Castles and Coprolites

Back in March I mentioned that I was involved in a sciart collaboration, where artists and scientists come together to work on collaborative art projects, inspired by scientific research. I love this idea. I was always really into both art and science growing up (and took Art as an A Level subject!), and although I choose to go down the 'science' route for my career, I have maintained a keen interest in art, and particularly how we can use artistic expression to communicate scientific research. The artist I have been working with is Molly McEwan , an Edinburgh based artist and graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and talented ceramicist.  The photos to the left are a sneak preview from Molly's exhibition at Wednesday's Girl, a free exhibition showcasing the work of female artists from Scotland, held at Space Club and supported by Somewhere To , an organisation provides spaces and venues for young people across the UK. Molly's solo exhibition , ...

I had one of those moments this morning when I realised how odd my career sounds to those outside academia, as I found myself Googling 'Newcastle poo blog' in an attempt to find a blog I came across a few weeks ago, when I posted a fab cartoon called ' A Day in the Life of Poo '. Are there many people out there who talk about poo on a semi-regular basis? Parents of small children perhaps. My own work on poo has been on the fossilised variety, known as coprolites, but I also follow research on modern faecal analysis, particularly biofuel research and waste water analysis, as both are related to my work and interests. My research on the use of animal dung and reeds as fuel in prehistory for example draws heavily on studies of the modern use of such fuels, and how we can use archaeological case studies to inform modern biofuel policy. Likewise, one of the main methods that I use to analyse archaeological materials, faecal biomarker analysis, was developed by environmental ...

Warning, this post is going to be a long one. Well, relatively long as far as my blog posts go. It's the post I thought I'd never write, the one that so many others before me have written - it's the 'alt ac' career post! For those of you not familiar with the term 'alt-ac' is used to describe a career outside academia, specifically for those who were once, or aspired to be, on the academic career ladder. I myself am a bit of an odd case - on the one hand you could say I've had an extremely successful academic career so far. I've worked on some very high profile research projects, I've published over 30 peer-reviewed papers, some of which have been highly cited, giving me a h-index of 7 (apparently good for an early career reseearcher in archaeology, if you take notice of these sorts of metrics). I've won over £100k in grants to fund my research, despite being in a position where I have been limited in the type of grants I can apply for. My ...

This month's microfossil is a classic, at least within near eastern archaeology. The beautiful little structure you are looking at here is a phytolith from the husk of wheat. A huge area of research in phytolith studies is focused on cereals, and whether cereal phytoliths can be used to identify the genus or even species of cereals, and whether we can distinguish cultivated cereals from wild grasses. This obviously has very significant potentials in studying the origins and development of agriculture. This particular phytolith is from the middle Neolithic levels at Catalhoyuk , Turkey. At this point we have definitive evidence for agriculture from other lines of evidence, such as charred cereal grain stores within buildings. This phytolith was recovered from a midden, and is interesting because of its size. There is a positive correlation between the size of conjoined phytoliths and the availability of water during the growth of the plant. you can see that this phytolith is very la...