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Showing posts from February, 2014

Publishing an Archaeology PhD part 2

Following my post a couple of days ago I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and thought I would get some other opinions to add to my own. I had a chat with some senior academics I have worked with who have been involved in the hiring process of postdocs and academic staff, 1 from a science-heavy background, 1 who is a straight archaeology/regional specialist and 1 who is a bit of both. I asked a series of questions regarding publications, and the answers were pretty interesting. Largely they reflected my own perceptions, but there were a few noteworthy points that I hadn't considered. 1. What do you look for in terms of a candidate's publication record? As we know, peer reviewed journals are important, followed by books in the sciences, with the quality of the book publisher being important. Being an editor of conference proceedings was also noteworthy, but the quality of the papers mattered, and also where it was published. However the overall message was that go

Publishing an archaeology PhD part 1

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Advice for Owain? RT @OwainConnors : Anyone got any advice on what to do with my thesis once my corrections are signed off? #PhD #archaeology — Archaeology Postdocs (@archpostdocs) February 20, 2014 I am writing this post in response to this request on Twitter about how to go about publishing an archaeology PhD. As I am now fairly experienced in this area, I felt it would be a good idea to share my knowledge. Please do comment if you have different experiences! How to publish is something that I was never explicitly told about during my PhD, though in hindsight it’s this kind of information that would have been incredibly useful. I think sometimes the more senior we get into the academic hierarchy we can forget that the things that seem so obvious do not come naturally (at least, not without a lot of unnecessarily wasted time and potentially mistakes). So here is my quick guide to publishing a PhD. I will do more on this in a future post as there is a lot to cover. T

Ode to Ice Ages

Ten hundred thousand times the Earth has turned Around the Sun that brightly burns In ebbs and flows Ever spinning, tilting, turning; The age of glaciers comes and goes. The ice retreats, the ice expands It creaks and creeps across the lands A frozen beast Slowly grinding, grazing, churning, Carving out the valleys deep. An ever-changing climate, piercing cold and dry With sculpted peaks against the sky A mountain shorn A landscape treeless, bare, eroded, Of all that went before. Colossal creatures roamed the land in herds And Homo sapiens emerged Migrating from afar The human story has unfolded, Driven by the motions of stars.

Manganese Micrograph Mystery!

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What a treat for you this month, another set of micrographs and it's only the end of the first week of the month! Actually, I am posting this because I need a bit of help - here we have an image of dung deposits in plane (PPL) and cross polarised light (XPL). You can see in the upper image, the layered appearance associated with ruminant dung, but we also have a lot of black 'speckling'. This appears to be concentrated in bands throughout the deposit. When we look at the deposit under XPL it turns out that these speckles are 'stains' on the dung spherulites! The only thing I have seen like this before was called microbial/fungal or manganese staining, but I can't find the reference (or it may have been something that was mentioned to me in passing?). Anyone got any insights/references? It's probably not vital to the interpretation but it could help understand the post-depositional processes going on here, and it is quite fascinating in itself (well, maybe ju

Micrograph of the Month: Ferrous phosphate (vivianite)

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This month we have a lovely image of a particularly colourful mineral feature called vivianite. Vivianite is an amorphous hydrated ferrous (iron) phosphate, which is blue when oxidised. It has been linked to the decomposition of bone and/or human and animal waste in wet sediments, which fits with what we know about this context. Yes, we are still looking at those waterlogged deposits from medieval Riga ! This is just one example of the many occurrences of vivianite in this layer. The small fragment of wood is also interesting. Unlike the waterlogged wood we looked at a couple of months ago , this fragment has been completely mineralised due to the presence of phosphate in the waterlogged sediment - at first glance I thought it was a bit of bone! You can also see that the pores spaces within the wood have been completely filled with fine sediments, which also indicates waterlogged conditions - the infilling of the voids occurs as fine sediments suspended in water are deposited within