Castles and Coprolites

I am very proud to be associated with not one but two departments which have been awarded this prestigious prize for academic excellence, the University of Reading in 2009 , and now the University of York in 2012. More on the story can be seen on the York newspage . Well done everyone!

Today was spent mostly taking apart complicated bits of kit and putting them back together again. We had a training course in GC/MS maintainance, including such delightful topics as cleaning the ion source (quite pretty and shiny I think), and troubleshooting for low sensitivity. It's really interesting getting to learn more about how this sort of equipment is put together. Reading the theory of how it all works isn't the same as seeing all the bits for yourself, and working out how it all goes together. Something that looks incredibly complex to begin with gradually becomes less scary and more familiar. I took photos of various stages of the cleaning process to remind myself what to do in future. This particular image reminded me of the USS Enterprise. Don't you think? See the door in the background, and the entrance to the Jefferies tube in the floor. No? Following the maintainance course I went to this weeks' Heritage Research seminar over in King's Manor,...

To continue the alliterative theme of the blog, this sums up nicely in 3 words my sampling visit to the Salisbury and Wiltshire Museum yesterday. The museum houses the collection of pottery from the 1967 excavations at Durrington Walls by Wainwright, which we will be using for comparison with the pottery being analysed from the Stonehenge Riverside Project . I was pleasantly suprised to see how pretty the city is - a little bit like York with random medieval buildings and bits of medieval wall dotted around the centre, and also an impressive cathedral. Maybe not quite as pretty as York Minster, but not too bad :) The cathedral is right next the the museum, though alas I didn't get a chance to look around as I had a rather large box of pottery to carry around by that point. The museum itself was rather exciting. The collections of archive material are located in a very chilly old store room complete with strangely labelled Victorian draws containing Antiquarian curiosities. It wa...

I actually like staff meetings, even admin related ones, as it means I get to spend time at the Kings Manor. The main part of the Department of Archaeology at York is located in the town centre at the old Tudor manor house, whereas the laboratories for the BioArCh group where I spend the majority of my time, are located on campus next to the Department of Biology. The place where I have lived for the past year and a half is about a 5 minute walk from the Kings Manor. The photos below show the route I took to work the other day through the Museum Gardens, complete with flock of pigeons, Narnia-esque lamp post, and abbey ruins. When I stopped to take a picture of the pigeons all huddled in the tree, they somehow knew I was focusing on them and all descended from the tree and landed at my feet in a flurry of coos. I felt a bit guilty that I didn’t have any crumbs for them! I think living in the town centre I take for granted just what a pretty place York is – the snow makes everything lo...

Just on the train back from London to York this morning (hurray Grand Central free wifi!), after attending a seminar yesterday evening for the Ecology of Crusading project, at the Lithuanian embassy. This is the second embassy seminar I've been able to attend, the first being around this time last year at the Estonian embassy. It is always really interesting to attend these events as you get to meet such a wide range of people, many of whom have interesting stories to tell. As someone who loves to travel, I like meeting people from around the world, and people from the UK who have lived abroad in unusual places. Yesterday we met some people who had worked in the diplomatic service and had lived and worked all over the Baltic and Caucasus regions. The Ecology of Crusading project is in its second year now, and although I am not officially working on it until later this year, I haven't been able to resist taking a quick peek at some of the samples - I'm presenting some of ...