Castles and Coprolites

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...

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 ...

I was invited today to take part in a blogging carnival, related to a Blogging in Archaeology session at the upcoming SAA conference . Quite handy actually as I can't attend the conference in person this year due to teaching commitments. What is a blogging carnival you may ask? Check out the original post on Doug's Archaeology here. Each month leading up to the session, a question is posted, and participants can choose to answer it via their blog. The answers are then all summarised at the end of the month. Hopefully this will highlight some new archaeology blogs to add to the long list I already follow (maybe I should do a post about that!). Anyhoo. Here are my answers to the first set of questions: Why did you start a blog? I had been meaning to start one for years before I actually did. I have been a big user of social media since I was an undergrad, but always for personal rather that professional purposes. I eventually started my blog at the beginning of 2012 af...

Finally back in the UK after 6 weeks in the US as a WUN visiting fellow at UW and subsequently conference participant at the SAA 77th Annual Meeting in Memphis . Since my previous update, I gave another seminar as part of UW Anthropology FAALS , this time on my micromorphology work at Catalhoyuk. Rather than giving the same presentation I normally do, I decided to incorporate some of the very latest work I've been doing at the site, including the analysis I did at UW, and even a bit of theory. It was great to get lots of questions and positive responses, and the discussion gave me some useful ideas on how to integrate larger scale spatial analysis with micromorphology (the focus of which, in my research at least, has been temporal). I was sad to have to leave UW after only 1 month - I intially thought this would be plenty of time, but it went by so quickly. Hopefully I'll be able to go back when my lab work with Feeding Stonehenge has finished. Before returning to the UK I s...