Tom Booth

Thanks!

Ah right, sorry thought you were talking about the Wessex Culture! Interesting I’ll have to have a deep dive into this…

To be honest given the number of these burials that were dug up in 19th century and the bones tossed away leaving nothing directly datable, I’m quite open to the idea of multiple possible worlds!

Stonehenge TL;DR - they moved some bluestones around and carved some axes and daggers on the stones. By all accounts a nice time was had by all.

16th-century watercolor illustration of Stonegenge by Lucas de Heere, made for an early guidebook for England. Watercolour painting of the Stonehenge monument with the surrounding ditch. A person id depicted lying on a green hill in the foreground. Another person stands by one of the stones and anoth (slightly our of proportion) rides a horse in the middle of the stones.

The Age of Stonehenge: 8th lecture down, 2 more to go. Today we covered the Early Bronze Age, how tin and copper mining in Britain and Ireland possibly drove the development of the Bronze Age proper across Europe, and how this enmeshed Britain births the ultra-blinged 'Wessex Culture'.

Synchronised lecture trajectories!

No such thing as too much corduoroy. Clothes, home furnishings, tents...

Yes, well I largely ignore them...they are usually either banal or useless or both unless it is something incredibly simple. This one caught my eye though!

There's an entire festival line-up on there. I see The Breton Group have reformed.

Greyscale diagram of northwestern Europe with arrows detailing movement and interaction of material cultures linked to Bell Beaker and Corded Ware around the Rhone-Rhine corridor.

I put this figure of Needham's model of a Bell Beaker/Corded Ware fusion into PowerPoint, and I kid you not the auto-generated caption was 'Map of the Battle of Brexit'.

@urbanprehistorian.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Little primer on quantifying human remains, using some of my work as an example. A thread.

As a commercial bioarchaeologist I use three primary ways of quantifying remains: Number of identified specimens (NISP), Minimum number of individuals (MNI) and weight (1/5)

Yes, I agree - but again in my experience, this is usually not about museums/curators being unwilling to do the work, I think more than anyone else they’d love to know exactly what they have, it’s about investment in what has often in the past been seen to be unglamorous cataloguing.

…provided a sense of a practical way forward and the good work that’s already been done. I can’t help but feel the articles, perhaps unintentionally, largely set up curators/museums as adversaries.

…museums to collaborate? It also does a disservice to people at some of these institutions who have long been involved in the complex, steady work of repatriation and who have remarkable success stories of how it can be achieved in very difficult circumstances. Highlighting this work would have…

…the way it’s been reported, implies that museums are hiding this information and wantonly storing remains in ways that exacerbate colonial harm, when often it comes down to a lack of investment and no capacity to either inventory remains or begin repatriation processes. Did you approach any…

I agree there is no case for their retention (unless this is the stakeholder community’s preference). I think it’s good that your work has raised the profile of this issue and if it leads to a broader national conversation, then great! But the way you’ve gone about this with the FoI requests and…

Carmen Sandiego from the 90s cartoon

Happy International Women's Day to the original International Woman

Yeah, this isn't right. The FOI request had 2 seperate questions: 'How many individual items of human remains are recorded on a database?' (30488) & 'How many individuals are represented by the items of human remains held?' (148 min.)

The Guardian has posted a piece on human remains, and as an osteologist I want to add some thoughts. First off I agree that the legacy of colonialism is a problem, and that there are issues surrounding certain collections.

But

The numbers in that piece are massively inflated for two reasons

Thanks Sue - in some ways it’s telling that the last FoI campaign like this was by a Telegraph journalist trying to expose rampant wokery infecting the interpretation of osteological collections.

Yes and even with the REF aside, work that this reporting ignores or is ignorant of in the search for a baddie.

Yes I assume that’s why they’ve taken Winchester off now - so these figures are of questionable comparability. In some cases it might be whole bodies and in others a single tooth.

Yes agree about the rhetoric - more heat than light - given most curators of human remains I know are pretty sympathetic to repatriation and would jump at the chance to address it properly you could imagine a version of this that was collaborative rather than reliant on adversarial FoI requests.

Raksha Dave is our 2026 Long Man Lecturer.
In A Conscious Uncoupling, she explores power, voice and responsibility in public archaeology - and why it matters now.

26 March, 7.30pm, @ ACCA, Falmer.

Find out more and book: sussexpast.co.uk/event/long-m...

Waterbirds, mustelids and bast fibres – evidence of soft organic materials in the Late Mesolithic Skateholm I and II cemeteries, Sweden - Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences - Skateholm I and II cemeteries form the core of a notable Late Mesolithic activity area located in southern Sweden on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The...

A fabulous paper - fur, feathers and fibres from the Mesolithic. A reminder of why good sampling, excavation records and archives of more that just artefacts really matter.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Yes, exactly and there’s a big focus on the big institutions which may or may not have the funds to dedicate to this but there’s absolutely no chance for the smaller regional museums. Lack of investment means institutional memory dwindles and more remains slip into the ‘unprovenanced’ category.

What began as a reply expanded into broader thoughts about the Guardian article on repatriation of human remains.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

I think most reasonable people would agree that the current situation for colonial human remains is pretty awful but getting out of it would require considerable time and resources which most museums don’t have, particularly in the current climate.

Add to this around 1/3 of the remains reported here have no clear provenance. Dealing with those would be fraught with difficulties. Destructively sample them to try to ascertain provenance, which risks further possibly desecration? Try and develop a consensus from varied plausible communities?

…world it’s not as straightforward as ‘send them back’. In the first place establishing which communities should be involved can be difficult and fraught with political complications. Then the preferences of different communities are highly variable.