Castles and Coprolites

Ashy midden deposits in thin section. Since starting my new job as a Research Fellow, I feel like the amount of actual research I have done is limited! But I have spent plenty of time applying for money to do research. It must be nice being a researcher in a subject that doesn't require expensive laboratory work or sample processing. I have daydreams about spending all my time just reading and writing in a nice quiet library somewhere, preferably overseas and sunny. On the plus side, the more funding applications I write, the quicker it gets, and sometimes I even get the money! I just found out recently I was awarded a University of Edinburgh Munro Research Grant to complete the pilot work I've been doing on material from Boncuklu Hoyuk ('the place of beads') in Turkey. I started working there after finishing my PhD, I think the first samples I collected were in 2009, but due to the expense of producing thin sections, I was not able to get them processed at the time...

 Natasha K. Loeblich's winning image  I rarely make more than one post per day, but I just had to share this amazing image by researcher Natasha K. Loeblich, which was awarded a distinction in the 2008 Nikon Small World Photography competition. The image shows layers of paints in a colonial townhouse building, and Natasha's work has helped understand what the townhouse looked like during different periods of occupation, which can then be used for repairing historic buildings in an authentic style. You can read more about the research project here . The image was p osted recently on io9 website , and many of the reader comments remarked how 'sparkly' the paint looks - it's suprising how materials can appear very different when viewed at the microscopic scale, and materials such as paints which may appear smooth and homogenous, are actually made up of different types of particles. Natasha is an art conservator and paint analyst with a backgro...

I will sort them into subject areas at some point Not too much to report from February. There are lots of things in progress, but I've spent a lot of time getting the facilities set up at Edinburgh, with relatively little time spent on new research. Hopefully now that most of the new lab kit has been ordered I can get going with all of the projects that have been put on hold during the moving process. Speaking of moving, having been based at three different universities over the past few years, my belongings have become somewhat spread out across the country, and I thought now would be the time to try and consolidate everything - mostly books! I had a parcel arrive from the University of Reading a few days ago, containing a whole load of books that I forgot to take when I moved to York in 2010 (I say forgot, most likely I didn't have the energy to pack up another two shelves of books from the office after clearing out everything at home). Mostly books on analytic...

I've been working on and off on these samples from Biała Góra (Poland) as part of the Ecology of Crusading project . We collected them back in June 2011 along with a coring transect survey to assess the nature and extent of the 'cultural layer' at the site. It's a very shallow deposit containing lots of broken ceramics and animal bones etc. The sediment itself looks similar to 'dark earth' deposits in the field, of which there have been many micromorphology studies, largely led in the UK by Dr Richard MacPhail .  The micrograph shows the lowermost 'natural' deposits (upper in PPL and lower in XPL), which consist of a silty sand deposit which becomes coarser further down the profile. The pretty greenish grains are glauconite, an iron potassium silicate mineral, which is thought to be indicative of a marine depositional environment. They can be seen especially clearly in XPL in the lower image.  The geology is this part of Poland (as I found out a...