Castles and Coprolites

As we come to the end of 2025, my final blog post of the year is a reflection on research outputs. Here are the three academic papers I published this year as part of collaborative projects with fantastic teams of co-authors. The first paper of the year was an overview of the pan‑European TerraSAgE project, published in Geoarchaeology , led by Tim Kinnaird. This comes from our AHRC project  that started in 2019, and had a few unfortunate hiccups due to COVID (totally scuppered our fieldwork schedule). There will be more to come from this project at a later date, but this paper presents our framework for understanding terrace life cycles from construction to abandonment across the Aegean, Croatia, Italy, Spain, and Galicia, showing how these ancient systems inspire sustainable land‑management today. Our micromorphology deep‑dive into Fodongdi Cave, published in Journal of Archaeological Science , was led by Jinxu Wu, whose high-resolution thin-section analysis revealed how tiny...

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a reviewer and panel member for a wide range of funding schemes. The responsibility of evaluating research proposals, often across disciplines and international contexts, requires careful consideration, but it also offers a unique perspective on the breadth of innovation and collaboration happening across the global research landscape.  Most recently, I had the opportunity to observe a Wellcome funding panel, which offered valuable insights into how different funders approach decision-making and prioritisation. I’ll be writing a separate blog soon reflecting on my experiences across various UKRI schemes and councils, but for now I want to focus on a particularly distinctive fund: the British Council’s International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) . The ISPF is different to many other UK-based research funding schemes. It’s part of the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) portfolio, which means it’s not just about advancing...

Chemistry has always been at the heart of my academic interests. As a teenager, I was obsessed was rocks. I remember staring at mineral specimens and trying to figure out how the chemistry I was learning at school related to the complex chemistry of rocks, and how crystals formed. Funnily enough though, my favourite part of chemistry at school was organic chemistry. I loved the logic of it; it felt like a giant puzzle that you could decode if you learned all the pieces, the functional groups and how they interacted. There was something deeply satisfying about seeing patterns emerge and understanding how molecules behaved. I wavered for a long time between choosing Chemistry or Geology to study at university, but in the end, I had a panic about the maths and opted for Geography instead. It all worked out in the end, though, because that decision opened the door to archaeology and the interdisciplinary world I now inhabit. And as much as I still love rocks, it turns out people can be qui...