Castles and Coprolites

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 ...

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...

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 .

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...

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...