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Showing posts from 2017

Achievements in 2017

Posting this one retrospectively, so that I don't have a big December gap in the blog for 2017. I did mean to post it before Xmas, but then I remembered I promised to keep a decent work/life balance, and literally did nothing work related over the Xmas holidays. I always find it hard 'doing nothing' - even though it's a job, I truly enjoy what I do and really don't mind working at weird hours if/when the inspiration strikes. In fact, I see it as one of the major benefits of the job, being able to choose when my working hours are (research related working hours anyway, teaching is of course timetabled). But this year we have just bought a house and my in laws were visiting, so I was very busy with the non-archaeology aspects of life.  Whilst I like to think I am pretty good at time management, this year has been more difficult than usual for getting things done. Nearly 3 years into my lectureship at Newcastle, my responsibilities have increased significantly and I h

First issue of the Archaeological Journal

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I have been meaning to write something about my new role as editor for the Archaeological Journal . I took over from Prof. Howard Williams officially in March, and it has been pretty full on since then. I am pleased to announce that my first issue is now available online ahead of print (vol 175 for 2018), with a great mix of papers spanning the Neolithic to post-Roman and historic periods, and topics ranging from social zooarchaeology to mortuary houses. The major change I made when taking over was moving to an online submission system , rather than dealing with papers manually via email. I personally find this a much easier system, as an author and an editor, and it makes the whole process much quicker. On the whole it seems to have worked well with the majority of authors submitting papers, and reviewers submitting comments within a reasonable time frame. I have still had one or two authors having problems (either technical or in principle!) with the online system. But it makes li

Microfossil in a Micrograph of the Month

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It's been a while since I did a monthly microfossil or micrograph post, so I thought I would share this nice example of something combining both. This is a midden deposit from the early Neolithic site of Bonkulu in Turkey - the large greyish object in the middle is a very highly silcified conjoined phytolith from a reed stem/leaf, embedded in a matrix of mixed ashy debris. There is a resemblance to an earlier micrograph I posted from the Babylonian site tell Khaiber, which also contains large mutlicelled reed phytoliths. The deposits at Boncuklu are chock full of these large Phragmites reed phytoliths, likely to be from burning these substantial plants as fuel. The macrobotanical record from the site also contains large volumes of reed stem charcoal.

What makes archaeologists angry?

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What makes archaeologists angry? Please share your worst rants - it’s research for a new vlog 😈 — ArchaeoDuck (@ArchaeoDuck) 5 November 2017 Twitter is not long enough for this rant. I was reassured to see a lot of the responses to this tweet mirrored my own concerns. Whilst I do have academic annoyances about archaeology to do with methods and interpretation, these feel so minor in comparison to the frustration I feel about archaeology as a profession. It all links in with the history of archaeology as a discipline. Other responses touched on the 'cult of the object' - despite moving beyond being about pretty objects, the popular image of archaeology still focuses on the objects, rather than what archaeology can tell us about society, and how it is relevant to the present and future. What hope have we to convince people archaeology is an important academic subject when the popular opinion is that it is lovely and all that but really just frivolous. The history of arc

NERC project first year anniversary

Yesterday marked the end of the official first year of the NERC project . The past year has gone by so quickly, and it was reassuring to actually sit down with the research officer who looks after the accounts, and see that actually everything is in place and we're not too far off on the budget, despite a few hiccups and changes to the project timetable. I've learned a great deal about being a PI and the whole process of running a large collaborative project. Mainly that the job of a PI is very much research management rather than actually doing the research. It has been difficult to get used to delegating tasks to team members and resisting the urge to try and do everything myself. I miss being in the lab - but I hope to get back to doing at least a little bit at the end of January next year when I have a semester of research leave. Hopefully this will also mean I have time to do more regular blog updates, with more fun micromorphology images from all the slides that I will be

What's new in October

Sitting on a train back from London to Newcastle so I thought I would make wise use of 4 hours and get round to a much needed blog update. But what to update about? You can tell by the uninspired blog title it's going to be a random mix of stuff. There is a lot going on at the moment (both academic and general life), some of which is super exciting but I have to wait to talk about until it is finished. I've just about recovered from the whirlwind that was the  DIG2017 conference , just in time to get started on the edited volume that goes with it. The conference was a great success, and we were lucky enough to get funding to cover the recording and publishing of the talks (speakers permitting), the majority of which are  now online  (unfortunately I can't actually watch them on my train journey as Youtube streaming is blocked...). This is going to make a great research teaching tool - we have presentations of papers available to view, and also updated written papers appeari

DIG2017 Conference - success!

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Well, August has come and gone, and no blog post. This is the first time since I started my blog that I haven't made at least one post per month. It will haunt me forever that 0 posts in the list. The reason August was so busy was largely due to the Developing International Geoarchaeology conference , which we hosted at Newcastle last week. So whilst I wasn't blogging, I was very busy live-tweeting and generally making sure the whole thing ran smoothly with my event management hat on. Who would have thought the job of an academic also included event management - I know more than I ever thought I needed about coordinating multiple external companies (hiring poster boards, printing, conference badges, a dinner for 70 people...), internal purchasing and booking procedures. Making sure we didn't accidentally leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere along Hadrian's Wall during the field trip. I don't even know where to start about the papers - we genuinely had a f

DIG2017 Conference data

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Registrations for DIG2017 closed over the weekend so I've been collating all the information for preparing information packs and confirming catering etc. I've been playing around with the delegate information and thought I would share some fun figures. All the data is based on the registration details provided by the delegates, with designation of male or female from delegate name. The first figure shows the geographic distribution of delegates (residence rather than nationality). We have around 80 people attending from 20 different countries, making DIG2017 truly international! The highest number attending are from the UK, which makes sense given the location this year, but we also have a good number from north america, and a wide spread from across Europe. Our furthest afield is coming from Australia! I'm happy to see that we have an almost even split of early career researches/students to established researchers, and a good gender balance of 43% female 31% male. It

Experiential experiments

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We've spent the past couple of days doing burning experiments in the reconstructed mudbrick house at Catalhoyuk, as part of our Wellcome Trust project. The aim of the experiments is to collect some pilot data relating to smoke emissions when ovens and hearths are in use. We don't have time in the pilot study to conduct a detailed series of controlled experiments - there are a lot of different variables that could be adjusted to test different scenarios - but we do hope to get some basic comparisons of different fuel types and how emissions change over a few hours of burning. I think the most useful part of doing this pilot work has been the practical side of things, the experience of having to find the materials for fuel, finding out how much fuel works best (and at what point there's too much fuel and you get smoked out of the house), observing how different people react differently to smoke levels. We tried using animal dung but it smouldered really badly, which we reali

Catalhoyuk - Wellcome project

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After yesterday's musings I figured I should post about some of the fun archaeological stuff I've been up to at Catalhoyuk this week. The reason we are here this year (we being myself and project postdoc Helen Mackay ), is that we were lucky enough to be awarded a grant from the Wellcome Trust. We are collecting archive samples to export for analysis, doing some burning experiments in the reconstructed mudbrick house, and general networking and scouting for collaborators for when we (hopefully!) do the full sale research project. The focus of the Wellcome project is to investigate the potential relationships between 'biofuel' use and respiratory health in the archaeological record. The materials that people used for fuel in the Neolithic (wood, dung, reeds etc) are being promoted today as sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, however there has been a lot of research showing that these fuels are actually just as bad for respiratory health as fossil fuels. Biomass

25 years of Catalhoyuk

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Day 2 at Catalhoyuk. This blog post was supposed to be full of excitement at all the cool samples we've collected and the experiments we have been doing in the reconstructed mudbrick house, but instead I find myself contemplating the institution that is Catalhoyuk. Not Catalhoyuk the Neolithic settlement, but Catalhoyuk the archaeological dig, the community of archaeologists, locals and all the other people who are or have been involved with the project. I don't think I ever fully appreciated what Prof Ian Hodder has achieved here, not until I got my job at Newcastle and realised the time and effort that goes into organising fieldwork, and generating funding for projects. Field seasons that last 2 months, with up to 100 people on site at a time. A dig house with labs and storage. Catering, accommodation, the politics, and of course the archaeology itself. I always felt like I never quite belonged here; my visits were always timed as the excavation was well underway, and ev

Geoarchaeology and mudbricks

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Remains of stone wall base, and a whole lot of roof tiles at Olynthos Anyone who is familiar with Catalhoyuk, or indeed Near Eastern prehistory in general, will know there has been a lot of focus on mudbricks. What are they made of? What can the raw materials and manufacturing processes tell us about Neolithic society? And also floors - we love floors in the Near East, counting them, describing them, analysing them. I was therefore a little surprised when I was doing some background research on Olynthos , to find that no-one has really looked that much at floors, or mudbricks, in classical archaeology. In fact, I was surprised to find out that the houses were made of mudbricks at all, though this is probably just due to my lack of familiarity with the period. We are so used to seeing the remains of stone walls, and the stone monumental architecture, but the mudbricks don't seem to preserve. The roof tiles on the other hand are everywhere (as can be seen nicely in the image from

Getting to know Olynthos

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Today was my last day on site at the classical Greek city of Olynthos in northern Greece. Although I have never studied Greek archaeology, or indeed anything classical, ancient Greece is something I was always fascinated by as a child. If I'd thought to study archaeology as an undergraduate I can imagine that ancient Greece is something I would have gone for. Regular blog readers know I was a geographer before I was an archaeologist, and that background has situated me more in prehistory, with it's greater emphasis on long term environmental change and human-environment interactions. But yet again I find myself being fascinated by themes and comparisons rather than specific time periods, and also the differences in approaches to archaeology in different areas. Ancient Greece is exciting as there is a wealth of documentary evidence and we know so many of the little details compared to prehistory. But like other historic periods I have worked on (e.g. The Ecology of Crusading

Off to Catalhoyuk, via Olynthos

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It seems like I only just got back from Oregon and I'm off again, this time to Catalhoyuk in Turkey, via Olynthos in Greece. I am really excited about the Olynthos project . Although I am no expert in ancient Greece, I was always fascinated by the mythology as a child, and it will be great to finally visit Greece. I was invited to join the project as a geoarchaeologist, specifically looking at the micromorphology of floor deposits in collaboration with the archaeobotany and geochemsitry experts. The excavations are co-directed by Lisa Nevett  at the University of Michigan in collaboration with the Greek Ministry of Culture & Sports and the British School at Athens . One focus is the excavation of house Bix6 on the North Hill. New data on artefacts and their distribution as well as geochemical testing by fellow geoarchaeologist  Carla Lancelotti have indicated broad spatial differences in uses between rooms in the building. I will be applying sediment micromorphology to house

A day in London

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I was hoping to post this whilst on the train but the not so great free wifi scuppered my plans. I arrived in London yesterday evening following a day of exam board meetings. The exam board is where we go through all the marks and see who has passed, what grades they have, and who gets prizes. The whole process is anonymised until final marks are confirmed, then we get to see who got which prizes. I was really happy to see some of the first students I taught when I joined Newcastle finish their degrees and do so well! No names though as I'm not sure the details have been released to students yet. So, I'm in London for two reasons - firstly to go to an appointment at the Turkish consulate to collect visas for myself and other team members for fieldwork at Catalhoyuk in July, and secondly for University Archaeology Day . I think the last time I went to Turkey was 2013 - how time goes by so quickly! Up until then I had been pretty much every year since 2004! University Archaeol

Micrograph of the Month: Wood fragment

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I'm in the middle of writing a brief introductory paper about the work we are doing at Paisley Caves, which includes some of the micromorphology results from our pilot study. The slides from this site are complex, and also so fascinating. Complex because the are very heterogeneous and include a huge variety of biogenic material, including lots of fragments of plant tissues, and there is also some weird stuff going on with the chemistry in the cave environment. Here is an example of a small fragment of wood, within a layer of mixed material overlying a layer of microfaunal dung pellets. The layer is between two radiocarbon dates approximately 8180 and 9565 years cal BP. In the picture below I've shown it at a range of magnifications, and images C and D show it in PPL (C) and XPL (D). Modern wood in XPL usually looks a bit fluorescent because cellulose is birefringent. Usually with archaeological material I'm much more accustomed to seeing wood in the form of charcoal! The on

Paisley Caves - notes from the field part 3

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Many many samples We are coming to the end of the field season for the NERC project at Paisley Caves. Only a few days until I return to Newcastle, and I've been spending the last few days packing up all the samples and sorting out the paper work for exporting them. One box is heading straight to Earthslides for micromorphology slide prep, and the others are going back to Newcastle for microfossil and biomarker work. In the meantime team member John Blong is heading to Eugene to spend a few weeks at the Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History , collecting extra material from the excavation archives. I have discovered that cool boxes are a great way to pack samples; the boxes are very lightweight and also pretty sturdy, and I am hoping the fact there is a lid + obvious top and bottom will mean that they are not shaken about too much on their journey back to the UK. Cool boxes are fairly pricey new back in the UK, but you can get them fairly cheap in the US, and I can gua

Paisley Caves - notes from the field part 2

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Back from the field now and making sense of all the photos and paperwork. As well as taking samples from Paisley Caves itself, we also spent a day doing a survey of the local vegetation and collecting samples for a botanical reference collection. Part of the project involves analysis of pollen and other plant remains from sediments and coprolites, and whilst there are several available collections and published material on the likely species that we will find, it is always helpful to build a project specific reference collection, and this will be added to the growing library of material based in the Wolfson lab at Newcastle. This will be one of the major tasks undertaken by project research associate John Blong , and he will be collaborating with project affiliate Katelyn McDonough , who analysed material from Paisley for her Masters and is currently working on botanical remains at the nearby Connelly Caves for her PhD. This is the first fieldwork where I have had the chance to put m

Paisley Caves - notes from the field part 1

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It's the end of the first week in Oregon as part of our NERC project at Paisley Caves. As usual fieldwork fills me full of ideas for blogging, with none of the time or internet access to post them. The weather has been hugely variable here. For the first few days it was below freezing at night time. I was in my tent in a super warm sleeping bag, with fleece jogging bottoms and beanie hat, and I was still not really that warm. Then after the second day the weather switched to baking hot, and by the end of the week we were all in t-shirts and covered in sunscreen. The view of the landscape from the entrance to the Paisley Caves is amazing - a huge expanse of sagebrush desert with the occasional agricultural feature in the distance. Dirt tracks snake across the landscape, heading towards the town of Paisley on the left, and Summer Lake hotsprings on the right. I'm going to miss this view. The day begins at 5.30, waking up in the tent to varying degrees of chill, getting d

Adventures in medium sized mammal bone preparation, part 2

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Well, I arrived in Oregon a couple of days ago, trying (without auccess) to get over jet lag before starting firldwork fot the NERC project tomorrow. Before I start with the stream of NERC related posts, a little update on my taphonomic experiment that I posted about back in November . Readers may recall that we came across some recently deceased racoons plus a hawk on the side of the road, and I decided they would make a fine addition to my animal bone reference collection. I set them up in a wire cage to be left to the elements, thinking that when I came back 6 months later they would be in the advanced stages of decay, perhaps even ready to extract and clean up the bones. Nope. 6 months sounds like plenty of time for two medium sized mammals plus one hawk to decay, but I didn't account for the fact that when I deposited them back in November, winter was coming, and they have been buried under two feet of snow for the best part of those 6 months! So, they pretty much look like th

Field season is about to begin

Field season is beginning a bit earlier than usual for me this year. 2015 - 16 was wonderfully successful in terms of project development and grants, which in turn means that there is a lot going on in 2017. The first round will start at the end of next week, when I will be heading off to Oregon for the main period of fieldwork for the NERC project at Paisley Caves, which I've been blogging about a fair bit. I can't wait to be back in central Oregon getting my hands dirty, literally. It is such a beautiful landscape, very quiet and we'll be a small team, which I prefer. We'll be camping near the site, and taking showers at Summer Lake Hot Springs.  So the stress of sampling at such an important site will be rewarded with a bit of relaxation at the end of the day! When I get back from Oregon I'll be making frantic arrangements to get my research visa for Turkey. This involves leaving your passport on the consulate in London for 1-2 weeks, which is a bit difficult w

Did the people of Çatalhöyük build boats?

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Two posts crossed my Twitter feed last week that got me thinking. Both are related to experimental archaeology and use of wetland resources. If you are a regular reader of my blog (or indeed my academic papers) you will have noticed that I talk a lot about the environment of Çatalhöyük, and how this may have influenced human activity in the Neolithic. You will also notice that I have criticised some of the early interpretations which, to me, present a simplistic interpretation of evidence that doesn’t consider the complexity of the environment, or people. Çatalhöyük was situated in a wetland environment, and there have been debates over the influence this had on agriculture. Where were people growing their crops if the local area was not suitable for agriculture?  One theory suggests people travelled to fields that were located many km away from the site, which in turn has implications for social organisation. This always bothered me, firstly because of the limitations of the evid

Micrograph of the Month: TBD

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You know nothing, Lisa Shillito! This is how I sometimes feel being a micromorphologist, especially one looking at samples that are a different to the contexts I am used to. Here are some more images from the Lufton Roman Villa sample I mentioned last month . I am not actually going to say much about this as I am not entirely sure what it is, and basically am scouting for opinions from fellow geoarchaeologists. This is a small rounded inclusion about 1mm in length, consisting of lots of brownish purple rhombohedral crystals embedded in a yellowish (almost ash-like?) matrix. As you can see, the crystals themselves don't look much different in XPL. The inclusion is located within a layer of mixed microcharcoal and calcareous debris (probably from the lime layer underneath). There are some bits of lime that have a similar appearance, sort of like iron staining of the carbonate. My guess is possibly iron carbonate crystals replacing the calcium? I will definitely be bringing this slide

SAA Conference, Vancouver 2017, Part 2

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twitter meet up - complete with badge ribbons! Conferences can be a bit hit or miss for me, depending on how sociable I am feeling. The downside to being an introvert is that it can be really difficult to do the networking and discussion thing that is an important part of the whole conference experience. I think people are often surprised at how quiet I can be in person given the amount of social media stuff I do. But that is why I love social media, it makes interactions easier (most of the time). I actually managed to make quite a few connections this year at the SAA conference. Just like giving presentations, networking becomes easier with practice, and I find myself in a place where I finally feel like I know what I am talking about (it only took 9 years post PhD but hey). One networking event that was a lot of fun was the Twitter meet-up, though I didn't stay for too long due to the dreaded jet-lag. It is interesting to meet all these people in person that you only know t

SAA conference, Vancouver 2017, Part 1

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Me looking thrilled to be presenting my poster I just got back at the beginning of the week from the Society for American Archaeology conference, held his year in Vancouver. Although it is 'American' archaeology, the geographic spread of attendees and research topics is very international, and I ended up catching up with friends and colleagues from all over the UK as well as the US. I ended up being incredibly busy as I foolishly agreed to do three different sessions. Many months ago I was asked to participate in two sessions as a discussant, as well as submitting a poster on my NERC project. I assumed this meant a role of leading the questions at the end of the session, but on arrival realized it is almost the equivalent of a keynote, and involved giving an actual 15 minute presentation summarizing the papers and state of the field! Luckily the sessions are both topics on which I am passionate, and I managed to put together two talks that went very well. The first was

Micrograph of the Month: Roman floors

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I haven't posted a micrograph for ages, but this one is so pretty I just had to share it. I'm in the middle of doing an analysis of Roman occupation deposits for the Lufton Roman Villa project . I don't know too much about the wider context yet, but my initial observations of this particular sample suggests we are looking at an old floor surface. There are 3 distinct layers, and the uppermost layer is composed of a calcareous material, in which are embedded lots of tiny crushed up ceramic fragments. The middle layer is a sandy aggregate with the occasional bit of soil/clay and charcoal, and there is a very thin lowermost layer (thin because of the sample size, not sure yet how thick it was in the field) which has a lot of organic material including wood and grass charcoal, and possibly fungal spores. I will be writing more on this as the analysis progresses, but for now here is a nice image of one of the ceramic fragments (the orangey-red rectangular inclusion) embedded in

Teaching archaeological sediment micromorphology part 2

This semester I've been teaching archaeological sediment micromorphology, as part of a third year module in geoarchaeology. I mentioned a few weeks ago how hard it was to teach a subject this complex in only 2 hours per week, and that in future I was thinking of removing it from Geoarchaeology and turning it into a stand alone module. I still haven't decided whether to do this, as I think it's important to have some teaching of it at UG level, but a module focusing entirely on micromorphology is probably more suitable for Masters level. Related to my frustrations, I made an offhand comment on Facebook that despite it being one of my specialist subjects, sediment micromorphology is very boring to teach. More than any other method I have studied, micromorphology is definitely the one filled with the most jargon. Don't get me wrong, I think jargon is important. We need the specialist language to describe the many complex features and processes that we see in thin sectio

Thin sections related to pyrotechnology in Bronze Age Sicily

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The arrival of new thin sections is always exciting, but always daunting at the same time. Sediment micromorphology has to be one of the more challenging geoarchaeological techniques, simply because of the huge variety in the types of material you can encounter, and a deposit from one site never quite looks the same as one from another, even when they are related to similar activities. The samples from Case Bastione were collected to investigate formation processes and activities of a number of features in the Bronze Age settlement, including a large 'burnt' layer, and some strange pit deposits. The most striking thing about all the samples is the ubiquitous presence of these teeny tiny little creatures - my educated guess is that these are tiny foraminifera of some sort , present within limestone/chalk or another carbonate material (I need to do some research on Sicilian geology!). What is slightly confusing is the presence of a spherulite like appearance within the shells in

Teaching geoarchaeology and sediment micromorphology

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Today I am doing three hours of teaching for PG students on soil. This follows two hours yesterday of teaching 3rd year students sediment micromorphology. My 3rd year Geoarchaeology module is challenging this year, as the class is 75% geography students, so I have had to modify the content a bit to make sure we go over the archaeological concepts. Having non archaeologists in the audience makes you really just how jargon filled the subject is! At the moment the module is set up so that the practical classes are about 25% bulk soil analysis and 75% thin section analysis, but I am tempted to switch this next year and focus on the bulk sediments. As much as I love micromorphology, it is a very challenging subject to teach as it is so time intensive, and I think it would work better as a stand alone module. This will give the students more time to work on materials, and to focus the seminars specifically on micromorphology. At the moment the Geoarchaeology module seminars are focused on br

The Stranger's Bag

I have just been sorting through my Folders and found a file called The Stranger's Bag. I had zero recollection of what this was, but on opening remembered that a while ago I entered the Tyne and Wear  Metro Morning short story competition . Needless to say I didn't win, but it was fun nonetheless, and a good challenge trying to write something interesting in 250 words. Whether I succeeded is a matter of debate. I'm pretty sure this format is not my forte. Opinions good or bad encouraged in the comments! The Stranger's Bag What was that? She glanced sideways at the strange shapes protruding from the bag of the passenger beside her. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious she was staring. There was just something familiar about the shape, something seemed not quite right. Then she realised, and stifled a gasp. Bones. Human bones. Her heart started to race. It was early; they were the only two people in the carriage. How far to the next stop? She stared straig