Castles and Coprolites

Since officially starting at Edinburgh at the beginning of January, one of my major tasks has been coordinating the university's stand at the launch of ScARF - the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework, an initiative which highlights current strengths in Scottish archaeological research, and directions for future work. I have learned some valuable lessons from this, firstly that 2 weeks is very little time to coordinate 10 students, produce 10 project flyers and 3 A0 posters, and secondly, no matter how little time you have, never leave printing until the day before, and always get proofs! But, lessons learned (and apologies for spelling some names wrong!), the event yesterday evening went really well, and I was pleased to catch up with many old friends and colleagues. It turns out that I know more people in Edinburgh than I thought! University of Edinburgh stand at the ScARF launch event The posters we displayed highlighted all of the postgraduate research in Scottish ...

I wrote a feature article for Current World Archaeology Magazine on the Ecology of Crusading project, which has just been published in issue 57. It's a brief overview for a general audience, so there's lots of basic info on the environmental and lab methods we are using as well as some of the preliminary results. And of course lots of fab photos of castles, fieldwork and whatnot. I like writing more general articles like this - it's something I can show the parents and they get all excited about. Pages of technical jargon in J. Arch. Sci. and the like never get quite the same reaction. http://www.world-archaeology.com/features/crusader-castles/ It's exactly 10 issues since the last piece I wrote for them in issue 47, 2011, on Catalhoyuk under the Microscope, which you can read an excerpt from here: http://www.world-archaeology.com/features/turkey-neolithic-life-at-catalhoyuk/

Following on from my post last week about the Neolithic site of Kamiltepe in Azerbaijan , I thought I would share some of the images from the preliminary micromorphology report I did for the 2010 monograph. I loved working on these samples - it's the first time I've worked on a building myself. All of my work at Catalhoyuk has focused on middens, and all of the work on buildings is done by Dr Wendy Matthews (University of Reading), who supervised my PhD. Wendy's work at Catalhoyuk and many other Near Eastern sites is fantastic, and is the starting reference point for my own work in this area! So it was nice to see variety in deposit types - with the middens there is a lot of redeposited material, ashes, charcoal etc, but I have seen suprisingly little of the type of thing you can see here in these images. These show bits of microdebitage embedded in the floor of the building - that's tiny bits of waste chips from the production of stone tools. What is exciting about th...

One of the trenches I worked in at Kamiltepe 2010 I'm almost at the end of my second week in my new position at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and it's already been full of busy! The first week I spent gathering quotes for equipment to set up the new microfossil and microscope laboratories, so fingers crossed we can get ordering soon! I also made sure the library was well stocked in all the books and journals that I will need for teaching towards the end of the year, and was really pleased to see how extensive the collections are here. I've already started discussing potential collaborations with other staff members here, and as it turns out there are already several connections with my old BioArCh research group at York, which is very useful! I anticipate I will maintain my involvement with York, and was made a Visiting Research Associate at the beginning of the new year so that I can carry on using the facilities there ...

Deflocculating the clay particles. Don't forget to label the beakers. After carbonate removal and washing away any remaining acid , stage 2 is to get rid of any clays. Again it depends on the type of sample how long this step will take - whilst ashy samples will have more carbonates, they are likely to have minimal clay content. Conversely, these deposits from Elbląg have much more organic and clay components. Again, this is a very straightforward process, but very time consuming. In fact, for samples with a significant clay component, it can take all day! The samples are transferred from their tubes into tall-form 400mL glass beakers. The height and volume of the beaker is important, as we are using a bit of fluid mechanics to seperate out all the clay and non-clay sized particles. Rinsing beakers into crucibles Distilled water is added  along with a few mL of sodium hexametaphosphate (otherwise known as Calgon), up to a height of 8cm (it's easiest to mark this out o...

Weighing out: the container is zeroed and the exact weight of the sample recorded New year, new samples! Well, newish, they were collected in the summer of 2012 but only made their way to me a few weeks ago . Today is my first day on site at the University of Edinburgh, where I am hoping to set up laboratory facilities for microfossil processing. In the meantime I managed to speedily process this last batch at York. Following drying the samples out in the oven, the next few stages involve removal of different fractions of the soil/sediment. Soil is made up of a range of organic and inorganic components - so to get at the phytoliths, we have to remove any non-phytolith material. It is actually quite an easy lab method, but rather time consuming as there is lots of drying and transferring into different sized containers! As with all sample preparation, the samples are weighed after drying so we can quantify how much material has been processed. The amount of sample that we choose to...