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Showing posts from 2016

Merry Xmas!

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Teaching has finished, marking is done! Time to catch up with a last few bits and pieces before relaxing over the Xmas holidays. Looking at my calendar, my holiday time looks so short. In the second week of January I'm heading off to Belize for 2 weeks for a field training course , then it's straight back into teaching as soon as I get back. January also marks the beginning of my membership of the AHRC Peer Review College , and as part of this I will be undertaking training sometime in January. My new PhD student is also scheduled to start next month, though this may vary depending on how long the visa application process takes, and if our funding application is successful, I will also have a new postdoc joining the Wolfson Lab early in the new year. And the Wellcome Seed Award is scheduled to start in January too, which involves recruiting a new lab technician! It's all good though, I like being busy, and am one of those people who works better when I have several tasks t

The details of giant daisies

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Today is the end of the Semester, and I'm definitely ready for a break after an extremely busy few months. Lots of great news this year, with two successful grant applications - the NERC project which I've been posting about, and a new Wellcome seed award which will be starting next year, developing further work at Catalhoyuk in Turkey. I have also had my own assignment deadline this week, for the NERC training course that I am going on in January . Everyone in the group has been assigned a plant family, and we had to do a bit of research on the genera and species that are found in Belize, and write a short information sheet on key characteristics. I think the expedition leader took pity on me as one of the participants without a background in botany, and I was assigned the Asteraecae (Compositae), which happen to be one of the easier families to identify. Or at least, it is one I am familiar with - daisies and sunflowers! Some of the terminology was familiar, ringing bells fro

Adventures in medium sized mammal bone preparation

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I think the zooarchaeology short course at Sheffield really inspired me, as now I think about animal bones as well as soils and plants in all situations. I'm currently working in central Oregon doing some preliminary work for the NERC project . As I continue to work in this region, we will need to build reference collections to work with. This is built into the NERC project, in terms of a plant microfossil reference collection. Animal skeletons in general are not so easy to get a hold of as plant specimens. Being the resourceful, perhaps slightly strange academic that I am, I noticed a few carcasses by the side of the road and figured why let them go to waste? The landscapes of the USA are so different to the UK, and something that is very noticeable is the amount of roadkill. In the UK I think animals that are hit by cars are cleared up pretty quickly. In the US the roads are much bigger, and animals that are hit just stay there. Or get removed by scavengers. This week I noticed

First NERC project meeting in Oregon

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The NERC project officially started on the 1st November. Since then we've held interviews for the first PDRA post, and last week I traveled to Oregon for the first project meeting with partners Dr Dennis Jenkins and Dr Tom Stafford, at the Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History . It felt very surreal, finally having got the grant that we talked about for so long, and to be honest, did not quite expect to get! Not that we all don't think it's an amazing and worthwhile project, but getting funding for archaeological science is pretty difficult, and the success rate for NERC is really low ( 11% for the standard grants, new investigator scheme in 2015 ). I've made this journey many times, as I have family in central Oregon, but I must be getting old or something as the jet lag really kicked in this time. Still, many coffees later we had a productive meeting, going over the schedule for the next three years, planning the first session of fieldwork in the Spring, and g

Geoarchaeology session at EGU 2017

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I am pleased to announce I will be co-convening a session on Geoarchaeology at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2017 . Please do consider submitting an abstract to our session - there is funding available to support the participation of early career researchers and researchers from low income countries. The deadline for support applications is December 1st 2016. For further details on our session and how to register see here .

Adventures in fish bone preparation

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Cold water maceration If you follow my Twitter feed you may have noticed a string of posts discussing the best methods for preparing specimens for animal bone reference collections. This all started a while back when I decided to take the Sheffield Zooarchaeology short course . Having had little training in bones I thought it would be a good idea to get some basic skills, as I am responsible for the reference collections at Newcastle. However the majority of our existing collection is large domesticates, and being an environmental archaeologist, I figured we needed some microfauna. I already have a lecture in my Environmental Archaeology module that covers animal remains as environmental indicators, and wanted to expand this to include a practical. Being a second year undergraduate module this is very much an introduction to the subject, and the learning outcomes focus more on understanding the implications of recovery and taphonomic issues, rather than developing expertise in spec

The Archaeological Journal

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Well this is actually 'old news' in that I've known about it for quite a few months now, but I thought it best to wait until the transition process was well underway. Also, it's on the website now so I guess that means it's official - I will be taking over as editor of the Royal Archaeological Institute's Archaeological Journal in May 2017. I have been shadowing the outgoing editor Prof. Howard Williams for a few months now to get a feel for things, and am in the process of handling my first few submissions, as we transition from an email submission system to an online editorial management system with Taylor and Francis (side note, go and check out Howard's Archaeodeath blog! ). When I saw the position advertised earlier this year I jumped at the chance to apply. Strangely enough I really do enjoy editorial work, and having gained a lot of experience as a guest editor and assistant editor for a number of other journals, figured I could take on this new c

Is 'Impact' in Archaeology 'Selling out'?

Well October has gone by incredibly quickly! Despite not posting much, there has been a lot happening, so much in fact that I have quite the backlog of things to talk about. For now just a few thoughts on academia and 'impact'. I read this article today that talked about focusing on impact as 'selling out' (for non UK readers, this is the drive towards having some sort of measurable impact beyond academia that is becoming increasingly required for grants and rankings). I get that, as I used to feel the same way. During my PhD I thought very much that the quality of the academic work is all that should matter. I guess this comes about because of the way we are trained as academics - we go from school, where the focus is on doing well, getting good grades, through university, undergrad to postgrad. Again, the focus is very much on your achievements as an individual, and the academic merit of your ideas and your writing.  In my experience, it is not until I started my str

Wolfson Archaeology Lab, Newcastle

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When I started at Newcastle one of the first major roles I undertook was taking over as Director of the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory. This sounds rather grand, but in reality it mostly involves managing room bookings and making sure everyone has all the kit they need for practicals, research and teaching. Part of the job involves looking after a zooarchaeology reference collection, hence the post last month about attending the zooarchaeology  short course at Sheffield . I have also made various wonderful purchasing decisions, vastly expanding our suite of microscopes to include a range of Leica DM750P scopes for teaching, and dedicated scopes for research with even fancier specs including reflected light capabilities, image analysis software etc. The next stage will be to transform the side room, currently used mostly for storage, into a dedicated space for research. With a new lab based PhD and PDRA started in January, and possibly a Fellow later in 2017 (if all goes to plan), it is

Zooarchaeology short course at Sheffield

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For the past three days I've been doing a short course in Zooarchaeology at Sheffield . The Sheffield lab is one of the best places in the UK, and probably Europe, for animal bone research, and I was amazed at the extent of their reference collections. An absolutely fantastic resource. Although I have spent many years working with zooarchaeologists, and have a basic understanding of the subject, I've never worked directly with this material myself. As I am now responsible for the Wolfson Laboratory at Newcastle , and therefore our animal bone reference collection, I figured I should learn a bit more about them! It was very interesting to hear about a lot of research themes that I am interested in from the perspective another specialism. Taphonomy for example is something that I deal with myself a lot in the analysis of environmental samples, and it was very informative to hear how other people approach this topic. Whilst a lot of zooarchaeology focuses on the relationships be

Training in Belize!

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2016 - the year where the exciting news just keeps on coming! I found out recently that I've been selected to take part in a NERC training course, Fieldwork Skills in the Tropics, run by the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh , as part of their MSc in Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants . The course runs over two weeks next year, in Belize! It's been over a decade since I first left the UK on my first fieldwork abroad, but the thought of travelling somewhere new is still as exciting now as it was then. Probably even more so as I have some idea what I'm doing now. This course covers vegetation survey, monitoring and plant identification, with some GIS. Part of the application process involved a statement of why you would like to attend, with priority given to those with NERC funding, ECRs and students. Whilst I now work as an archaeologist, my background is in geosciences/geography, and I've always maintained that perspective in my research and teaching. My long term aim is

EAA conference, Vilnius 2016

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Last week was very busy. I was away in Vilnius, Lithuania for the European Association of Archaeologists annual meeting . The last one I went to was Pilsen in 2013  so it was good to go back and catch up with the latest research. I think I probably overdid it, giving a paper and a poster presentation, and also running the Newcastle University exhibition stand. I wasn't really able to do either effectively, having to jump in and out of sessions to sit at the desk. I ended up missing quite a few talks that I wanted to see. However, my paper presentation did go well, and I got some good questions and discussion. I was talking about Catalhoyuk, and assessing the past 25 years of 'multi-proxy' archaeology and approaches to use of space. Although some aspects were critical, the aim was to try and see what has worked and what hasn't worked, and some of the reasons why this might be. There is such a rich and unique record of the history of  excavation and methodology at Catalh

Bristol visit

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I just got back from a great visit to Bristol, to discuss timetables and a plan of action for the NERC grant. My coI is Dr Ian Bull of the OGU , and expert on all things faecal biomarker related. The last time I was in Bristol was in 2014, when I was a research fellow at Edinburgh , doing a whole range of pilot studies on various projects. The first time I went to Bristol was during my PhD, around 2004, to be trained in faecal biomarker analysis. Ian is like the unofficial third supervisor and the guy who showed me how to write a good academic paper. So it's somewhat surreal, but exciting, to be going back there as a PI. I'm always blown away by the amazing laboratory facilities they have -  it has to be one of the best places in the world for organic geochemistry, and there's always some fancy new kit to gawk at. We had a visit to the new radiocarbon AMS lab in archaeology. It's the first time I've seen one of these in person - such a complex bit of kit, it's i

I love middens

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We are in the process of updating the School website for History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastl e. I've been asked to provide some high resolution photos for various sections, and so have been digitally digging through my image archive. I came across this amsuing photo from 2004 - my first ever visit to Catalhoyuk . It was either during my MSc or just after I finished. So long ago that I still dyed my hair black! I remember this midden - I think it was Unit 1668, and probably isn't there anymore. The first midden I worked on, looking at archived micromorphology slides at the University of Reading, and trying to compare the phytolith data from the same units. Although the Masters project had a lot of limitations (working with archive samples is very difficult when trying to compare microstratigraphic data), the lessons I learned formed the basis of the project I went on to do for my PhD. So I still have a soft spot for this particular midden! These were taken using one of

The story of how I started working in Oregon

If you follow me on twitter you may have seen a series of posts over this year relating to a NERC application I submitted. From writing the thing, >10,000 words (that's a whole undergraduate dissertation!), going through the internal review process, finally submitting it in January. Then anxiously waiting for reviewer feedback, frantically responding to reviewer queries within a very short time frame, then waiting for another couple of months to hear...the amazing news that I was awarded the grant! When the administrative process is complete, I'll write a proper post about the project and what it is we hope to do, but for now I wanted to tell the story of how I ended up working on a project that initially seems far removed from working on Neolithic middens in the Near East, or even Neolithic pottery in Britain. I like this story, as it goes to show how opportunities turn up in strange ways, often when you don't expect them, and that the research process can take you in

6 Amazing Archaeological Sites That Lara Croft Hasn’t Visited (But Really Should)

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Originally posted on The Archaeology of Tomb Raider . The site was archived for a while so I figured I would share it here (though it appears it may be back up and running last month, do go and have a look!). 1) Pavlopetri – The City Beneath the Waves In the original Tomb Raider Lara finds herself in the fabled lost city of Atlantis, known only through the written accounts of Plato around 360 BC, where it is said to have vanished beneath the waves some 9000 years earlier. This would make Atlantis around 11,000 years old, pushing its occupation right back to the beginning of the Holocene, or the end of the last Ice Age. In archaeological terms, this date corresponds with the early Neolithic cultures of sites such as Jericho in the Near East, or the hunter-gatherer ‘Clovis’ culture, one of the earliest groups of people to inhabitant North America. Alas, Atlantis remains a myth but until some lucky person becomes the most famous archaeologist of all time and finds the legen

Social mobility and a sense of (not) belonging

Warning, if you read this blog for the fun archaeology, this post is unlikely to interest you! It's a bit of a personal grump about life and academia. Wasn't even sure whether to post it, but here goes. I'm having an identity crisis at the moment. It's been brought to the forefront because of Brexit, but it's something that I've always felt in the back of my mind for as long time. I never recognised it at the time, as it has been a process rather than a sudden understanding, but I think it started when my parents (mam in particular) decided that I should go to a private (fee paying) secondary school rather than the state school all my friends were going to. Up until that point, I was the same as everyone else in my family. Grew up in Wallsend, lived in a council house, walked to school which was the local primary. Had never been abroad on holiday, and never expected that I would. We didn't have a lot of money as my dad had lost his job in the shipyards, an

Summer suddenly got very busy!

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It's been just over 3 weeks since I got back from fieldwork in Sicily and I'm still missing the sun, and the fun of doing fieldwork. I had hoped to be doing more over the summer and getting on with microscope work for the Ness of Brodgar midden samples , but for various reasons that isn't looking likely. I have a mountain of admin  to get on top of, including sorting out adverts and interviews for a PhD studentship I have been awarded (exciting stuff, I'll post more about it when the advert is live), sorting out adverts for a postdoctoral position I have, related to a successful grant application (even more exciting, more details as soon as the grant details have been confirmed!). As the grant is joint with Bristol's Organic Geochemistry Unit , I also have to make a trip down there in August to sort out details and a work plan. Added to all of this is our website migration to a mobile responsive system. This is very welcome news as the current site is a bit out of

Digitized thin section slides!

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I can't remember if I posted about this earlier in the year, but I was lucky enough to be awarded two student work experience placements as part of the  Newcastle NWE programme , where students complete flexible paid projects within the university. Two of my Environmental Archaeology students have been working for the past few months, digitizing my entire collection of thin section slides. At some point I hope to make these available online as an open access resource for teaching and research. They did a brilliant job! I've only just had a chance to go through all the scans, having been away on fieldwork, busy with exams, then graduation. Here is one of the scans of a thin section from medieval Riga, that I have been working on as part of the Ecology of Crusading project . Combined with the fact I have just moved the lovely Leica DM750P research microscope into my office (kindly purchased by History, Classics and Archaeology ), I can now get working on my mounting backlog of sa

Come for the Pokemon, stay for the cool Roman archaeology

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Disclaimer: I was a huge Pokemon fan in the late 90s and played it religiously on my Gameboy. So I was always going to love Pokemon Go just from a nostalgia perspective. So I've been a bit surprised at all the moaning about it on social media - seriously, why be all grumpy about a free game that gets people outside and walking about? It's not like we haven't all been playing odd games on our phones for years. Candy Crush anyone? I think Pokemon Go is a brilliant idea, you literally have to leave the house and get some exercise to play it. We all lament so much that 'kids these days' spend all day sat down playing computer games instead of going outside, what could be better than combining the two? Something I did not expect was that I would learn so much playing it. Whereas the original game was set in a fantasy world, this one is set in the real world. The whole thing is based on a location based tourist app, that gives you little snippets of information on various

Fancy dress day

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The Reading PhD gown is not actually that bad!  Yesterday I attended my first graduation as an academic, in the procession for graduations at Newcastle. As it is my first year here I did not know many of the students very well, only the handful whose dissertations I supervised. Even so it was a surprisingly emotional occasion. It reminded me of my own graduations and how much I've changed since I first started university. My first graduation I was still in the midst of being a shy reclusive northerner in a very traditional and competitive Oxford, and I didn't really enjoy the whole experience of graduation, aside from my parents being there and being proud. It probably didn't help that the whole thing was in Latin, though now I'd probably find that quite fun. And in the Sheldonian Theatre - an absolutely amazing building. It's sad to reflect on how much more I could have gained out of my undergraduate experience, if I'd not felt so isolated. I hope that I c

DIG2017 conference - call for papers

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Back in February I announced that Newcastle would be hosting the 7th Developing International Geoarchaeology conference in 2017. Plans are slowly coming along and I am happy to say the conference website is now up and running, which you can view here . There is all sorts of information about travel and whatnot, and we will be updating it regularly, so keep checking. We have also issued the first call for papers , almost a year in advance so plenty of time to make your arrangements! Information on conference accommodation will be available soon and will be bookable at the time of registration, which we hope to have ready by the end of September this year. Student and early career researchers may be interested to know that we are going to have prizes awarded for the best paper and poster submissions, kindly sponsored by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology . We are also making arrangements with Geoarchaeology journal for a potential special issue related to the conference, su

Geoarchaeology at Case Bastione

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I'm missing the Sicilian weather already. As much as I love Newcastle, I'm very much a fan of hot weather, and the 35 degrees in Sicily suited me nicely. Likewise, I don't think I can ever have ice cream in the UK again after 2 weeks of Italian gelato. And oh how I miss the coffee. I feel very invigorated after the fieldwork. Despite the depressing news we received while were away, the excavation reminded me of everything that originally got me interested in archaeology. Travelling, the excitement of discovery , and the satisfaction of successfully completing hard work. This is my first year of involvement in the project, but I hope to dedicate time to it over the next few years (not just because of the gelato and coffee, though that does help). As I am sure you have guessed, my role in the project is to conduct a series of pilot geoarchaeological studies to investigate the formation processes of some of the more unusual deposits and features on site. The first of these is

Fieldwork in Sicily - Abandoned buildings

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Back in the office today after a safe return from Sicily yesterday. I've just about cleared the two week email backlog and am going through all the fieldwork photos. As well as taking lots of photos of the actual excavation , I also took quite a few around the town where we were staying, Villarosa. It's a very small town, with a population of around 6000. A few decades ago it was almost twice this, but the population declined rapidly after the last of the local sulphur mine s was closed in the 1980s. A huge number of people moved to Belgium to take up work in the coal mines, leaving a large number of unoccupied buildings in the town. The photos show an example of an abandoned building overgrown with vegetation, located in between two occupied flats. It is such a strange thing to see; we would never get this in the UK, where property (or land to build new property) is so sought after. It got me thinking about the prehistoric urban landscape of places like Catalhoyuk. The popul

We are European Archaeologists

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We have just come to the end of our first week of digging here in Casa Bastione. The excavation is going really well, the students are starting to get the hang of things, and we’ve cleared and sieved most of the topsoil, ready to get started on the archaeological layers next week. The great thing about working in this part of Europe is that even the topsoil is full of archaeological material. We’ve already got bags and bags of pottery and bone, and the occasional lithics and some fragments of Byzantine glass. Even though this material is not in its original context, it’s great for helping the students to learn how to spot things, and the feeling that you are actually finding stuff rather than just sieving sterile soil. Of course, the mood on site has shifted noticeably over the past couple of days. I never get into politics in this blog, but it would be impossible not to mention the fact that we are here in Sicily, working with a British (including English and Scottish students!) and I

Fieldwork in Sicily - Case Bastione

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I’m sitting here writing this on my laptop, on the patio of a rustic farm villa, with a lovely view of the mountains and checkerboard fields, sipping an espresso. Actually, I’ll probably be posting it at a later date, given that there is no internet up here in the lovely quiet hills, no sounds apart from the odd bleating goat and chirping swallow. Yes, it’s the best time of the year again; fieldwork time! I’m allowed to gloat at these surroundings, I’ve endured everything from 2 months sleeping on a floor with no mattress to 3 weeks with no electricity or running water. That means getting washed = a bucket of cold water over the head. But not this year! This year I’m working at a site called Case Bastione in central Sicily . I’m here as a geoarchaeology specialist, but also as a supervisor for our students from Newcastle University. The project is run by Italian archaeologist Enrico Giannitrapani, along with Newcastle’s Andrea Dolfini, and dates from the early Copper Age to Bronze Age,

Jobs before academia

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I came across this article ages ago about jobs academics did before they became academics , and have been meaning to write something about it, but the semester has been so very very busy that I haven't had a chance. Having just handed in what I hope is my last lot of marking before I'm off on fieldwork next week, I thought I'd sit down and do some reminiscing. My early adventures in the world of work. My very first job was as a assistant at an amusement arcade in my hometown of Newcastle. It was so monotonous and very depressing, spending the whole day handing out change to people that they would then just put into slot machines. I always knew I wanted to go to university, but that experience really reminded me that I would never be happy doing something 'normal'. It was the summer before I was about to head off to university, and I worked really hard at that job, saving up enough money to buy myself a desktop computer that I could take with me. I remember it wel

Getting shortlisted - publications

Since joining Newcastle I have been on two shortlisting panels, one for a temporary teaching post and the other for a permanent lectureship. Having been on the other side of things for such a long time , I think I have honed my own application skills considerably, and it has been quite eye-opening to see how the hiring process works, and what other peoples' applications look like. It was really obvious the people who 'knew what they were doing' (i.e. had probably talked to senior colleagues and gotten advice) versus those who just wrote what I would consider a 'first draft' type application. The application is like a piece of work for publication; everything needs to be spot on. It was frustrating to see what were probably good candidates not really sell themselves well, and often not demonstrate how they actually fit the job criteria. There was a tendency I think in many cases to make assumptions, that the reader would just know what the technical skills were, or w

Where did all that time go

I can't believe it's already June, getting close to a year in my job at Newcastle . I can't even call it my new job anymore! It's been an amazing year so far. Even though I have been swamped with designing new modules and getting used to the teaching and admin processes here, I have really enjoyed everything. I even managed to get some research related activities in. I applied for a NERC new investigator grant back in January, which in itself was a learning process. 10,000 words in total for that application, and that wasn't even the hard part; sorting out the finances for an international project split between two institutions (my co-I is at Bristol) was more of a headache that I expected. Then the reviewing process, oh the reviewing process. Despite being told that being interdisciplinary is one of my major strengths, and I do believe that it leads to better, more innovative research, it makes things surprisingly hard when it comes to applying for funding. There&#

Micrograph: Layers within layers

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I love this image. It's another one from Catalhoyuk , a nice midden in the South Area (unit 17739). I published a paper on these deposits in Antiquity which included this image , so I'll let you read the paper to find out more about this area and its significance. Here I wanted to show a close up of this image and the beautiful but daunting complexity of archaeological deposits under the microscope. What we are looking at is a tiny fragment of wall plaster mixed in with ashy debris and charcoal. A few years ago I did a post about these plaster deposits, as they are found within buildings at Catalhoyuk , on floors and walls. By counting the layers we can see the frequency with which the inhabitants were re-plastering and 'repainting' their houses - regular cycles of maintenance on an annual and seasonal basis. This layer in the midden shows a fragment which has fallen off a wall, and somehow made its way into the midden, probably through sweeping and dumping of debris,