Day 3: Jersey's Ice Age geology. #IceAgeIsland #Jersey #Prehistory 🏺🦣🇯🇪

Day 2. Starting in the field. #Jersey #IslandArchaeology # 🦣🏺🇯🇪

Day 1 of our Jersey Fieldwork Season. Leaving behind the coastline. #IslandArchaeology

We've arrived in Jersey for our 2026 field season and we are cooking our first meal. Potatoes, and potato fields will feature in the next three weeks of prehistoric research. 🇯🇪🏺🦣

By 1929 the Abbé Breuil realised the Mesvinian was not a viable, coherent technological stage. So he pivoted & set out the case for that the material discovered by Warren represented a unique technological stage between the Acheulean & Mousterian. He named it The Clactonien #ClactonPrehistory

Warren was unable to make sense of the artefacts in terms of known European Palaeolithic cultures. But upon showing them to the Abbé Breuil "the Father of Prehistory", the mystery was solved. He pronounced them Mezvinian, after a proto-Middle Palaeolithic site in Belgium. #ClactonPrehistory 🦣🏺

Just finished a watch-thru of Twin Peaks S1&2. Just as weird as I remembered but more scary and tragic than I'd taken on board. Now also having to process that folksy Pete Martel, who discovered both Laura Palmer’s body & the fish in the kettle, was played by Jack Nance, who played Eraserhead 😳

Hazzledine-Warren will be best remembered for the 1911 discovery of The Clacton Spear. 30cm long, made of yew, worked by stone tools, broken in antiquity. Preserved for 420,00 years in peaty mud on the Clacton-on-Sea foreshore. Its the oldest known wooden weapon in the world. #ClactonPrehistory 🦣🏺

It feels cooler in the garden this morning. Cooper and me playing hide and seek which is her favourite game. I just found her

It's time to introduce Samuel Hazzledine Warren into the Ice Age Clacton story. Born in 1872 into a wealthy Essex family, he was able to retire in his early 30s and focus on geology. He began to collect bones and artefacts from the Clacton-on-Sea and Jaywick foreshores. 🏺🦣 #ClactonPrehistory

This is the Reverend J.W Kenworthy (1832 - 1915), the Vicar of Braintree, Essex and noted Antiquary. In 1898 he published on stone artefacts he found eroding from the 'Elephas antiquus' bed near #Clacton pier. This is the first record of Palaeolithic archaeology from #Clacton-on-Sea. 🏺🦣

The earliest recorded discoveries from Clacton were made by the naturalist John Brown in the 1830s. Bones of Pleistocene mammals, including lion, elephant and rhinoceros were eroding out of West Cliff, close the where the pier is now. No doubt stone tools lay unrecognised. 🦣🏺 #PrehistoricClacton

Apropos of nothing I'm starting an occasional thread on the importance of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, to the story of human evolution. Its one of the most important Palaeolithic landscapes in Europe and we should celebrate that fact a lot more. Look out for updates #ClactonPrehistory 🏺🦣

Have your degree results? Lookingfor a Masters in Human origins with lots of opportunities to sprecialise? Join our MSc Programme here at @uclarchaeology.bsky.social. Applications are open until mid August. DM or email me with any questions. 🦣💀🧬

We are preparing for our field season which begins in just a couple of weeks, our students from @uclarchaeology.bsky.social will be lucky enough to be working within site of one of north west Europe's most spectacular megalithic monuments. It is such a privilege for us all.

First Dill crop, before and after

More encounters at @kneppwilding.bsky.social, which can sometimes feel like a living Lascaux frieze. We also saw our first Purple Emperor butterfly , which never made a cave painting but was adorning a broken branch in the canopy of an oak tree 🐎 🦌🐄🦋

Today I'm giving a lecture at the @algao-uk.bluesky.social AGM. Protecting the Palaeolithic in the Planning System. It's a call to arms because the Palaeolithic record is being regularly trashed in the UK right now. I identity 5 reasons why this is happening and suggest some remedies: 🏺🦣 1/2

I love that @bexhillmuseum.bsky.social brilliantly has a diorama of a hillfort rampart reconstruction that seems to be based on a line drawing reconstruction from Curwens publication on Hollingbury. #HillfortsWednesday

Find your own resonances. White horse and white chalk, Seven Sisters, Sussex.

Hazy today over the Adur estuary, only 26 degrees, early morning swims have kept me working through the week, lots of admin and writing amid the heat and summer lightning.

Two degrees higher in the office today, 35.

Friday...

Current status in home office

I added an overly ripe banana to my overnight oats yesterday. It's really good.

Anthropocence Nights. 22.30, 30 degrees, too warm to sleep yet, worrying where this all ends.

Here's some actual Viper's Bugloss. About 30cm high, not 450cm high

I got the Echiums through the winter frost, will I get them through the heat wave?

Meanwhile, here's the UCL Institute of Archaeology sarsen stone, on the eve of the solstice, resting amongst the St John's Wort on Solstice Eve.

Decorating my office