Castles and Coprolites

Feeling quite excited today as I have just finalised my travel arrangements to Seattle, where I will be a visiting fellow at the University of Washington, Department of Anthropology   in March and April, as part of WUN (Worldwide University Network) scheme. I'll be doing a whole bunch of things while I am there, including developing my research on Palaeoindian coprolites, and teaching seminars in bioarchaeology and geoarchaeology. I am also really looking forward to visiting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and meeting Julie Stein. I remember when I was an undergraduate being inspired her research on shell middens. Shell middens are the reason I became an archaeologist - as an undergraduate I read geography, and was always interested in Quaternary environmental change, and the relationships between humans and their environment. I ended up working on a shell midden site in Fiji for my dissertation, and discovered that the socio-cultural side of the past was equall...

Sometimes I have a moment where I realise just how odd my day to day work probably appears to non-archaeologists. And probably even amongst archaeologists some of the things I end up with on my desk are quite odd. I seem to have aquired a sort of reputation as a coprolite person, and have aquired quite the collection of material from all over the place. I didn't set out intending to be a coprolite person, it just happened as I couldn't really ignore them. During my PhD, which initially focused on formation processes of middens at Catalhoyuk , I came to realise that the middens contained quite a large quantity of coprolites, and if I wanted to understand what people were dumping (lol) into middens, I had to investigate what people were doing with this particular type of waste. For those of you not in the know, coprolite is a catch all term for ancient faecal material (though technically there are different terms depending on whether it is an actual fossilised bit of poo versus a...

Lab day today, finishing off the last batch (for now) of pottery samples from Durrington Walls . Bit of background - my main research project at the moment is to investigate patterns of food consumption at Durrington Walls, the Neolithic settlement associated with Stonehenge. This involves selecting pottery from different parts of the site, extracting food remains, and seeing if there are differences across the site. Fatty food residues survive suprisingly well in prehistoric pottery (well, some of it, depending on the preservation conditions and other factors). They can be extracted quite easily in the lab by grinding up a small portion of the pottery and shaking it with solvent. The fatty residues dissolve into the solvent, and can then be identified by injecting the solvent into a GC/MS. In basic terms, the GC/MS seperates out all of the different parts of the food residue so we can identify the different components, and the result is something like this. Each of the peaks is a diff...

I just recieved a nice suprise in the post today - a new set of micromorphology slides from the 2009 field season at Catalhoyuk and 2010 season at Boncuklu . I have technically been working on material from Catalhoyuk since 2003, when I analysed midden samples at the University of Reading for my MSc thesis, though I didn't visit the site myself until 2004 when I started my PhD. I've been working on the site ever since, in collaboration with Dr Wendy Matthews (micromorphology) and Dr Ian Bull (coprolites). It really is a fantastic case study for the type of high resolution approach that I am interested in. As you can see from the following pictures, the level of preservation (particularly in the lower, deeply buried deposits) is phenomenal, and enables reconstruction of past human acitivites to the extent that we can recognise individual actions such as the dumping of a fine layer of ash. More recently I have become involved in work at Boncuklu, which is being led by Professo...

I'm having a rest today after 2 hectic days of co-organising the 6th Experimental Archaeology Conference with colleagues at the University of York. Funny actually that I just wrote that, when what I am actually doing is marking student essays on the development of cities and social inequality. But it involves sprawling on the sofa with the laptop on my knee, so is sort of having a rest, compared to the past two days of session chairing. The conference went really well, with only 1 or 2 small last minute hiccups, and led to some useful discussions and ideas for future papers and whatnot. I find myself thinking more and more about subject areas that I always thought I wasn't interested in, or were not relevent to me, as a 'scientist'. In particular the philosophy of science and archaeological theory, and the nature of archaeological data. One paper at the conference also got me thinking about the way that people teach and learn archaeology, and how this then has impact...