New year, new job, new news

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 when needed. Another bit of great news for the new year - the Ancient Kura project, directed partly by the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, along with the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique and the National Academy of Sciences Baku, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography has just recieved funding for the next 3 years' of excavation and analysis. I have been working with Dr Barbara Helwing at one of the key sites, Kamiltepe, since 2010, and my paper on the pilot micromorphology and phytolith analysis should be out in the next few weeks. The funding means that we can extend the pilot and focus on a wider range of buildings and contexts, at Kamiltepe and other sites in Azerbaijan and Georgia, to investigate the lifestyles and subsistence practises of the Neolithic populations in this region.

Shillito, L-M. (2012) Preliminary Microstratigraphic Observations of Ash Deposits and Architectural Materials at Kamiltepe, Azerbaijan. In Ancient Kura 2010–2011. The First Two Seasons of Joint Fieldwork in the Southern Caucasus. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 44: 1-189. Ed. by Lyonnet, B., Guliyev, F., Helwing, B., Aliyev, T., Hansen, S. and Mirtskhulava, G.