Castles and Coprolites

Almost forgot to post a microfossil for November! That would be sad as I've managed to do the monthly micrograph then microfossil posts every month for almost two years now. I've just been so busy with teaching, and the lack of microscope camera makes taking pictures a bit more of an effort than it used to be. Good news is that we do have a new set of microscopes and cameras for the archaeology lab here at Newcastle, hurray! The lab however is located in a different building to my office, so photograph acquisition still requires a bit more planning than it used to. As it is almost the end of 2015 (yikes), I am thinking of a new monthly blog feature, perhaps a thin section of the month, where I show you exciting pictures of whole thin section slides! But for now, here is something very pretty. Like the sponge spicules I posted earlier in the year , these little creatures are not my specific area of expertise, but they occasionally show up in my phytolith slides. They are littl...

I am pleased to announce a session I am co-organizing at the EGU 2016, Geoarchaeology: Human adaptation to landscape changes, landscape resilience to human impact, and integrating palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records  (GM6.2/SSS3.10), supported by the International Working Group on Geoarchaeology . If you are an archaeologist who has never been to a EGU I would highly recommend it - it gives you an important insight into work going on in the geoscience community, much of which is relevant to themes archaeologists are interested in. I first attended in 2010 (being lucky enough to be awarded an early career grant - see below), and I remember being very impressed my projects integrating historic documentary sources with climate data for example, in looking at human responses to environmental change, and if you are into isotopes, you are very likely to find the latest in cutting edge methods coming from the geoscience community. Likewise environmental archaeologists, com...

This weekend I went to my first AEA conference . As a student, then as a fixed term post-doc, it is difficult to fund conference attendance, and also to find the time when there are so many conferences to choose from. Having done a few years of the big conferences ( SAA and EAA ) to maximise audience and networking opportunities, I’ve decided to spend some time at the smaller ones, where I can focus on my specific interests. Overall it has been an enjoyable weekend, and it was great to be back in York and catch up with old friends and colleagues, including Matthew Collins , who I can’t thank enough for writing me many references over these past few years (I bet he’s relieved that I finally got a job so he can stop writing them!). There are three ‘themes’ that stood out for me at the conference. The first was the study of taphonomy, and how wildly different this is between different techniques in environmental archaeology. The second was the recognition of the advantages of inte...

The past few weeks have been pollen themed. Teaching pollen for Environmental Archaeology, and a new paper out on pollen analysis (and geoarchaeology) at Radzyń Chełminski in Poland . The latter is from my time working on the Ecology of Crusading project , and is a nice case study in using multi-proxy approaches, including historical documentary sources, to investigate landscape change. Pollen analysis is not my area of research expertise, but I have spent a long time working with pollen data. As a geography undergraduate I had several pollen classes for modules in  Quaternary   Environments  and Biogeography, and it also featured heavily in my MSc Geoarchaeology. Pollen analysis does what it says on the tin - we extract pollen grains from sequential layers in sediment cores, and count them to see how vegetation has changed over time. If we have a sediment layer dated to 1000 years ago that is full of oak pollen for example, we can reasonably assume that there was an oa...