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Tag: archaeology

ded: 3feb26

Published February 3, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Still gripped by plague. The weather outside is dismal and has been for days – the garden has become an intractable bog and I have new plants sitting in buckets of water, waiting for the possibility of me having two days without rain and the ability to move without coughing or otherwise dripping.

TODAY:

I looked at my Instagram on desktop and saw they’ve finally wrestled the algo to the point where it didn’t show me anyone I’m actually following.

This is very Andy Goldsworthy:

New Kali Malone collaboration record:

(Previous Kali Malone notes)

OPERATIONS: work is for people not drowning in their own fluids
STATUS: ded. Less than 7hrs sleep. Inbox 150. Connecting the Retro Nano to the phone and doing podcasts all day.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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Caves And Waves: 29jan26

Published January 29, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Paper flowers preserved in a sealed Chinese cave for a thousand years.

TODAY:

This is a tripwire crossbow. I discovered Will Lord some years ago, when he was on an episode of FIRST MAN OUT, and have been following his work ever since.

FIRST MAN OUT was a show where survival expert Ed Stafford would race against someone with similar skills through some inclement part of the world. The episodes would all follow a similar pattern – Stafford would almost kill himself to win, and his competitor would rock up to the finish line a short time later having had a nice time and usually arriving in some style. I have a memory of Will Lord’s episode featuring him basically whittling a hotel room and dining like a medieval king while Stafford nearly died a couple of times and crawled around in the dark eating ants.

STATUS: went out for a glass of wine and a quick stop at the shops yesterday so of course I have a slight cough and what feels like the beginning of a chest infection today
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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20jan26

Published January 20, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I found a weird little object online – a USB reader for floppy discs. I still have a few boxes of floppy discs from way back when that I didn’t throw out. There’s a fair chance they’re all as corrupted and rotted as shit now, but I picked up said weird little object and I’m going to see if any of those disks are recoverable. Chances are they have a lot of old Marvel, DC and Wildstorm stuff on, and while it’s not crucial to have copies of those old scripts, and they would be painful to look at, I feel like it would be kind of nice to possess them again. I’ve had so many hard drive and storage issues over the years, so many lost scripts and documents and emails, that I’ve gotten used to considering it all volatile and ephemeral and have learned not to be upset at losing things and to let go of things. To be able to recover just a handful of old pieces would have its pleasures.

In retrospect, I should have printed off literally everything and gotten filing cabinets and, I dunno, a full library system or a zettelkasten index or something, and stayed analogue. I have this memory of a bit in the old MAX HEADROOM show where Blank Reg tries to sell a cyberpunk kid a book on the grounds that it’s a “non-volatile storage medium.” Oh, bugger me, the clip’s on YouTube-

TODAY:

Accessions:

CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+)

The 9th Rob Marshall book. I have a great fondness for these less than cosy Scottish crime novels. This one seems to be in the nature of a put pilot for a new series, so it’s probably not the one to start with.

OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter
STATUS: what is this outside world you speak of
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
LAST WATCHED: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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16jan26

Published January 16, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Hello from out here in the Thames Delta. I haven’t written here in a few days, so I’m attempting to make a fresh start with a single daily note for a while.

TODAY:

TELEMETRY:

Accessions:

I was bad at the start of the year and bought myself a few books in Kindle sales. I presume they both do what it says on the tins.

  • THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
  • THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenburger (UK) (US+)

OPERATIONS: production has been, frankly, fucked this week. I have a script to land and I still need to rebuild the template for the newsletter. Two weeks into the new year and I’m at least four weeks behind.
STATUS: Haven’t been feeling my best and it’s been one of those weeks here where nobody seems to want to allow me the sole uninterrupted use of my own (very tired) brain. Best night’s sleep in a week – 8hrs 7m.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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telemetry 2dec25

Published December 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet regardless of where they’re hosted.

As with all indieweb stuff, I lost the will to live less than halfway through the “getting started” section of the docs, but maybe this will be useful to someone, and maybe I should return to it after more coffee.

The Hare #9 [December 2025] by Andrew Chapman

Bronze Age/Neolithic complex find, Indian menhirs… and the original rock music

Read on Substack

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morning computer fish church

Published November 10, 2025 by Warren Ellis

White Arkitekter restores Gothenburg’s fish church.

A new collagen fingerprinting tool can help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. Pacific islanders of the late Stone Age, also known as the Neolithic period, were master fishers. Archaeological evidence indicates that these groups caught fish both inshore as well as in open waters.

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Now, researchers have found a way to shed light on the types of fish they feasted on and the advanced fishing techniques used to capture them. The new Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) tool can detect the unique chemical fingerprint hidden within collagen, a structural protein that makes up most of bone mass.

The researchers tested 131 archaeological bones and accurately identified three tuna and five shark varieties

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

The Milky Way galaxy is like a gigantic ocean gyre or eddy that spins and wobbles around its center.

But our home galaxy also has a colossal wave rippling through it, pulling and pushing an ocean of stars and cosmic dust in its wake, according to newly released images from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope.

The images show that this wave of motion emanates from the center of the Milky Way and takes up a large portion — a little less than half — of the galaxy’s entire body, which itself is warped in the outer edges. Looking at the galaxy in a vertical sideways view, you see that stars float above or below the disc’s dusty central body, as if they were fish bobbing up and down in a wave of water after a boat passes by.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer imagined gardens

Published September 5, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Rafael Silviera.

Journey of the Senses by Zhuoer Zhong

“This project reimagines the river Clyde moored Renfrew Ferry venue as a high-tech, floating biomaterials education centre.

The Pompeii Archaeological Park has recreated an ancient perfume garden—right down to its antique roses.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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status 2sep25

Published September 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

September skies in full effect now. Another couple of weeks and I’ll have to put the linen clothes in storage and shake out the work shirts and jeans. The boy cat must sense the season’s change, as I haven’t seen him yet today — he’ll be out somewhere taking in the last of the warmth and the occasional burst of blue sky.

TODAY:

OPERATIONS: Writing long and complicated production update emails to publishers. Then it’s scripting, then newsletter, then sawing a hole in my schedule to fit a 7500-word short story and a 20pp piece in.
STATUS: Inbox 87, still too tired for short-term memory to start working! I’ve had the memory span of a goldfish for the first two hours of every day lately.
READING: OUR DEBTS TO THE PAST by Ed James (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: BBC Proms: Pekka Kuusisto and Katarina Barruk

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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HOB’S LANE 005

Published May 16, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Archaeological discoveries made in London between 1946 and 1958 include a secret temple to Mithras, and The Fleet Street Ossuary and medieval Charnel House. Hidden alien gods and a mess of buried human bones.

Mithras was only ever worshipped underground, and icons depict him as being born from a rock.

The Roman Mithras mystery cult was a corruption of an Iranian deity, itself an echo of an ancient pre-Zoroastrian figure. Gods and rumours of gods.

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morning computer big giant rocks

Published May 13, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The Olmec heads are among the largest non-architectural monuments ever discovered in Mexico, ranging between roughly 3.5 and 11.5 feet in height and weighing up to eight tons, with the largest of them weighing a head-spinning 45 tons. They all have a similar appearance, one strikingly similar to that of modern-day indigenous groups living in southern Mexico, featuring large cheekbones and flat noses. 

Researchers have found evidence that a giant “lid” made of magma could be stopping the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park from erupting.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature last month, a team of researchers discovered a “volatile-rich cap” a mere 2.36 miles below the surface, trapping pressure and heat below it.

In fact, the researchers believe the obstruction may be what’s preventing the volcanic system from erupting — a blast that’s happened several times previously in the history of our planet, and which could have devastating consequences for civilization if it happened again.

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