Castles and Coprolites

I'm happy to announce that the editorial and the majority of papers for the special issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences are now available online ahead of print publication later this year. This volume is the end result of the 6th Experimental Archaeology conference , co-organised by myself, Eva Fairnell and Helen Williams , at the University of York in 2012, and includes a great range of papers on all aspects of experimental archaeology, from scientific experiments, archaeological reconstructions, and more experiential approaches. The editorial is free to access here , but if anyone would like pdfs of any individual papers please get in touch. The 7th EAUK was in Cardiff 2013, and the 8th EAUK has just been held this week at the University of Oxford. Although I couldn't attend this year it has been great being able to follow the conference online via live Twittering (#EAUK2014), and there are a couple of papers and posters presented this year that build on th...

This is the second floor themed micrograph post, you can see examples of Neolithic floors in a post from last year here . You'll notice the same horizontal surface and distinct boundaries, and even a similar type of charred plant, ash and bone debris, however the construction of the floors themselves is quite different. Whereas the prehistoric floors are made from packed mud/earth, these Medieval floors from the town of Riga are made from a calcareous material with a very high quantity of sand grains. It looks very similar to a lime mortar, though I want to do a bit more work on it before saying that for definite. Another difference here, whereas the Neolithic floors were showing signs of post-depositional processes in the form of gypsum crystals, the debris on this floor is remarkably well-preserved. I have put together two photos here, the bottom image showing an earlier floor, overlain by mixed debris, containing tiny bone fragments, wood charcoal and ash. The upper photo show...

It's Blogging Archaeology round 3! The summary of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly has just been posted over on Doug's Archaeology . Lots of good responses, it's definitely worth a read to see some of the 'bad'. The positive aspects of blogging are obvious in some ways - spreading the word about your research, (theoretically) getting interaction with an interested audience. The negative side it seems can be quite serious. My own reponse to 'the bad' seems quite trivial compared to what some people had to say. One response that stood out for me was Pots and Places, Stones and Bones, "the balance between self promotion and over exposure on social media (including blogging) really needs to be questioned" and the suggestion that blogging can come across as boasting. This is something I have thought about with my own blog. As it is a blog about my research, it is all a bit me me me, though I hope it doesn't come across as boastful. Maybe I should h...

Happy new year from Castles and Coprolites! The first news item of 2014 is a write-up by Michael Balter about the latest research on Stonehenge, featuring snippets about my work on pottery residues as part of the Feeding Stonehenge project , as well as summaries of work by the faunal team and other specialists. There's also a brief mention of our unpublished pilot study on pottery residues at the Ness of Brodgar, which we carried out as a comparison whilst working on the Durrington Walls assemblage. If you'd like to read it and don't have access to Science online, drop me an email and I can send you a pdf. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6166/18