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Is Archaeology a Science?

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Who'd have thought I'd find myself as co-convener for a third year Theoretical Archaeology module? Such is the situation I find myself in towards the end of my first year at the University of Edinburgh. I used to be one of those people who thought theory was all a bit confusing with no relevance to 'real' archaeology. This is an attitude I have found especially of researchers in archaeology who have a background in the sciences. What is the point of theory? Or I'm a scientist, I don't need theory! As an undergraduate I had a compulsory Philosophy of Science module, but I'm not sure how common this is for most science degrees. I think sometimes we don't realise that even as scientists with 'hard data', we have to interpret our data - and in archaeology especially, these data are always flawed in some way, and our interpretations steeped in our own experiences. It's a myth that scientific results can only have one interpretation. The way we us

Cracking archaeology Christmas present!

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What a fab Christmas present idea for that special archaeologist in your life, a Catalhoyuk themed 2014 calendar! Stunning photography by the site photographer Jason Quinlan. Alas I doubt he decided to include any photos of coprolites. Still worth a look though, despite this obvious omission, there are many photos of lovely lesser features such as intricate wall paintings, Neolithic burials and exceptionally well preserved mud-brick architecture etc ;) To Order: http://www.magcloud.com/ browse/issue/674617  

Middens and microfauna

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There was a nice surprise in the post for me this morning - a copy of a new book by Professor Terry O'Connor , Animals as Neighbours: the Past and Present of Commensal Species . I contributed an image for one of the figures, of midden deposits built up around Neolithic buildings at Catalhoyuk, Turkey. As O'Connor notes, Catalhoyuk is one of the earliest human settlements to have been colonized by house mice! Not surprising, considering the sheer volume of domestic waste deposits that accumulated in such close proximity to where people were living, and the density of human occupation. This also goes to show how useful it is to integrate different lines of evidence in archaeological research - my own work on middens at Catalhoyuk has shown they contain abundant human and animal dung, which also has interesting implications for understanding human health. Dr Emma Jenkins , who works on the microfauna at Catalhoyuk, has also identified large quantities of digested microfaunal mat

The Earliest Neolithic of Iran

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The long awaited CZAP volume is out at the end of this month, published by Oxbow . This is the first project monograph from the Central Zagros Archaeological Project (CZAP) , and includes 2 (and a half) chapters co-authored by myself, on the biomolecular analysis of coprolites (oh that old chestnut!) and phytolith analysis. Dr Wendy Matthews coordinated the micromorphology analysis and directed sampling, and in the monograph she provides an excellent integration of micromorphology, phytolith and geochemical analysis to address questions about resource use and animal management at this early pre pottery Neolithic site. I also did the chapter on molluscs - though I am in no way an expert on this, I was the most qualified person on the 2008 excavation team (having worked on a shell midden as an undergrad!), and as we unexpectedly ended up with an incredibly large volume of molluscs from the excavation, a brief preliminary report was needed (hence half a chapter - would make a great

Micrograph of the Month - Waterlogged Wood

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Here are two examples of waterlogged wood, in deposits from Medieval Riga, currently being analysed as part of the Ecology of Crusading project. It's been almost a year since I started on these slides, which were prepared in December last year - there are so many of them it is taking me quite a while to get through. It's a fascinating set of samples, such a mix of materials with some interesting post-depostional processes going on. In the upper image you can see a fragment of wood preserved entirely through waterlogging, within a mixed deposit containing charred material. This little fragment of wood has been stained orange, which is typical of waterlogging and mineralisation. In the lower image you can see a fragment of wood which has been preserved through a mix of partial burning (as seen by the black colour in the lower part of the wood), whilst the non-charred part has been preserved through waterlogging. Waterlogged deposits are relatively rare - most plant material

Blogging Archaeology - the Good the Bad and the Ugly

It's December! That means I need to be thinking about a new micrograph of the month for your viewing pleasure, but for now here is my response to the second round of questions for the Blogging Archaeology blog carnival. Click here for more info and my response to the first round in November. Very interesting to see the range of responses to the last lot. I recognised a few of the blogs taking part, as well discovering some new ones to add to my reading list. The Good- what has been good about blogging?  I love writing and putting together images, and my blog is a great way to keep up with that in a way that is less time consuming and stressful than writing articles and lectures. Aside from the pleasure of simply writing, it's also great fun looking at my viewer statistics. It is quite satisfying to see where my audience comes from. Sometimes I can guess who it is, for example when my relatives in Oregon have been reading, and I also get a lot of views from Edinburgh, York

Blogging Archaeology

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I was invited today to take part in a blogging carnival, related to a Blogging in Archaeology session at the upcoming SAA conference . Quite handy actually as I can't attend the conference in person this year due to teaching commitments. What is a blogging carnival you may ask? Check out the original post on Doug's Archaeology here. Each month leading up to the session, a question is posted, and participants can choose to answer it via their blog. The answers are then all summarised at the end of the month. Hopefully this will highlight some new archaeology blogs to add to the long list I already follow (maybe I should do a post about that!). Anyhoo. Here are my answers to the first set of questions: Why did you start a blog? I had been meaning to start one for years before I actually did. I have been a big user of social media since I was an undergrad, but always for personal rather that professional purposes. I eventually started my blog at the beginning of 2012 af

Micrograph of the Month: Starch inside a waterlogged seed

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Here we have a series of micrographs showing a seed, embedded within waterlogged midden deposits at Neolithic Catalhoyuk. These are the earliest deposits from the Deep Sounding in the South Area, and are some of the only waterlogged contexts at the site. These deposits make a particularly interesting comparison to the later middens at the site, as we can look at the differences between waterlogged and non-waterlogged versions of similar deposit types. In the many sections I have looked at, getting sections through seeds like this does not occur too often. I have see larger seeds from Celtis (hackberry) more frequently. This teeny little seed looks like it might be a Chenopod (the little bump on the left of the seed is a feature of Chenopods), though I'd have to ask an archaeobotanist to confirm. The exciting thing about this is you can see the organic part of the seed still preserved within the endocarp - the orangey colour is typical of mineralised organic remains. In the lowe

International Archaeology Day 2013

October 19th was International Archaeology Day , not to be confused with Day of Archaeology which I have participated in in the past ( 2012 and 2013 ). Whereas Day of Archaeology is a blog based event, where people blog about their day as an archaeologist, International Archaeology Day is more a series of events organised by different groups and institutions. I was a bit late finding out about it so didn't have time to organise any events, but by browsing some of the online activities I discovered Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Specifically I came across Ada Lovelace and Trowelblazers edit-a-thons , which aim to celebrate women in archaeology, palaeontology and geology, by creating and improving Wikipedia articles. What a great idea! Wikipedia often gets bashed for being a poor source of information for academic work, but as a first stopping point to get your head around a subject it's really not that bad. As with any source, the ability to judge the quality of the information on

Catalhoyuk monographs

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Just a quick update, it looks like the new Catalhoyuk monographs will be out in the next month! This set of volumes describes work at the site from 2000-2008 and includes a huge amount of new and exciting data. I have two chapters in Volume 8 summarising my PhD research on midden formation processes and our pilot study on coprolite and burial residues. These chapters include extra data, images and samples that were not included in the journal articles from 2011 that were published on these studies.  Volume 8 details here.

The Ness in Progress

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Micromorphology block being impregnated with resin. Photo by Earthslides. Not too much to report on my own activities this week, apart from the neverending email stream that has to be tackled on a daily basis. Sometimes I think it would be nice to declare an email bankruptancy and just delete them all and start anew. More exciting than the contents of my inbox however, are the updates from Earthslides on the progress of my micromorphology samples from the Ness of Brodgar . Julie Boreham from Earthslides runs a page called Hidden Worlds, Off the Bench, where she posts updates of her daily goings on in the lab. This week she has been working on the Ness samples, which are currently being impregnanted in resin, the first step in the process of turning them into slides. Check out her page here for more details!

Micrograph of the Month: Fabulous Fired Clay

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Here is a nice series of micrographs from a little experiment I did many years ago, back when I was a research assistant at the University of Reading, shortly after finishing my PhD. Professor John Allen had collected a clay sample associated with the Roman town of Silchester, and conducted a series of firing sessions in a kiln, each in increments of 100 °C , to provide a collection of reference slides for fired clays in thin section. As I had been working on infra red spectroscopy at the time, I used the same fired samples to produce a series of reference FT-IR spectra to compare with the micrographs. We presented this as a poster at the 5th Experimental Archaeology conference in Reading 2011, though I never really took the work further, as I became more interested in developing the use of organic geochemical techniques rather than inorganic. FT-IR is a great technique for certain materials, but archaeological samples tend to be so mixed and hetergeneous it can be hard to get defini

Hidden Worlds at the EAA 2013 - Pilsen, Czech Republic

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Today was the first day of the 2013 EAA conference , held this year in Pilsen, Czech Republic. I've been to quite a few of the EAAs now, and they are always great for catching up with colleagues from across Europe and beyond, and this year is no exception. I've probably spend more of the conference today discussing work over coffee than seeing papers! So far I've met colleagues from Bristol, Reading and York as well as some Edinburgh folk. This year, rather than giving a paper, I'm doing something a little different. Together with Julie Boreham from Earthslides, UK , I have put together a photographic exhibition of micromorphology slides from Paisley Caves. Julie did a similar exhibition a few years ago for the WAC 2008 conference in Dublin, which was a great success. The idea is to showcase 'Hidden Worlds' of archaeology under the microscope, and to communicate thin section micromorphology to a non-specialist archaeological audience. The large poster sized pho

Phytoliths don't cut the mustard?

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All over my news feed last week were links to news articles reporting on the 'earliest use of spices in Europe', specifically the use of garlic mustard seed ( Alliaria petiolata) by Neolithic people. The evidence used to support this is our old favourite microfossil, the phytolith (frequent readers will know they come up in this blog quite frequently), which archaeologists have recovered from burnt food crusts inside Neolithic pots. The original research article is open access in PLoS ONE and can be read here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070583 I have been debating with myself whether to post these thoughts, as I know the team that did the work, and have great respect for them. But the subject is one I feel strongly about (as anyone who has discussed phytolith analysis with me will know!). So the aim here is to open discussion about the problems with microfossil analysis in general, and this happens to be a case study which illustrate

Micrograph of the Month: Modern roots

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In your sediments, post-depositionally disturbing your stratigraphy. Here we have examples of roots from modern plants that have grown into the archaeological deposits. They are easily distinguishable from archaeological plant remains as the tissue is fresh, organic and well preserved. Photo A shows a root that has grown into soft, ashy, compact midden at Boncuklu, Turkey. You can see clearly the void that has been created from the root's growth, which is the same shape as the root itself (3). We can also see a fragment of shell (1) and some small crushed bone fragments (2) embedded in the deposits. Photos B and C show close ups of modern root from Cesis Hillfort, Latvia. In B you can see where the root is divided into two rootlets whilst C shows the cell structure very clearly. Each of those 'jigsaw' shapes is an individual cell - it is cells like this that become infilled with silica during the growth of the plant, to produce phytoliths. This example of 'jigsaw' s

Investigations at the Ness of Brodgar Days 4 and 5

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Ben Chan discusses this week's progress on the site tour This week has gone by so quickly, but we have managed to collect some great sets of samples, more than we can get made into slides at the moment! The first lot have already been sent off to Earthslides to get made into thin sections. An important lesson from the field - if you get over enthusiastic about collecting blocks of soil that weigh >1kg each, they will not fit in your luggage and will incur hefty postage fees. And lesson 2, blocks of soil wrapped in tissue and tape look very odd on the airport X ray and your bags will likely be searched. I ended up taking about 20 block samples in all, and spent much of my last day in Orkney panicking about how to transport them back.  Friday was my last day on site, and the day started with a site tour with each supervisor summarising what has been going on in the building/trench that week. A week is just not long enough to get my head around everything going on at the Nes

Investigations at the Ness of Brodgar Days 2 and 3

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Planning sampling strategy with Jo After planning the sampling strategy, the next few days have been spent collecting samples. I decided to focus on two areas of nicely stratified midden for the main sampling, and have collected overlapping sample blocks to provide an overview of the entire sequence. Already it's possible to see some quite ashy areas, so hopefully we will be able to get some nice information on resource use, and hopefully what activities the fuels relate to. We decided on a further 4 areas as secondary sample sets with a smaller number of samples, testing specific hypotheses from the excavations. More on those later this week. As well as the Orkney students, we also have a team here from Willamette University, Oregon, led by Professor Scott Pike . Professor Pike has a background in geology and expertise in pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence). In brief this involves using a piece of kit that looks like a ray gun to fire X rays at material, which then

Investigations at the Ness of Brodgar, Day 1

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ORCA project officer Dan explains what's going on with middens Marvelous midden at the Ness of Brodgar - check out those ashy layers! Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to be awarded 2 small grants from the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Orkney Archaeological Society , to carry out a pilot microarchaeology study at the Ness of Brodgar site in Orkney. The Ness of Brodgar is part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site , and excavations are directed by Nick Card of ORCA/UHI . The site is one of the finest examples of Neolithic archaeology in the UK (along with the rest of Orkney!), and the extent of preservation of the buildings and middens provides a rare opportunity to study the subsistence activities of the inhabitants. The architecture here is some of the most impressive I've ever seen. It's interesting to note that the dates for the Neolithic here go to around 2500BC - roughly the same date that the Great Pyramid of Giza was cons

Micrograph of the Month: Varieties of Gypsum 1

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A: gypsum plaster (Tell Brak, building) B. microcrystalline gypsum (Catalhoyuk, midden) C. gypsum rosette (Kamiltepe, building) D. microcrystalline gypsum (Kamiltepe, external area) This month we have some micrographs showing examples of some different ways you might encounter gypsum in archaeological thin sections, part 1 as there are a few other forms that I don't have photos of yet but will aquire at some point. Gypsum (aka calcium sulphate) often occurs in Near Eastern samples as a post-depositional feature, where the calcium sulphate salt, dissolved in water, precipitates as the water evaporates. The growth of the crystals can often cause a lot of damage to intact deposits, as the growth of the crystals pushes apart the material. The crystals can have a widely variable morphology, as a result of different formation mechanisms. As well as precipitation from water evaporation, the salts can precipitate due to the solution becoming saturated (i.e. there is so much present no

Day of Archaeology 2013

Paisley Caves – a view from the microscope Today's post is for the Day of Archaeology 2013, go check out their website for lots of great posts about the diverse things archaeologists get up to on a day to day basis.

A dung debate?

I never imagined I would end up being a specialist on the subject of archaeological poop, but there you go. Coprolites, animal dung, palaeofaeces you name it. So I was very intrigued by an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week, claiming evidence for the earliest use of manure by European farmers 8000 years ago . Firstly let's consider the different methods that we can use to identify dung in the archaeological record. These can be divided into direct and indirect methods. The former include definitive evidence for the presence of dung, that is actual dung pellets, or lipid biomarkers which are found exclusively in dung (i.e. faecal sterols and bile acids from the gut). The latter include evidence which is suggestive of dung, for example weed seed assemblages. Although indirect indicators are often the only thing available in archaeology, in my opinion one cannot make definitive statements based on indirect evidence. The best we can do