 Medieval is in the news again. It's never for a good reason. It's used as a derogatory term when discussing ISIS destroying cultural monuments in Syria, or increasingly, as Dries mentioned already, with the far right. This is an actual meme used online in places like Reddit and Twitter equating the Trump movement with the Crusades. This is a faux medieval movement. This is something that is born online, but has very real world effects. These are marchers, white supremacist marchers at a rally in Charlottesville. The second from the left there eventually ran over a counter-protester and killed her later that day. These are real movements, even if they're born online and they're very serious. And they're not coming from nowhere. They're not a grassroots movement. They're coming straight from the top at times. This is the, until recently, Trump whisperer, Steve Bannon, describing his view of the world as a clash of civilizations. He thinks we're in a dark age now, and we should go on Crusade. Now, fortunately, most people don't get their medieval news from Steve Bannon or Breitbart News, but they do get it from the news. And a recent study that I did in Anglophone newspapers found that the newspapers reporting archaeology the most, like Daily Mail here in green, are not necessarily the most reputable, what we would call maybe tabloid journalism. In a recent book that I co-edited, we identify identity as one of the sort of unifying themes of archaeology more generally over its entire history. And this has been identified by the reviewer as one of the most important things to do right now. We have to be part of these debates about identity as experts in sort of identity over the long term. In the introduction to this, we sort of identify long term macro level patterns in the study of identity in archaeology. And we've decided, we've sort of seen that there is a sort of move away from nationalism and cultural identity to something now which is a little bit more relational, more exciting perhaps, materiality, personhood, but has yet to sort of spill over really into medieval archaeology more widely. We still chase these headlines. We still look for stories about kings. And when medieval stuff gets into the newspapers, it's about things like Game of Thrones. And again, Richard III, celebrities, kind of confirming history rather than challenging it. When medievalists do get together to talk about these things, we get in trouble. The International Medieval Congress very recently can't not mention it, had to apologize because their panel was too male. I say that as the sort of fourth male speaker in a row. And too white, I'm afraid. And so depressingly, we're still talking about race when we talk about the medieval. We've had over a decade now a very good, high quality isotope analysis studies in the medieval period. But as this one from Ireland, I could have chosen any of many shows. They've chosen one outlier crouched inhumation here and explained all of the other local examples of crouched inhumation as attributed to that one outlier. We're still looking for non-locals. In Britain, in particular, there's also a fashion for facial reconstruction. So this really great rare Northern Scottish burial is found. And all we can think to ask is, did he have long wavy hair and a thick Viking beard? This is where all the money is going. And this is how this gets reported in the news. Again, if I can pick on the Daily Mail a little bit more. A picture of a shouty Australian man from 1995. And the description a Roman may have used of a pict. The pics were a group of wild savages who lived in Eastern and Northern Scotland. This is how the pics, my sort of area study, are represented. Within my field, within my little bubble, we've been trying for 20 years, more than 20 years, 30 years to normalize the pics. They were thought of as not Indo-European as strange somehow, not European. And now we're more on the level that they are part of the European project. But these sort of stereotypes linger in my own field. And it's been hard to shake these off. In my own field of research, I focused on burial. This is one of the things that unites us with the rest of Europe, in Scotland I should say. The traditional map of burials has them as a sort of green wave of barrows pushing north, pushing south against the sort of Christian cemeteries. My map makes this a little bit more complex and allows us to make connections broadly in Europe with log coffin burial and things like these. But when you depict a pict, you still get them fighting Romans, usually on Hadrian's wall in movies about pics. This is all they are. This is fair enough. This is their origin. Their first mentions of pics in Scotland are the sort of antagonists of the Roman armies. But that's this sort of obsession with where we come from, where we start of ancestry as destiny. And unfortunately, the DNA revolution has only emphasized these old questions. Well, the first revolution in archaeology, the first scientific revolution of radiocarbon dates, allowed us to challenge lots of things. The DNA revolution has allowed us to fall back on our old prejudices. By and large, archaeologists are not participating in this movement. This is one of the major well-funded sort of genomic projects describing the British genome, whatever that means. A single archaeologist on that panel, and maybe not one of the new generation either. This article is also very outdated in its language, and it uses very freely, even though it's talking about the modern British population, medieval terminology to describe them, Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Dalryada, this old school map with directional arrows going in one direction. All right? And this is the kind of headline that came out of it. Celts are not a unique genetic group, the corollary being the Anglo-Saxons are. We're still fighting these battles. The science might be neutral, but the interpretation is not. Another study using genome science has sort of put Irish people, Scottish people, Welsh people, English people in a box, and seen how these yellow diamonds fit in, this ancient DNA. How Scottish are you? It means nothing in the Iron Age. Studies like these are not always open access either. This study sponsored by Ancestry.com is meant to sell ancestry DNA tests, and it describes the British DNA, the British genome as Anglo-Saxon. We are not as British as we think, meaning 22% of us is Celtic, not British. It's crazy. This is dangerous, and we have to participate. If you don't like the way this is going, the only way to change it is to participate. We have all the science in the world at our fingertips, and all we can think to ask is whether people are from somewhere or what color eyes they had. To break out of the Dark Ages, become scientifically literate and participate in these stories. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.