology Prof Aidan O'Sullivan - It might have been like this? Experimental archaeology

"It might have been like this? Experimental archaeology: Making, understanding, storytelling" by Prof Aidan O'Sullivan

This talk was recorded as part of the Garrod research seminar series hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research on 11 November 2021.

youtu.be/x9FIEoWrZyg?...

Wave of Mutilation: Violence & Warfare.

American Historical Association Condemns Israel’s Scholasticide in Gaza The American Historical Association, the oldest learned society in the United States, has adopted the “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” condemning Israel’s “intentional effort to comprehensively...

American Historical Assoc. Votes Overwhelmingly to Support Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza

"When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer … [Eric] Bristow's only 27."
– Sid Waddell (1984)

Rumours say he's going to be Christopher Nolan's Odysseus.

Archaeodeath Notes on Necroviolence and Gaza Stop the conflict, end the genocide and cease the Gazan necroviolence! ‘Death is not the end’ when it comes to state-violence – because violence can extend to the dead and their t…

Archaeodeath Notes on Necroviolence and Gaza howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2024/12/23/a...

‘The darker angels of our nature’: Early Bronze Age butchered human remains from Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, UK | Antiquity | Cambridge Core ‘The darker angels of our nature’: Early Bronze Age butchered human remains from Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, UK

New paper out today. It's always worth reading the original research, rather than the media spin...

#Archaeology #Prehistory

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

Sad news from SHA: Mark Leone, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, has passed away. A founding voice in US Marxist archaeology, director of the long-running Annapolis archaeology project.

An author copy! 🏺🏛

Title credits of A warning to the curious

A masterpiece

I guess it would've been better if I'd impressed him with something to do with archaeology, but such is life.

The one time I spoke to Colin Renfrew it was at the TAG conference in Exeter in 2006. He was impressed that I'd successfully identified an extract from a Seamus Heaney poem in the TAG quiz. 🏺🏛

Archaeologists in Financial Crisis – Poverty Impact Report 2024 This 2024 Poverty Impact Report is based on the responses of 645 individuals in UK archaeology. The statistics that have been collected, analysed and collated by Lu Stanton-Greenwood. The concept w…

The BAJR report on poverty in UK commercial archaeology, released today. www.bajrfed.co.uk/bajrpress/ar...
🏺🏛

Ritual deposition: A skateboard graveyard on one of the footings of the Hungerford Foot Bridges, London. 🏺🏛

A recent article by Hamdan Taha in Jerusalem Quarterly documents the deliberate destruction of cultural and heritage sites by Israel over the last year.🏺🏛
www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656...

Tracing social disruptions over time using radiocarbon datasets: Copper and Early Bronze Ages in Southeast Iberia The transition between the Late Copper and the Early Bronze Age in Central and Western Europe saw large-scale social disruptions ca. 2200 cal BCE (’4,…

🏺

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

More reasoned push back against idea that 3rd Millennium BC migrations across Europe linked to steppe ancestries were necessarily violent, male-dominated conquests, this time in Iberia. Sadly the invasion interpretations are sticky in the public sphere.