iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 10/09/2026

Okay, archaeologists... Let's say you have a chance to create a small (about 300 sq ft) but state-of-the-art digital archaeology laboratory - besides computers, of course, what else would you want it to have?

static.klipy.com

Vintage Computer Lab & Heart Monitors

ALT: Vintage Computer Lab & Heart Monitors

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 02/09/2026

Very serious and important addition to my office for the first day of classes

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 29/06/2026

Fun fact: Klingons enjoy Early Bronze Age Cycladic art. www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 26/05/2026

You might've thought that learning about significant figures was a waste of time in school, but don't ignore them in scientific publishing – it is one of my (and other editors') pet peeves and red flags 🚩

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 20/05/2026

If you're planning to collaborate with a research group that might have different priorities than yours, please follow an editor's advice and get an agreement in writing first.

open.substack.com

Get it in writing! The need for research agreements in collaborations

Research agreements are almost essential when different research groups work together

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 19/05/2026

Getting started on my summer reading list

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 18/05/2026

New post about the importance of paying attention to a journal's aim and scope and why... and what's one of my biggest red flags that an author will be a jerk? substack.com/@elleryfrahm

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 15/05/2026

I've joined Substack! Check out "The Editor's Trench" for behind-the-scenes tips, tricks, and triggers from editing a major archaeological science journal, as narrated by a Yale faculty member to help demystify the peer-review publication process | elleryfrahm.substack.com

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 06/05/2026

So far the most disturbing part of Netflix’s new “Lord of the Flies” miniseries is how the child actors were directed to make sharp spear points for hunting 🔪🐷

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 11/02/2026

New pottery aprons from RAYGUNshirts for students in Yale’s Archaeological Ceramics class! (Shared with student permission)🏺

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 10/01/2026

I’m PSAT-famous! “Variously, researchers have closely examined obsidian artifacts to understand ancient social and economic structures, as in Colin Renfrew’s 1975 study, or to glean aspects of cultural identity, as in Ellery Frahm and colleagues’ 2017 study.”

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 13/12/2025

Hot off the presses! Last year's full-class project by my awesome students in "Introduction to Archaeological Lab Sciences" is now published and freely accessible for the next 50 days via this link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mGK-,rVDB...

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1mGK-,rVDBnOVO

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 19/11/2025

You’ve heard of Neanderthals, of course. But have you heard of… ? From “The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution” (1955)

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 08/10/2025

Ready to talk stone tools with Yale first-years and give them a chance to try making their own

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 13/08/2025

I find the title of this 1993 article hilarious — it’s just so bizarrely blunt. My wife, though, doesn’t see the humor (“Explain to me again why you think it’s funny”). What do you think?

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 04/08/2025

Let’s count the clues in just this part of the email that this is super dodgy: 1. This person doesn’t exist and has a nonsensical affiliation. 2. Which scholarly society, hmm? 3. Their US headquarters address is mangled… And as a bonus, 4. I have never asked for an author’s WhatsApp number.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 03/04/2025

Here's the free-for-50-days link for my new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews: "Scales of toolstone transport in the Armenian Highlands during MIS 3: The contribution of Ararat-1 Cave (Ararat Depression) to reconstructing opportunities for social interactions" authors.elsevier.com/a/1kt3c-4PSD...

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 21/03/2025

What's new in obsidian artifact sourcing? This link offers free access (for 50 days) to my new article – Archaeological obsidian sourcing: Looking from the first 60 years to the next – for the 50th anniversary special issue of Journal of Archaeological Science – authors.elsevier.com/a/1koEW15SlU...

pXRF instrument being used to test obsidian outcrops on the slopes of a volcano

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 10/03/2025

I didn’t expect to see my favorite demonic Mesopotamian deity appear on “Saturday Night Live” in a sketch with Lady Gaga, but sure enough, they invoked Lamashtu, featured on my favorite stone amulets! 😍

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 07/03/2025

Well, now I'm hungry for soft-serve vanilla ice cream – and it would go great with the Babylonian Collection tablet cookies

Rocks in the Yale Peabody Museum collection

Tablets in the Yale Peabody Museum collection

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 01/03/2025

Doing some Saturday morning reading for research and teaching — yes, comic books count

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Reposted by Dr. Ellery Frahm

Chris Stringer @chrisbstringer.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Nature Editorial Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere. US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere

US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 26/02/2025

It’s gonna be lit 🔥 in Experimental Archaeology class today as we start fires the *really* old-fashioned way: flint, pyrite, and tinder fungus — Paleolithic archaeologists are really just undercover survivalists

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 09/02/2025

An entry that I wrote on XRF and #obsidian sourcing for an #archaeology encyclopedia was published at a such limited subscription level that even Yale doesn't have access – and our libraries have almost everything! Anyway, I've posted a free preprint version – enjoy! doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/khpx9_v1

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 23/01/2025

My freeze-dried mammoth meat has arrived 🦣🥩

Yup, it’s a box with a small chunk of mammoth meat

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 07/01/2025

Re: the JHE situation – Just to be sure that I was being factual and that my impressions were indeed correct, I reached out to my contacts at Elsevier, and the answer was exactly what I thought and consistent with the statement that Elsevier put out yesterday: there is NO use of AI in copyediting...

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 02/01/2025

This multi-year (well, multi-decade) work on the excavations at the Middle Paleolithic site of Lusakert-1 Cave in central Armenia is finally online (only early view for now) and will be open-access when the final, nicely formatted, PDF version becomes available: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

The geoarchaeology, chronology and environment of Lusakert-1, a Late Middle Palaeolithic rockshelter (Kotayk Province, Armenia)

Lusakert-1 (LKT-1) is a key site in any discussion of the Palaeolithic of the Armenian Highlands. This is in large part because of a long-running camp…

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 19/12/2024

Today I oversaw returning 63 boxes of excavated materials from the Eli Whitney Gun Factory to the Eli Whitney Museum, including this box of firearm parts (note the bayonet and the revolver component). The museum plans to exhibit the materials, including the finds from the employee barracks.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 18/12/2024

Me twinning with #Neanderthals, occasionally having a brow ridge contest on the side

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 17/12/2024

I have apparently become an extra-credit meme in my friend @jaysongillpaleo.bsky.social’s class… I approve.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 05/12/2024

100+ more followers, so here's another fantastic obsidian artifact I've studied: an Old Babylonian cylinder seal carved out of obsidian. I couldn't find a geochemical match to Middle Eastern obsidian until I started looking at East African sources. It matches to an Egyptian artifact! That's a first!

Mesopotamian cylinder seal made of out black obsidian

Three-dimensional scatterplot showing the composition of different obsidian sources and artifacts

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 02/12/2024

I’ve seen a lot of reproduction movie posters for “The #Neanderthal Man” (1953), but I’d never seen this before, so I had to have it — it’s the left side of a newspaper-thin duoble-bill poster (the other side seems to have been torn off, possibly thanks to a cinema manager who was showing this film)

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 02/12/2024

#Archaeology students... If you have questions about pXRF of obsidian, ceramics, or other materials, I’m happy to try and answer them, even chat with you, and not charge $100+ for access to a recorded 2-hour SAA webinar. I’m not RPA-certified, but my sourcing research is published in Science & PNAS.

Advertisement from the Society for American Archaeology website for a $100+ course – well, for two-week access to a recording of a 2-hour webinar – on pXRF in archaeological research

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 02/12/2024

Molecular modeling meets brutalist sculpture 🧪 I love walking past this handmade model, built in the 1970s by biochemist Dr. Ann Korner, of E. coli transfer RNA in Yale’s Environmental Science Center. She completed her MPhil here in 1972 and her PhD in 1974. It's built to scale too: 2 cm equals 1 Å!

A handmade metal model, built in the 1970s by biochemist Dr. Ann Korner, of E. coli transfer RNA in Yale’s Environmental Science Center.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 02/12/2024

#Textiles aren’t my specialty (they rarely show up at sites after millennia), so these fabric pieces in custom frames are a bit of a mystery to me. Attempts at ID using Google Lens haven’t been terribly insightful. Any ideas as to origin or age? Can you help a stone-tool-loving #archaeologist out?

Mystery fabric squares of unknown age and origin

Mystery fabric square of unknown age and origin

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 01/12/2024

The obsidian bowl was a hit, so here is another special item. This is, to my knowledge, one of only five known Mesopotamian obsidian amulets, inscribed with spells to protect the wearer from Lamaštu, a demon who tormented pregnant women and kidnapped babies. The obsidian came from central Turkey.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 30/11/2024

I have many new followers since I last introduced myself. I'm an #archaeologist at Yale, and one of my specialties is identifying the geological origins of obsidian artifacts using nondestructive chemical tests. This carved obsidian bowl, for example, originated from a source in northeastern Turkey.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 24/11/2024

It’s real! As mentioned in the latest issue of “New Scientist” i think we’ve all felt this way at some point. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 23/11/2024

“But, this is impossible!! It’s a Neanderthal man—! Alive and at large in beastly fury—!”

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 22/11/2024

Me a couple months ago: Okay, THIS time I will keep better track of my references and build the bibliography as I write. Me today: Shit.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 21/11/2024

There are still a few days left (until Dec 9) for totally free access to my new paper on the use of portable XRF instruments in #archaeology via the link below: "Protocols, pitfalls, and publishing for pXRF analyses: From 'know how' to 'best practices'" authors.elsevier.com/a/1jzEM,rVDB...

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 21/11/2024

It is worth noting that, while Kirk is simply looking for rocks to throw, the Gorn captain has collected cobbles of various lithic raw materials, assessed their suitability, and knapped an entire obsidian spike. #StarTrek meets #Archaeology

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 21/11/2024

The cover of “Unknown Worlds” Issue #7 from 1961

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 21/11/2024

Was “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” on TV last night? Yes, it was. Did I watch it? Yes, I did. Did I check if it could be a full moon, as shown in the film, on December 14, 1989? Yes, I did. Was it? Well, close enough, it was a full moon on December 12-13, 1989.

media.tenor.com

a rocket is flying past a full moon in space .

ALT: a rocket is flying past a full moon in space .

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 21/11/2024

All of these are wrong… It’s WALL-E. That’s it. Just WALL-E.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm @elleryfrahm.com · 20/11/2024

What do we do on our days off from excavating in Armenia? Check out more recent ruins, of course. We couldn’t help but explore the abandoned “Palace of Culture” in Jermuk during our visit this summer.

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