Castles and Coprolites

One of the nicest things about my job is hearing about the successes of past students. It makes me genuinely happy to see students with enthusiasm and passion for environmental archaeology go on to build successful careers. I taught my first postgraduate students during my time at Edinburgh back in  2013, and they are all doing so well. One recently finished a PhD and gained a great postdoctoral position, another is on track to finish their PhD very soon and has recently published their first paper, and another has a fantastic job as a research technician in a top environmental archaeology lab. I had an email from the latter recently regarding the identification of some unknown phytoliths. They appear to be generic grass long cells, but have odd striations that I have never seen before. The striations are all in the same direction - could this be an artefact of processing or is it surface decoration? I am not sure about surface decoration, it looks a bit too regular. has anyone see...

This year has been very productive from a research perspective. We are at the point of the NERC project where all the results are starting to come in , and it has made me remember the excitement of doing research, rather than the headache of applying for grants and all the admin associated with a complex international project. The postdoc team, Dr John Blong and Dr Helen Whelton , are in Copenhagen this week, collecting the final set of samples for the project, currently archived at the University of Copenhagen's Centre for Geogenetics . Up until now we have been working on samples from the archive in Oregon, and samples we collected during our fieldwork. The samples at Copenhagen are some of the most important from Paisley Caves, the ones that provide the earliest occupation dates from the site, that were found to contain human aDNA. By applying lipid biomarker analysis to these samples, we will be able to compare the DNA and lipid results, something I have been keen to do from a...

I am so happy that I've actually managed to get some microscope work done over the past couple of weeks. It feels like forever since I had the time to do any lab work, or spend time looking down the microscope. Even on my research leave, I have been so busy writing papers and grant applications that microscope time has taken a back seat. I am currently working on the 30 or so slides we collected as part of a NERC project at Paisley Caves in Oregon . This week I have been focusing on characterising the different types of faeces that are found in the sediments. There are lots of different types - rat and bat dung , ovicaprid type pellets, and of most interest of course, the potential human coprolites. I say potential, as we can't know for sure if they are human without conducting additional biomolecular analysis , but the pictures below show a likely human candidate. In any case we can say that it is omnivore coprolite, containing both digested bone fragments and plant tissues. T...