Castles and Coprolites

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...