Castles and Coprolites

For the past year I've been involved in the organisation of the 5th biennial  Landscape Archaeology Conference , which is being held this week at Newcastle and Durham. It's a step up from organizing DIG2017 last year , which had around 100 participants, compared to LAC's estimated 300. The timing has been rather unfortunate for a number of reasons. Firstly my pregnancy, which means I was unable to attend the drinks reception at the wonderful Wylam Brewery . I love this venue and have been trying to get an event organised here for ages, so am a bit gutted I missed out on it. There are many people I would have liked to catch up with, including plenary speaker Dr Nicki Whitehouse . But the main reason I've been absent from LAC is that I had another important event this week - an interview for an ERC consolidator grant , which happened to clash with the full day Geoarchaeology and Landscape session I was supposed to be co-chairing at LAC. Many thanks to Dr John Blong for...

Following on from my previous post , I am disappointed I couldn't go to Barcelona in person for the European Association of Archaeologists conference last week. The EAA itself is one of the few chances I get to meet up with European colleagues and friends in person, and Barcelona is one of my favourite cities. On the plus side, it did give me the opportunity to learn how to make a video presentation. It turns out my beloved Surface tablet has a bells and whistles version of PowerPoint that lets you record your presentation with video and sound all in one go, and export it as an MP4. The presentation focused on pilot studies I have been leading as part of a Wellcome Trust seed award in Humanities and Social Sciences, to test the feasibility of applying various civil engineering methods to an archaeological settlement, and building a network of researchers in Turkey and Europe. Pilot studies are fantastic as a 'proof of concept' to justify full scale studies, but also in som...