Castles and Coprolites

I was recently alerted to this interesting new paper (open access!) through Google Scholar citation alerts, which is a very useful service for finding out when your papers are cited by other authors (in this case my 2011 paper on faecal lipid residues at Catalhoyuk ). The authors studied a sequence of lake sediments from Lake Igaliku in SW Greenland, looking at changes in the quantity of DOC and fungal spores. DOC is a bile acid (deoxycholic acid), and is found in both human and ruminant faeces, but at a higher concentration in ruminants. Humans have higher amounts of LC (another bile acid, lithocholic acid). Interestingly no LC was found, suggesting that the DOC comes entirely from herbivores (and that the runoff 'polluting' the lake is largely agricultural, rather than coming from settlement sewage waste). The fungal spores that were found are from coprophilous fungi - i.e. fungi that grow on faeces! The amount of DOC present correlated with the number of fungal spores, wi...

I made my first ever video this week. It is an attempt to visualise a concept that can be difficult to express - the relationship between micro (and sub-micro) stratigraphy that we can see under the microscope, to the macroscale deposits that most (non-micromorphologists) are familiar with in the field. It is hard to imagine something you cannot see, and as an archaeologist who has the privilege of being able to examine the 'invisible' archaeological record, I want to be able to show others these insights, which can have a significant impact on the process of interpretation. It is this thought that is the focus of a short article that has just been published on Then Dig , a peer reviewed blog hosted at Berkeley. The thoughts that I express there are a short glimpse into the theoretical (and practical) problems that I ponder frequently, and on which I hope to write something more extensive in the future. To come back to the video, I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I m...

Something a little bit different - this month I have an image of a siliceous sponge spicule! This show up occasionally in my phytolith slides, and are very distinctive. Sponges, or poriferans to give them their scientific name, are characterised by an unusual feeding system that involves drawing water in through little pores in the outer walls, and filtering food from the water as it moves around their bodies, before being pumped back out again. This flow of water occurs in one direction and is driven by beating flagella. Sponge spicules provide structural support and protection from predators. They come in all sorts of shapes each with a different name - the single spike shape that you can see looks like a monaxon, though it is also possible that is has broken off a larger 'polyaxon' type. The formation of spicules seems to be better understand than that of my other favourite siliceous microfossil, the phytolith, and is controlled largely genetically, but with environmental c...

I read on the interwebs recently that the new Ghostbusters are women! I also read that some people thought this was "unrealistic". So I thought I would check out the original characters and see what is so unrealistic about them being played by women. Why am I blogging about this you may ask? Where is the archaeological connection? Well, it so happens that one of the original Ghostbusters did a PhD in Egyptology! Now it's been many years since I watched the films, and I was of an age where I didn't take in the details of people's professions and whatnot, but that's pretty awesome. And ghosts, you know, archaeology, dead people, cursed artefacts etc. There's a connection in there somewhere. Dr Watt, Prof Jackson, Prof Ikram & Prof. Ferlaino The original dudes were parapsychologists. As psychology is a rather large field, I wasn't sure where to start, but I managed to find Dr Caroline Watt, at my own University of Edinburgh , who researches th...