I just discovered my account of a visit to an archaeological site in Northern Syria in October 2005 is online. Looking back, I'm a bit disappointed nothing more came of that little caper. The excavation director, Peter Akkermans, has a fascinating theory about how life in pre-historic times was totally transformed, in some places, by a little-known climatic blip called the 8.2 kyr B.P. Cooling Event, discovered only in the 1990s via drilling into arctic ice caps. Akkermans also discovered the earliest traces of stored milk at Tell Sabi Abyad.

The article I wrote for Syria Today could have been a lot better. I had a lot of stuff going on at the time, and I was hoping to sell the article to a much more mainstream publication, but these plans came to naught, as so many do.