Castles and Coprolites

I just read an interesting blog post by Professor Stephanie Moser at the University of Southampton, commenting on the recent Guardian art blog by Jonathan Jones , where he suggest that archaeologists should emphasise the 'thrilling' and 'beautiful' attributes of the subject to popularise their research. Professor Moser's discusses the important issue of balancing scientific rigour with providing cultural enlightenment. I wholeheartedly agree that we should promote our research beyond academia, but as Moser also concludes, I am not sure about focusing on the intrinsic beauty of objects to do so. Objects certainly can be beautiful, and I appreciate them as much as anyone, but without context that's all they are, beautiful, but pointless. It is the analysis and interpretation of objects (conducted with scientific rigour) that gives them meaning. Even if that is just to marvel at the technological skill that went into creating the object - even the most simple of st...

My postdoc work on the pottery residues for the Feeding Stonehenge project was featured on the Channel 4 documentary last night Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons. The organic residues PI, Dr Oliver Craig did a great job of explaining the methods we have been using, with a few hints at our results - full details won't be available until we publish the research towards the end of the year (and complete our statistical analysis to confirm our interpretations!). The work is also featured as one of this week's main news stories on the University of York website here and the Department of Archaeology news page here . http://www.channel4.com/programmes/secrets-of-the-stonehenge-skeletons/4od As Ol explains, this is one of the largest studies of pottery residues from a single site (over 300 individual pots were analysed), and by designing a sampling strategy with GIS and other specialists, we have been able to investigate spatial differences in pottery use across the site, be...

Different ways of representing lipid structures Chemistry has always been one of my favourite subjects, I like how logical mechanisms are, and the structures have a certain beauty - once you know what the symbols mean. I was asked to contribute some lectures on lipid analysis for the Honours Scientific Methods in Bioarchaeology course this semester. Having taught this subject previously I thought this wouldn't be a problem, and dug out my 2 hour session on lipid chemistry and nomenclature ( Octadeca- cis -6- cis -9- cis -12-trienoic acid anyone?).  It's a shame I can't just start with the archaeology - Feeding Stonehenge! The Earliest Humans in North America! Mummification! There is such an exciting range of applications of the technique. It isn't until the latter part of the session however that I usually get into the archaeological aspects, as I think it's important to understand the background chemistry in order to understand how you can apply it to ...

Kenyon excavating at Jericho. Photo from Archaeology International http://www.ai-journal.com/article/view/ai.1321/89 It's International Women's Day ! So I thought it would be appropriate to have a quick muse about one of archaeology's most inspiring female figures (in my opinion at least!). I first became aware of Kathleen Kenyon as the lady after whom my first year undergrad accomodation was named - the delightful Kenyon Building, a 1960s concrete tower block of doom in the middle of the otherwise attractive grounds of St Hugh's Colleg e. She is perhaps most well known for her excavations of early Jericho in the 1950s, and she also played a key role in the formation of the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, was the first female president of the Oxford University Archaeological Society, was honorary director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, became Principle of  St. Hugh's College and in 1973 was named Dame of the Order of the Brit...

This is an example of where having a background in geosciences can be very useful as an archaeological micromorphologist. Although a lot of the materials that I look at are anthropogenic, there are also many processes occuring that involve natural sediments. In these micrographs you can see some nice examples of water-laid sediment crusts. Water-laid crusts are quite distinctive, and form when an inwash of water carries particles which then settle under gravity according to their size. The coarsest material requires the most energy to stay in suspension, so settles first, and gradually finer and finer particles settle out of the water, creating the banding effect, with the very fine clay particles settling out last. It occurs on a much larger scale in certain river environments wherever there is a change in the energy of the river. This is the same idea that I was talking about that is used to seperate out the clay fraction from sediments during phytolith processing - the coarser ph...