Castles and Coprolites

Last month I thought that I would be unable to post any new micrographs for a while, however with a stroke of luck, and digging out of an old hard drive, I came across all the files from my PhD thesis! A stark reminder of the importance of proper archiving of digital image files, I must have hundreds of images that have not been catalogued properly...I'll add that to the to do list! Here we have a micrograph of a reference specimen of Setaria italica, more commonly known as foxtail millet. In this image you can see that this is a very well silicified bit of plant tissue, with all the individual cells being clearly defined. This is a leaf fragment and you can see the spikey hair phytoliths, which are also called trichomes. the little 'dumb-bell' shaped short cells are known as bilobes or bilobate cells. These bilobes are typically found in plants with C4 photosynthesis, and can give an indication of the broad type of environment. C4 refers to the biochemical mechanism that ...

Blog readers, I need your help! Or rather, a fellow blog reader and student needs your help. Fleur Shinning is a Masters student in Heritage Management at Leiden University  in the Netherlands. Her research is investigating how the use of blogs and social media contributes to the accessibility of archaeology, and she is studying several blogs as case studies, Castles and Coprolites being one of them. Her end goal is to contribute to improving public outreach activities, and she is hoping to get blog visitors to answer a series of questions regarding their motives for visiting the blog. You can access the questionnaire here:  http://goo.gl/forms/z3BAUTyYUL . As an incentive anyone who answers the questionnaire will be entered into a competition to win 6 issues of Archaeology Magazine! As the blog author I have also answered a series of questions on blogging for Fleur's research, and it reminded me about the blogging carnival that I took part in durin...

Just taking this opportunity to share a video I recently posted on my YouTube page, from my talk at the Archaeological Research in Progress conference 2015, organised by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland . Any feedback and comments on this would be much appreciated, as it is the first 'full length' talk I have done that has been recorded (by the talented Open Access Archaeology ). I now have a grand total of 3 videos posted on YouTube, and it got me thinking about the idea of doing video-blogging. Is this something that people would find interesting? I was thinking of doing short videos that summarise different aspects of my work (and related research areas), and including PowerPoints that I have previously used in my teaching - this could either be at a very introductory level, or a little more advanced. What sorts of topics would people like to see? Also taking this opportunity to share my IndieGoGo campaign again, which is now half way through and on 21% - thank yo...