For the November–December 2026 issue of British Archaeology, Dr Ella Egberts (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and REST wrote “Kept in the dark” for the magazine’s Narrate-Create series, in which academics share imaginative approaches on how to responsibly turn science into storytelling. Moving between scientific method and lived experience. The text takes readers to a night at the Muddy Minds excavation site in Mirns. There, under red light and after sunset, sediment samples were measured with a portable OSL reader to reveal when each layer last saw daylight.