I’m glad to announce that this blog will be hosting some guest posts in the near future. I think that these contributions will greatly enhance the quality of the original content posted here and will also offer a greater diversity in both scope and perspective. And of course, it will help to keep this place more regularly updated, since as you’ve all probably noticed, the time I have to dedicate to it is a bit limited.

A few notes regarding these guest posts:

• For now I’ve invited a few friends (well known by most, if not all, of you) to write whenever they feel that the comments section falls short for their needs to comment extensively about certain subject, or just because the comments would be off topic in my own posts. I hope that along the way other regulars might want to share some contribution too. This can be useful for commentators who post regularly (here or in other places) valuable comments with a good amount of information to have a place to keep their main ideas about a subject in one place, rather than spilled all over this or other blogs/fora, etc… I sometimes feel that many people deserve to have their valuable contributions in one place and written in a coherent way, both for their own and the readers’ benefit. So if anyone would like to contribute some guest post, please contact me (alberto at adnaera.com) to let me know what you’d like to write about so we can agree about it.
• I guess you all know the scope of this blog, so keep that in mind when thinking about possible contributions. That said, the “West Eurasian History” tag line is not a strict rule, and many tangentially related topics can have a place here too. Either about other geographical areas or about something that is not strictly historical but might be interesting for understanding historical events (I’m thinking about subjects like anthropology, ethnology, linguistics or any background information from people who have direct experience from places that are relevant to understand history, but not very well known by many of us).
• The guest posts will represent the author’s point of view and opinion, not mine. I might agree or disagree about certain points, but that’s not an important factor. The quality and relevance of the contribution is what matters. Well founded research, opinions, hypotheses, etc… can only widen our perspective and enrich our knowledge, and sparkle interesting debates. This blog does not promote in any way any specific line of thought or preference when it comes to historical events. It just promotes (or tries to, at least) our better understanding of our history, thanks in great part to the new opportunities that the study of ancient DNA has offered (but not restricted to it. Archaeology, linguistics, etc… also advance and bring new data every year).
• A note about the content’s copyright: As you might have noticed, there’s a copyright note in the footer, on my name. This just appeared by default when I used this theme for the blog and my first intention was to change it to some “copyleft” license (Creative Commons, or similar). However it couldn’t be done from the backend and required to manually modify the templates, so I didn’t get around to doing it. Thinking about it now, I don’t think that’s necessary, since the kind of content posted here is freely available, easy to reference and copyright allows fair use of it for educational purposes and the like. Now that I’ll host guest posts I even think it’s better to leave it as it is rather than forcing the contribution to fall under a more “free” license. Of course, the copyright of each guest post will belong to its author, not to me. I just want to keep the standard protection for them, which I think is good enough. If any author wants to add any footnote about the copyright of their content, that’s of course fine with me. And if anyone would like to use any of the content here in a way that might not fall under the fair use definition, please contact me (alberto at adnaera.com) to ask about it (if the content itself belongs to some guest post, I’ll forward the request to the author in question, in case you don’t know how to contact him/her directly).

Ok, so I think that’s it more or less. If anyone has any question regarding the above, please ask in the comments.

Last, but not least, let me tease that the first guest post will come from FrankN, whose vast knowledge about, among other things, northern/central European archaeology is well known, so a post (probably coming in two parts) putting new aDNA from Central Europe into context seems like an excellent introduction. You’ll have to wait a few days to get the details, but hopefully just a few.

Stay tuned!