Castles and Coprolites

It's fair to say that in order to be competitive for most permanent academic posts in the UK (and elsewhere), you're likely to need to complete a postdoc after you finish your PhD. But postdocs aren’t just a stepping stone, they’re a chance to define your research identity, build collaborations, and (let’s be honest) keep the lights on while you publish your thesis work. The best fellowships give you time, resources, and freedom to explore big ideas and really grow into independence. I have written recently about the differences between PDRA posts and Fellowships , which you may find helpful if you are not familiar with the difference between these. This post is looking specifically at Fellowship opportunities.  Back in 2018, I wrote a post about postdoctoral funding for archaeologists, which became one of the most read items in the entire blog. The advice in that post still stands, but a lot has changed since then, new schemes have emerged, old ones have evolved, and the ho...

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on an editorial marking the forthcoming 40th anniversary of Geoarchaeology , which has been a great to chance to spend some time reading through the journal archive. I've been spending time revisiting classic papers that helped shape the field, while also discovering newer papers that slipped past my attention when they were first published (and of course, the first 14 years of the journal were published before I even started my academic career - the journal is only 4 years younger than I am!). One of the joys of working through the archive is being reminded of the remarkable breadth of geoarchaeology. The journal's pages chart the development of approaches ranging from micromorphology and sedimentology to landscape archaeology, provenance studies, heritage science, geochemistry and isotopic analysis. Many of the questions that remain central to the discipline today including site formation processes, environmental change, human-la...

This week, reports emerged that the Department for Education (DfE) intends to remove teaching grant support for creative and performing arts courses in English universities as part of a wider reprioritisation of the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG) . The rationale is that scarce public funding should be concentrated on subjects considered most critical to national skills needs, particularly healthcare and high-cost STEM provision (though, grants for nursing are also being cut). At first glance, this may seem like the familiar debate about the relative value of arts and sciences. In reality, it raises a much bigger question, that is how coherent is government policy across higher education, skills, research, innovation and economic growth? Just over a year ago, the UK Government's Modern Industrial Strategy identified the Creative Industries as one of eight priority growth sectors . The accompanying Creative Industries Sector Plan described a sector contributing £124 billion in GV...

It's that time of year when many recent PhDs and ECRs are thinking about their next career move. I am currently fielding a number of enquiries about this, from people interested in working with us in the NEMCAS lab , and it made me realise yet one more thing that is not always made clear to people early on in their academic careers. The word postdoc is used to generally to describe roles that a researcher undertakes after their PhD, but it's a broad label that actually conceals important distinctions. The biggest distinction is between a postdoctoral research associate (PDRA) employed on someone else's grant, and an independent research fellow holding their own funding. Both have PhDs, both are researchers. Both may publish papers, supervise students, and contribute to major discoveries, but the relationship they have to the research itself is fundamentally different. A PDRA is employed to work on a project that has been conceived, designed, and funded under the leadership ...

A couple of months ago, I was invited to become a Fellow of the Geological Society of London . It was a nice moment of recognition, and one I was very happy to accept. At the same time, I’m also aware that this is not entirely unusual - learned societies are, understandably, looking to broaden their memberships, and a Professor of Geoarchaeology is an obvious easy win. Still, there is something genuinely meaningful about being welcomed into an organisation with such a long and influential history. The Geological Society of London, founded in 1807, is the oldest geological society in the world, and one that has played a central role in shaping how we understand the Earth. It has been home to many of the figures whose work underpins not just geology, but also archaeology, palaeoecology, and environmental science more broadly. To be part of that lineage, however loosely, feels significant. I am especially happy as the Society actually is closely linked to the history of my own research. C...

For a discipline fundamentally concerned with people, archaeology has long relied on a surprisingly narrow definition of what constitutes the human body in the past. Human remains, in most archaeological and heritage contexts, effectively mean bones. Occasionally teeth and cremated material. But much of what bodies actually produce, shed, and leave behind falls outside these dominant categories and, as a result, outside many of our analytical priorities and ethical frameworks. My recent paper in World Archaeology, More than bones: rethinking ethics and epistemologies of bodily exuviae in archaeology , reflects on this imbalance. It brings together a range of what can be termed bodily exuviae, coprolites, dental calculus, material traces of bodily processes, and suggests that we take them seriously, both analytically and ethically. It has been encouraging to see that the paper is already among the journal’s most-read articles over the past 12 months, which hopefully indicates that peopl...

I attended a fascinating lunchtime seminar this week on the potentials for archaeology and AI, which brought together perspectives from across different departments at Durham University . One of the talks was by Prof Jelena Ninic , a civil engineer whose work focuses on structural assessment and maintenance of infrastructure, particularly ageing transport networks such as railways and bridges. Her presentation discussed how heritage is not something separate from modern engineering but fundamentally embedded within it. Much of the infrastructure we rely on every day is in fact, historic. Across the UK and elsewhere, roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, often have origins in the nineteenth century, if not earlier. These are complex, evolving systems that have been repaired, adapted, and extended over decades or centuries. As such, they present a series of challenges that are as much archaeological as they are engineering in nature.  A key challenge is maintaining historic infrastructu...

This follows on from my previous post , where I reflected on the value of the heritage sector in the UK, and the frustration that we have not been very good at communicating this value more broadly. This followed a UKRI board visit to the north east, where I was asked a question specifically about RICHeS (Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science)  (which readers will know I am closely involved in, as director for NEMCAS , the north east node of the distributed infrastructure). It got me thinking, perhaps more urgently than I have before, about how crucial RICHeS is both as a programme for catalysing research, but as a tool for demonstrating the economic value of the heritage sector, consolidating what has historically been very dispersed, and making the case for continued investment in heritage, and arts and humanities, broadly defined. If the first step is recognising that archaeology and heritage are a significant part of the UK economy, the next question is ...

Let’s start with the numbers. According to Historic England’s latest Heritage Counts analysis , the heritage sector contributed £44.9 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) to the UK economy in 2022, supporting over 523,000 jobs. Of this, £15.3 billion is direct economic output, with the remainder generated through supply chains and wider spending across the economy. For every £1 directly generated by heritage, an additional £1.93 is created elsewhere in the economy. This places heritage firmly within the UK’s core economic activity, deeply embedded in construction, planning, tourism, and regional development. And this is only part of the picture - across the wider cultural and creative economy, UK sectors generated over £120 billion in GVA annually , representing around 5% of the UK GDP. Even these figures are likely conservative. Government commissioned research acknowledges that standard statistical definitions struggle to capture the full extent of heritage activity, meaning its to...

This week we had the annual research away day for the Department of Archaeology at Durham . It was the first such event I have been to since joining the department just over a year ago, and it was great to see the range of brilliant work going on across the breadth of the discipline. I presented a short provocation on what the future of archaeology might look like in an era increasingly shaped by biomolecular data.  We are unquestionably living through what has been termed a 'biomolecular turn' in archaeology. Advances in ancient DNA, proteomics, lipids and isotopic analysis have opened up extraordinary possibilities for reconstructing past lives, movements, diets and relationships. These methods have transformed the kinds of questions we can ask, and in many cases, the kinds of answers we can plausibly give. But they also raise important challenges. As with DNA evidence in forensic science, biomolecular data is powerful, but it does not speak for itself. It must be interpreted...

Last month I spent a day at the Daresbury laboratory for a RICHeS data day, to think about how we will manage data for our facilities and make it accessible. This is a daunting task, but a challenge I am excited to tackle, working together with the Heritage Science Data Service team. One of the highlights of the day was touring the Visual Computing Labs. Seeing full laser scans and digital models of entire cities (in this case Liverpool) was genuinely awe inspiring. These aren’t just impressive visualisations, but complex data‑rich representations that can be interrogated. In archaeology, where we constantly move between scales, from microscopic residues to landscapes and infrastructures, the potentials are endless. What might we learn and better understand if we can apply these technologies to ancient cities? Another highlight was seeing virtual museums integrated with a treadmill system. The user sees a virtual environment and feels as if they are moving through it. It felt like an...

  I’m writing a book! “Archaeological Excrements and the Study of Foodways”, for the CUP Elements series, has been occupying most of my brain for the past few months. The heavy writing is now finished, which means I’ve reached my favourite stage, preparing the figures. In other words, an entirely valid excuse to spend quality time at the microscope, revisiting some old friends in the slide cabinet. This week’s nostalgia trip took me back to 2012, when I’d recently finished my PhD and was working as a research assistant. At the time, I’d started a small pilot study at the brilliant Boncuklu site in Türkiye. The idea was to compare the midden deposits there with those from Çatalhöyük, that were the focus of my PhD. Unfortunately a postdoc never materialised to take this project further, but writing the book has given me the perfect opportunity to look at these slides again properly. They are very different to the Çatalhöyük middens, not only in terms of taphonomy, but in the actual ...

I’m sitting in a playground, on a Sunday afternoon, watching decay happen in real time, like a small-scale experiment in taphonomy. Google tells me playground paint has a lifespan of around ten years. I can’t help thinking about where it goes. Tiny particles released into the surrounding soil, tracked away on shoes, washed into drains by rain. What are they carrying with them? Pigments, binders, trace metals? Potential pollutants moving through the environment, I wonder how far they become dispersed beyond the original structure?  I am thinking about how this would read archaeologically. A surface repeatedly repainted versus one left to crumble. Some structures maintained long past their original design life alongside elements allowed to fail. How far do the tiny particles we see in sediment micromorphology samples represent a local activity and how much comes from dispersal?   

As we come to the end of 2025, my final blog post of the year is a reflection on research outputs. Here are the three academic papers I published this year as part of collaborative projects with fantastic teams of co-authors. The first paper of the year was an overview of the pan‑European TerraSAgE project, published in Geoarchaeology , led by Tim Kinnaird. This comes from our AHRC project  that started in 2019, and had a few unfortunate hiccups due to COVID (totally scuppered our fieldwork schedule). There will be more to come from this project at a later date, but this paper presents our framework for understanding terrace life cycles from construction to abandonment across the Aegean, Croatia, Italy, Spain, and Galicia, showing how these ancient systems inspire sustainable land‑management today. Our micromorphology deep‑dive into Fodongdi Cave, published in Journal of Archaeological Science , was led by Jinxu Wu, whose high-resolution thin-section analysis revealed how tiny...

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a reviewer and panel member for a wide range of funding schemes. The responsibility of evaluating research proposals, often across disciplines and international contexts, requires careful consideration, but it also offers a unique perspective on the breadth of innovation and collaboration happening across the global research landscape.  Most recently, I had the opportunity to observe a Wellcome funding panel, which offered valuable insights into how different funders approach decision-making and prioritisation. I’ll be writing a separate blog soon reflecting on my experiences across various UKRI schemes and councils, but for now I want to focus on a particularly distinctive fund: the British Council’s International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) . The ISPF is different to many other UK-based research funding schemes. It’s part of the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) portfolio, which means it’s not just about advancing...