Castles and Coprolites

There has been an opinion piece doing the rounds on twitter - The Secret Life of an archaeologist: soil in your sandwiches and sexism.  Having been subject to sexism both privately and professionally, I can sympathize with aspects of this, however there is a lot in this piece which made me frown. Enough so that I decided to do my own blog post about it. When I saw the title I thought it was going to focus on the problems of sexism and harassment in the field, something which has received a lot of attention recently, both in archaeology and in other field-based disciplines. But the thing that irked me was its presentation of what 'real' archaeology is like. There seem to be two extremes in the way archaeology is perceived, it's either Indiana Jones and digging up 'treasure' (i.e. pretty objects, preferably precious metal), or there are the pieces like this, which want to tell everyone how boring and hard work it actually is. This reminded me of an excellent post (go ...

As a micromorphologist something that you begin to notice quite quickly is that plant remains come in a huge variety of forms. Whilst at the macroscale we usually think about charred remains - wood charcoal, burnt seeds and grains - at the microscale there is a whole world of other plant remains. Phytoliths and other microfossils are something I talk about quite a lot in this blog, and these are becoming a standard form of 'plant evidence' alongside plant macros. More unusual are pseudomorphic voids, plant remains that are no longer there! I have talked about these a lot in previous posts , basically they are 'impressions' of plants that have since decayed. The micrographs below show something a bit in between. The plants haven't fully decayed, as they were partially desiccated. The orange colour you can see is where the organic matter from the plant has stained the calcareous aggregate (probably some sort of architectural material). In the voids you can see remains...

I've been preparing for teaching a micromorphology lab class tomorrow, on the topic of architectural materials. Having recently dug out my old laptop ( to look at old job applications... ), I came across my huge archive of micromorphology images. I really need to figure a way of making these available online. I have so many and they are such fantastic references. I found this nice example of a partially burnt aggregate; it is perfect for showing how pseudomorphic plant voids appear in a plant-tempered clay. On the right hand side of the image, the plant temper (grasses) has been burnt, and so has preserved in the form of microcharcoal. On the left hand side, where the aggregate escaped the burning, the plants have totally decayed, leaving only the voids in the shape of the grasses. It also shows how the colour of the sediment change as they are heated, becoming a distinctly darker brown. This sample is from the Deep Sounding midden at Catalhoyuk, some of the earliest deposits that...

Two posts in one day?? Yes, deadlines are looming so the blog posting is on fire. I thought I would do a little update on some non-academic stuff I've been doing recently. Around this time last year I ran an Indiegogo fundraiser . The main reason was that I no longer had an academic job, and therefore no longer had access to a microscope to continue my research that I had started at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney. I was unsure about whether to do crowdfunding, it is really hard asking individuals for money, compared to asking research councils for millions (that's harder in a different way). But I couldn't think of any other options and desperately wanted to continue the research I was doing. The campaign was reasonably successful; I didn't raise the total, but I did get enough to buy a halfway decent microscope and to cover the costs of taking it up to Orkney for the next field season, to do a 'field lab' where students and visitors could watch the analysis in p...

Following a discussion over on Twitter about whether you should apply for a particular academic job or not I decided to have a look through my archive of job applications. Having been a bit rubbish at blogging over the past couple of months, procrastination is back with a vengeance, as usual correlating nicely with many many deadlines. This analysis is something I said I would do if I ever got a permanent job - whilst the numbers are somewhat depressing, I hope it is informative. At the very least, it shows that rejection is the norm, even for someone who eventually did get a job. I finished my PhD in 2008, though due to an unusually long time between submission and viva, then corrections, I didn't officially graduate until 2010. I began seriously thinking about applying for academic jobs in 2009 (yes, AFTER I had finished; I was clueless). Looking back my first attempts were rubbish. I got some very harsh feedback from my first proper interview in 2010, which I found very upsett...