Castles and Coprolites

Finally back in the UK after 6 weeks in the US as a WUN visiting fellow at UW and subsequently conference participant at the SAA 77th Annual Meeting in Memphis . Since my previous update, I gave another seminar as part of UW Anthropology FAALS , this time on my micromorphology work at Catalhoyuk. Rather than giving the same presentation I normally do, I decided to incorporate some of the very latest work I've been doing at the site, including the analysis I did at UW, and even a bit of theory. It was great to get lots of questions and positive responses, and the discussion gave me some useful ideas on how to integrate larger scale spatial analysis with micromorphology (the focus of which, in my research at least, has been temporal). I was sad to have to leave UW after only 1 month - I intially thought this would be plenty of time, but it went by so quickly. Hopefully I'll be able to go back when my lab work with Feeding Stonehenge has finished. Before returning to the UK I s...

All those good intentions to update my blog on a daily basis seem to have failed, though this is good in a way as it reflects how busy I have been. Since my last update I have had a behind the scenes tour of the Burke Museum (absolutely fantastic collections of art from the northwest coast, including bent boxes, incredible!), I've visited the labs in Oceanography (which by the way, has a rather fantastic coffee/lounge area, see below), and have given my first department seminar for Archaeology (which attracted a decent audience despite being a friday afternoon and having the word biomolecular in the title). Lounge area, UW Oceanography I've also made significant progress on a paper I'm co-authoring on 'jumping scales' at Çatalhöyük, which is exploring the link between the scale at which data is collected, and the scale at which interpretations are made. It turns out UW is a great place to be working on this, as the office I'm in has a huge geoarchaeology l...