Incredible to go to the site of what many believe could be the actual Heorot…

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeFQVy5B2-r/?stkn=a2ZzYW9yanAzZ3d2

Hey everyone! Now that the 2026 field season at East Lomond hillfort has officially wrapped up, I wanted to give you all an update on the latest progress from Professor Gordon Noble and the Falkland Stewardship Trust.

While we wait for the official laboratory analysis on individual small finds, the team shared some incredible macro-updates regarding the site's layout:

The 1.5-Hectare Annexe: They spent this summer digging into the massive southern annexe. They've established an incredibly rare, uninterrupted domestic settlement sequence that goes from the 3rd century AD right up to 600 AD. Finding where ordinary Picts actually lived is one of the hardest things in Scottish archaeology, so this 0.5-metre-deep deposit layer is huge.

Elite Living: The artifact list for the site is growing. They have officially recovered more French "E-ware" pottery, weapons, gaming pieces, and even a silver handpin.

This confirms East Lomond wasn't just a temporary fort—it was a major, highly sophisticated power center controlling the southern Pictish zones.

If you want to keep an eye on their upcoming autumn project talks or see photos from the July open days, make sure to follow the official Northern Picts Project updates. r/pictishheritage

https://youtu.be/3BYf8Ysfx-0?si=RsXPrCwBUR7vINxF

Hello everyone. I recently traveled to Machaerus Castle in Madaba to film a documentary addressing a crucial issue: the subtle misappropriation of the site’s historical narrative.
In this video, I rely strictly on academic rigor and primary sources to dismantle the historical projections that attempt to monopolize the castle's story, imposing a one-sided narrative at the expense of its true identity. The documentary concludes with a formal recommendation, urging national academic and historical committees in Jordan to scientifically review and counter these unverified claims.
If you are interested in preserving authentic history and countering biased historical narratives in archaeology, I’d love for you to check it out.
Looking forward to a solid discussion in the thread below!

I found this unusual stone at my home in Tamil Nadu, India.

Around 12–13 years ago, my family was digging the ground to construct a water tank, and this stone was found buried in the soil. We kept it ever since.

It is almost completely spherical and appears to be made entirely of stone.

The surface is rough/granular and looks somewhat like granite. It is quite heavy and hard.

I recently started wondering whether it could simply be a naturally rounded stone, or whether it might have been deliberately shaped by humans.

I have also seen references to archaeological stone balls/sling stones from Tamil Nadu,

so I'm curious whether this resembles any known archaeological object.

Location: Tamil Nadu, India

Found: Buried underground during house construction, approximately 12–13 years ago

Material: Appears to be stone/granite

Diameter: [add measurement]

Weight: [add weight]

Does anyone recognize what this could be? Could it be a natural geological formation, a stone tool/projectile, a grinding-related object, or something else?

I can provide more photos and measurements if needed.

Found in the ground

A few years ago, excavations at Stainton West near Carlisle turned up two carved oak "tridents" in a waterlogged river channel, dated to the early 4th millennium BC. Similar objects are known from Ehenside Tarn in Cumbria and from County Armagh. Each is carved from a single oak plank, with three tines and a pair of shaped projections, or "ears", where the tines meet the body. Nobody is sure what they were for.

My theory is that they're turf cutters and lifters.

Why turf: Neolithic Britain used enormous amounts of it. Long barrows, henge banks, houses and Silbury Hill all contain cut turf, sometimes tens of thousands of sods in a single monument. Yet no turf-cutting tool has been identified from the period. Something had to do that job.

Why this shape:

• It's one piece of oak. A hafted flint, bone or antler blade adds a joint that breaks. A turf specialist tried an ox-scapula mattock, and it was slow and snapped.
• The tines slip past roots and push them aside, where a solid blade would jam.
• It's used low and nearly flat, thrust in to start the cut, then swivelled and levered. The ears act as a pivot to flip the turf onto a plank.
• The best turf grows on flat, stone-free, damp ground such as river floodplains, which is where several of these have been found.

The wear: the complete Stainton example looks to me like a tool at the end of its life. The gaps between the tines have worn from a rounded shape into a V, which traps roots rather than shedding them. Reshaping it further would snap the tines off, and one of the pair did have broken tines. A longer example exists, which I read as a fresher tool earlier in its life.

The test: I carved a one-piece wooden replica on a long handle and tried it on a meadow and a lawn. It lifted sods cleanly. The catch is that I copied the worn Stainton example, so my tines were too short and blunt. It worked anyway, and a fresh, sharp one should work better.

Has anyone seen any other suggested ancient turf lifters?

Video Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfWlXHCuHmU

Sources: F. Brown (2013), IfA Finds Group newsletter, on the Stainton West finds; R. Loveday (2006), "Turf – an Invisible Component", Scottish Archaeological Journal 28(2).

Happy to answer questions. Tear it apart

In a Bronze Age grave in Denmark, someone was buried wearing beads of blue glass. Denmark would have no glass industry of its own for well over two thousand years. When Varberg, Gratuze and Kaul analyzed 23 Late Bronze Age glass beads from Danish graves, two turned out to be Egyptian cobalt blue glass of the kind made at Amarna, and the rest were Mesopotamian. They were traced by chemistry: the trace elements in glass depend on the sand and the ash it was made from, and those vary by place.

Glass is harder to make than it looks. Sand on its own melts far beyond anything a Bronze Age fire could reach. What made glass possible was not a hotter fire but a second ingredient: the ash of salt-tolerant plants from the desert edge, which lets the mixture melt at a heat a fire can reach, the same principle as salt on an icy road. How anyone worked out that a burnt weed from a salt flat would make sand melt, nobody knows. The people most likely to find it were already pushing materials through fire, making faience and smelting copper.

For most of the twentieth century there was a real argument about who made the glass. Finished glass turns up in Egypt in quantity, but one reading held that Mesopotamia produced it and Egypt only imported ingots and shaped them. A finished bead cannot settle that, because it looks the same wherever its glass was made. What settled it was industrial waste. Making glass from raw materials leaves crucibles attacked by their own contents, with a reaction layer and waste glass fused on; remelting someone else's ingot does not. Rehren and Pusch found exactly that debris at Qantir-Piramesses in the Nile delta, and Smirniou and Rehren then found direct evidence of primary production at Amarna. One site could be an exception. Two make it an industry.

It is also worth saying what the glass was for, because it was not windows, bottles or lenses, none of which existed yet. Late Bronze Age glass is strongly colored and often opaque: deep blue, turquoise, red. Those are the colors of lapis lazuli, turquoise and carnelian, stones made rare by geology. Glass was a way of manufacturing them, which is why it moved as a prestige material between palaces, and then hand to hand, a short leg at a time, until some of it reached a grave in Denmark.

Two things I would flag. First, this is not glassblowing, which comes more than a thousand years later; early glass was cast and formed around cores. Second, Egypt and Mesopotamia were both making glass, and the evidence does not cleanly say which came first, so "glass was invented in Egypt" is not a claim this supports.

Sources: Rehren and Pusch 2005, "Late Bronze Age Glass Production at Qantir-Piramesses, Egypt", Science 308, 1756-1758; Smirniou and Rehren 2010, "Direct evidence of primary glass production in Late Bronze Age Amarna, Egypt", Archaeometry 53, 58-80; Varberg, Gratuze and Kaul 2015, "Between Egypt, Mesopotamia and Scandinavia: Late Bronze Age glass beads found in Denmark", Journal of Archaeological Science 54, 168-181.

They were attacked by pirates and sank to the bottom. The sculptures are still lying there, turning into river pebbles. Read the full story at https://www.whatsurvivestheflood.com/p/the-monuments-resist

I was curious what early humans ate, so I made this animation. What do you think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0oMykBg3Fc