Castles and Coprolites

What do dinosaurs and archaeology have in common? Nothing, surely! the archaeologist may say with a knowing smile. There is a bit of a running joke amongst archaeologists that one of the first questions people ask is do you dig up dinosaurs? And the response being well no, you're thinking of palaeontology. Both disciplines are associated with trowel usage, and summers of field work digging stuff up. There may even be some overlap in terms of questions asked - the nature of long term environmental and ecological change, especially the further back in time we go to the earliest origins of hominids. In general however, archaeology is focused on the study of material remains of human societies (largely anatomically modern humans), whilst palaeontology focuses on all other life forms prior to the beginning of the Holocene. And not just dinosaurs. There is another area where these two research areas overlap, and that is the way in which discoveries in these disciplines make it from the...

A little bit late this month as I've recently moved office and only just had my microscope camera software installed on my new PC. Incidentally this is also the reason I haven't added scale bars to these images, as I haven't had the chance to calibrate the magnification for the software (you have to tell the computer what the magnifications are by taking measurements of known lengths on a micrometer). The image to the left is at x10 magnification, the one on the right is x20. Here we are looking at some ashy deposits from the Babylonian city of Tell Khaiber, Iraq (being excavated as part of the Ur region project ). These are absolutely full of plant phytoliths and grass derived microcharcoal. The structure of these conjoined cell phytoliths is beautifully preserved. I have highlighted the multiple layers of plant tissue that are likely to be from reeds (a bundle of stems?). The stacked bulliform phytoliths are typical of reeds, and are often seen as individual cells. Here w...