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Livestream tomorrow at 5pm UK/noon EDT with Drs Eleanor Scerri and Huw Groucutt (Huw Groucutt) to chat about their recent paper that's been all over the news about Hunter gatherer occupation on Malta youtube.com/live/ZGRjN20U0…

nature.com/articles/s4200…

Fun to talk with flint Dibble about our research in Malta yesterday youtube.com/watch?v=ZGRjN2…

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ge…

Claims for Homo naledi burial, art, controlled fire etc could be very easily tested by radiocarbon dating of the supposedly abundant evidence for fire in Rising Star. C14 labs will gives results in a matter of days to months. But why let science get in the way of a good story!

[NEW VIDEO] Archaeology is under siege from popular anti-intellectual influencers. I document threats and harassment and provide actionable strategies for promoting public educational content Watch, like, comment, and share to boost visibility youtu.be/F5PvwzgfKKw

#FieldworkFriday. Terraces, terraces, terraces. The TerraForm project is getting rolling (thanks Mario Mata González for the photos!).

First publication for my recently started TerraForm project is out. A short overview and introduction published in The European Archaeologist (researchgate.net/publication/39…).

Had the pleasure of visiting the important site of Tas-Silġ today. Beneath later Punic and Roman remains, there were several Late Neolithic 'temples'. You can see the huge blocks formed a curved wall, amazing that was done without metal tools some 5,000 years ago.

I have some comments in this piece about claims for astronomical orientations of Maltese Late Neolithic 'temples'. newscientist.com/article/248074…

Very nice new preprint, well done to the team. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

"the study of human prehistory attracts the most ambitious and, as one member of the discipline put it to me, “the most psychotic”, palaeontologists" theguardian.com/science/2025/m…

Great to see human origins research increasing in West Africa. Still far too much human origins focus on a few small, often atypical, parts of the world. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Hmm. I'm a bit dubious that a splodge of pigment on a rock counts as art. Sorry Neanderthals! (paper: link.springer.com/article/10.100…)

I love these steps cut through the rock to allow access to the 'rdumijiet' (good Maltese word, plural of rdum, the steep coastal slopes). This one is called Il Minżel Ta’Gaha. By such means people were able to access hard to reach areas and cultivate patches of land.