iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Great example of genetic data in PCA space mirroring geography - this time in Scandinavian lemmings!

Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Medieval (13th century) Seljuk painted tiles, of various real and mythical creatures, at the Karatay Tile Works Museum in Konya, Türkiye. #MosaicMonday

A mosaic of painted tiled with various birds, a goat, a hare and a hedgehog, and a mythical creature with the body of a leopard and the head of human

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Stained glass window at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, where I was lucky enough to attend a conference a few weeks ago #mosaismonday

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

How time, climate, and storage shape DNA survival in herbarium specimens - and why plants from the tropics face tougher odds 🌿🧬 #AncientDNA www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

Can confirm, the Parco degli Acquedotti is stunning on the ground as well - and within biking distance from Rome🏺 #RomanSiteSaturday

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Interested in archaeological theory, ancient DNA, and the Roman Mediterranean? 🏺🧬 @ezgimou.bsky.social and I are organizing a session at #TRAC-TiDA2025 to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion and we’d love to have you join us! Call for abstracts is open until August 31st!

A flyer with key details about the Call for Abstracts for the "Integrating Ancient DNA with Archaeological Theory and Practice" session at the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference 2025. The full abstract can be found at https://www.trac.org.uk/trac-tida-2025/ and abstracts can be submitted by emailing Ezgi Altınıșk at ezgialtinisik@hacettepe.edu.tr or Hannah Moots at hannah.moots@su.se. The flyer features a picture of the Library of Celsus, built in 117 CE at Ephesus, Türkiye

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Come check out my poster this afternoon! On the language we use to talk mobility in ancient DNA studies #SMBE2025

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Rapid speciation of lemmings over the last 35,000 years - coinciding with geographic isolation during the last glacial maximum 🧊 @cpgsthlm.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Evidence for ivory-working and knapping for tools by Pleistocene hominins 400,000 years ago at Medzhibozh A, Ukraine! doi.org/10.1002/oa.3...

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Here's a sample of the syllabus. And I should say, most of the articles I assign are ones I think are constructive/positive examples of ethical and equitable research practice - just in case anyone sees their article there and wonders why!

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

Interested in learning more about this new research on Late Pleistocene climate change & horse mobility patterns? If you’re in the Stockholm area, one of the authors will be giving a free, public lecture for all ages (kids are very welcome!) on May 30th at 10 am www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A picture of two horses running (perhaps galloping, although I am no expert on horses), in focus while the grassy background they are passing is blurred, indicating their speed

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

The authors suggest that Romans spread chestnut trees due to their fast regrowth for fortress and infrastructure building

Roman floor mosaic showing a Roman-era fortified farm and farmers raising a toast. From a 2nd-century home in El Alia, Tunisia. Now housed in the Bardo National Museum, Tunis.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Had a great time speaking w/ Anthony Kaldellis about studying the people of ancient Rome using archaeogenetics and allied disciplines. At Isola Sacra, the necropolis for Rome’s primary port, genetic ancestry and mobility isotopes tell *very* different, but complementary, stories

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Cherry blossoms of Stockholm, in different lighting 🌸

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Journalist Peter Gwin has written two wonderful articles for National Geographic about the site and the people who lived there www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

A green-stone ax and crocodile scute (dermal bone) from Gobero, an archaeological site in Niger, inhabited in the mid-Holocene, when the central Sahara was a series of interconnected lakes. #FieldworkFriday #archaeology #GreenSahara 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

In particular, we observed close connections between Italy Sardinia,and North Africa, in all directions. This might not sound so surprising, given their proximity, but often the expansion of Greek- and Phoenician-speaking city-states are the focus of discussions on Iron Age mobility

A qpAdm plot (showing individual genomes represented as horizontal bars, each colored by the ancestry preparation from 7 relevant ancestry populations.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

@theguardian.com Why not take more critical approach to the reconstruction? One question that jumps to mind is why didn't the artist take more cues from the Mycenean depictions of themselves, such as the fresco below, also featured in your story. #AncientBlueSky

An image of a Mycenaean fresco showing a woman, dressed in yellow with a yellow dress with a yellow and red necklace, featured in the article reposted here, with the caption: "A 13th-century BC fresco from Mycenae." Photograph: Peter Eastland/Alamy and

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Nighttime in the central courtyard of Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Croatia 📷 by me #RomanSiteSaturday

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Yes, I was super lucky! I got to travel to Türkiye to conduct research in an ancient DNA lab there, and then stayed a week after to visit places. Here's a picture of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus that I mentioned

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

In honor of spring, a duck from the site of Ephesus, Türkiye #MosaicMonday 📸 May 2022

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

We even quoted Broodbank's book in our conclusions!

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

This book - The Making of the Middle Sea - was a formative resource for our work on mobility in the Carthaginian and Etruscan Mediterranean. So it was truly a delightful surprise to see this summary of our work in the newly revised edition!

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

The history of the site is itself dates back much earlier, including associations with the Phrygian goddess Cybele. the region is famous for its hot springs and mineral waters, making a health and healing center for millennia 📸s from May 2022

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

The amphitheater at #Hierapolis, Türkiye, built in the Roman-period, around 60 CE #WorldTheatreDay

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Creatures, both real and mythical, depicted at #OstiaAntica #MosaicMonday 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

One of the many nautical mosaics at #OstiaAntica - this one showing Amphitrite/Salacia riding a hippocampus and surrounded by other spirits and creatures of the sea 🌊 #MosaicMonday 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

New paper on the wonderful array of pigments - some preserved in their original containers - used at #Pompeii 🏺 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

A fascinating glimpse into what people were eating onboard ships in the Late Antique Mediterranean! Based on the cooking and tableware assemblages from shipwrecks, they find evidence for everything from ready-cooked meals that could be warmed in the sun, to insulated hearths used for roasting.

6th-century mosaic of a ship in harbor a Ravenna. Image from www.ravennamosaici.it

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

We used a durable acrylic resin and strips of geotextile to secure and stabilize loose tiles. This approach allows water and moisture to naturally drain from the tesserae (a process that is hindered when concrete is used) and is easily reversible, in case better techniques come along in the future.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

#MosaicMonday throwback to mosaic conservation at Chedworth Roman Villa, where my love of mosaics first began! Our job was to stabilize any loose tesserae (the stone tiles) using minimally-invasive and reversible techniques, allowing them to be studied and displayed for visitors. 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

One of the few full-color mosaics at #OstiaAntica (many are black and white), also unique for it's detailed (laurel?) leaf border between the scenes #MosaicMonday 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

And for a wonderful virtual immersion into the Roman world of the Piazzale, see the Memorializing Connectivity story map built by Lindsey Mazurek and the University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab arcg.is/0emSDD

The opening page of the Memorializing Connectivity site, created by Lindsey Mazurek, showing an aerial photo of the Piazzale at Ostia combined with a hand-drawn map

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

A few floor mosaics from the Piazzale delle Corporazioni (Forum of Corporations) at Ostia. The Piazzale was a place where merchants came to trade goods from across the Roman Empire and beyond, advertise their shipping services and connect with one another. 📸 by me #OstiaAntica #MosaicMonday

A black and white mosaics showing a dolphin in the foreground and two ships sailing towards a lighthouse

A view of several of the stalls lining the Piazzale delle Corporazioni with the theater visible in the distance

A black and white mosaic depicting an elephant and the words "STAT SABRATENSIUM", referencing the region of Sabratha, Libya

A black and white mosaic of a whale in the foreground, a ship in the distance, and waves throughout, indicating the movement of the sea

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

The goddess Tanit, the primary deity of the ancient Carthaginians, depicted in the entryway to a house in Selinunte, Sicily #mosaicmonday 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

The economy was primarily based on the production and export of marine resources from the region, including the production and exportation of garum, salt, and Tyrian purple dye derived from locally harvested Murex sp. shells.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

One of the sites in the study, Kerkouane, is an exceptionally well-preserved Punic town. Originally inhabited from 650 - 250 BCE with a population around 1,200 inhabitants. whc.unesco.org/en/list/332/

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

This trans-Mediterranean approach illuminates the complicated interplay between continuity and mobility resulting in extensive genetic exchange across the Iron Age central Mediterranean and allows us to directly examine relationships between local and diasporic people.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Across the locations studied, we observe continuity in the Iron Age with the preceding population of the region. This was accompanied, however, by a significant increase in heterogeneity and the presence of individuals with ancestry from other parts of the Mediterranean & beyond

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

And if there is a paywall on the above link, the open access preprint (which is very similar to the published version) is here - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

We sequenced ancient genomes from archaeological sites in the central Mediterranean to study the increasingly interconnected nature of the populations of the Great Sea. 📸(by me) of the Tomb of Leopards at Tarquina, one of the sites we were fortunate enough to study.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Two dolphins from a mosaic floor at Ostia, one of Rome's primary ports. Many of the mosaics here feature nautical themes - including dolphins, whales, fish, ships, and lighthouses #ostiaantica #mosaicmonday 📸 by me

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Evidently Edgar Allen Poe was critiquing scientific research as being too dependent on specialized training and rigorous scientific processes (and he called the people who do this kind of work "ground moles.")

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

There is one between the circus maximus and the Tiber as well!

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Looking forward to reading this! Anna Källén was so kind to participate in a session at TAG US a few years ago about reflecting on and envisioning possible futures for the field of aDNA. Was such a pleasure to talk with her about this!

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

#MosaicMonday - Geometrics motifs at Sardis, Türkiye 📸 by me

Geometric mosaic border featuring triangles and a two-stranded braid

Geometric Roman mosaic in a greyish-blue and red

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Two serpents, in very different styles, from #OstiaAntica. The one on the right is part of a long corridor, which is otherwise solid white with black borders, the lone snake off-center in one corner. #MosaicMonday

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

I read it just before visiting Sicily and was so grateful for the better understanding of Mediterranean history I had gained. For instance, the cover of the book features a map, originally made by Muhammad al-Idrisi in Palermo.

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Hannah Moots @mootspoints.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

After stabilization, we covered the mosaics with cloth and sand, to protect them during the construction of a visitors' pavilion. They are now displayed in the same condition they were excavated in so that visitors can appreciate their patterns while also seeing what 1500+ years have done:

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