Castles and Coprolites

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...

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? 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...

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...