Castles and Coprolites

No tweets! Having already written about 2000 words on the AEA conference, I thought I'd save these last few thoughts for a separate post, as it feeds into something I've been thinking about in general. It's a bit late considering the conference was back in November 2015 , but better late than never and all that. The AEA is the first conference I've been to that had a social media guidelines, in the form on Tweet/No Tweet symbols. I wish I had actually taken note of the use of the symbol, though qualitatively I think most people were ok with it. Someone made the observation that it was mostly early career researchers that were using the No tweet. This may seem surprising at first, as us 'early career' people are supposed to be all over this social media thing, right? I've seen some discussions on Twitter that really don't see the problem with sharing someone else's work in a public forum; science should be open, and open means sharing. I think th...

I have a very important deadline tomorrow, hence it's the perfect time to do a blog post for Doug's Archaeology Blogging Carnival.  Last year I took part in a series of posts about the purpose of blogging . This time the theme is Grand Challenges facing archaeology, specifically the participant's archaeology. In my case of course this is geoarchaeology. It's a good theme for me, as it's something I've been reflecting on a lot recently. I am writing a paper on investigating 'use of space', and multi-proxy approaches in archaeology. It's half review, half critique, and is turning into a bit of a monster. What follows is some of the central thoughts I am discussing in that paper, so actually any comments and feedback would be much appreciated! One of the major challenges that I see facing geoarchaeology, is the integration of data from different scales. How do we use data collected for example at the microscale (such as geochemical patterning of floor...

Today is my first day back in the office after the Xmas hols, though I've actually been itching to get back. Not because I don't like the holidays - it was great, I had a real Christmas tree for the first time in my life which was very exciting, and I am now planning on ways to turn it into reference material for environmental archaeology practical classes. This is also the first time ever that I can think of, where I genuinely did not do ANY WORK AT ALL over the holidays . This definitely correlates with the fact I got a permanent position last September , and so am no longer in that state of permanent anxiety that characterizes being a postdoc. I made a promise to my family that I would get better at work-life balance and stop being in continuous work mode. I do not regret this decision at all, I am happier, my family is happier, we had a fantastic Xmas and New Year. But I do find it so hard to stop working. It's a combination of actually loving my job, all the paper wri...