Castles and Coprolites

July appears to be whizzing by nicely. Unusually for me, I am still in the UK. For the past 10 years (has it really been that long?!) I have spent every summer abroad doing fieldwork, and for most of those summers at least a few weeks have been spent collecting samples at Catalhoyuk in Turkey. This year will be the second year that I have been unable to go - last year I was coming to the end of my contract on the Feeding Stonehenge project and had to stay in the lab , and this year I have too many teaching commitments and writing to complete. Depsite this I will still be doing some UK based fieldwork in the next couple of weeks, more on that as it happens. Lucky for me in the age of social media and blogging, I can keep up to date with the latest news from Catalhoyuk as it happens via Scott Haddow's blog, A Bone to Pick. Scott is a member of the osteoarchaeology team at Catalhoyuk and has been posting regular updates, including an amazing find of intact woven textile in a baby bur...

BioArCh PhD candidate Harry Robson excavates Flixton Back out in the field, at long last, on a day trip with fellow micromorphologist, Helen Williams (PhD candidate at the University of York). This is a bit of a change for me; normally heading off on field work involves long journeys in hot foreign places, but today I had to go no further than an hour down the road to Flixton, Scarborough. Not such a long journey and fortunately the weather was great. I’m not going to say hot as the last place I went to that was ‘hot’ was 40 ° + ( in the 100 ° s), and I think if it ever got to that temperature in the UK it would literally be breaking the record.  And an added bonus to local fieldwork - a nice cup of Yorkshire tea afterwards with Helen's parents! As I mentioned a few months ago , I will be joining the Star Carr project next year as a part-time microarchaeology specialist, which will involve advising on micromorphology, geochemistry and phytoliths amongst other things....

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post as part of the Day of Archaeology which aims to give people an insight into the variety of work that archaeoklogists around the world do. There are some really fascinating stories on there, and it was great to see a few posts from fellow Çatalhöyük types ( faunal team and human remains team ) on what they are up to this year. This is the first season in a long time that I won't be heading out this summer. We are just too busy finishing off all the lab work for Feeding Stonehenge. My post outlined a typical day in the bioarchaeology lab at the University of York, featuring more of those poetry inspiring pot sherds from Durrington Walls. This is just a little follow on to explain what happened next.... So, we got to the point of putting the extracted samples on the GC/MS which works something like this: Step 4 actually involves a lot of manual checking of the data to make sure what the computer thinks the lipids are is correct - it c...

I wandered lonely in the lab, Amongst the tubes, clearing the spills When all at once I saw a bag Of broken sherds amongst the drills Beside the bench, beneath the shelves I guess they won’t extract themselves.           Continuous as the gas that flows, And dries the samples in their vials, Wherefore these sherds appear who knows? It’s like a never-ending trial: Ten thousand Grooved Ware at a glance, Am I caught in a bad romance? From postholes, pits and avenue From middens, house floors, slots of beams, There’re always more postsherds to do: Grit tempered vessels haunt my dreams. I gazed - and gazed - with little thought What wealth the sherds to me had brought For now, whilst at the bench I stand, Clad in white coat, with pensive stare, It all makes sense, I understand! I like you lots, most Grooved of Ware And now my heart with pleasure fills The sherds my friends, my secret thrills. ...

Fair Star Carr, we weep to see You fade away so soon: As yet the archaeologists, Have not unearthed your boon. Stay, stay Until the field seasons Have run Unto their final year; And having found your secrets, we Will leave you with good cheer. We have five years to study you, Three seasons yet to dig                The dryland and the lake, Find bone points, and antler picks. We’ll try Before the land acidifies, To take Soil samples, pollen cores; So many Mesolithic clues Beside the relict shores.    We started planning the geoarchaeological aspects of the new Star Carr excavations this afternoon. The latest round of research at the site begins this year with Nicky Milner's 5 year ERC project. It looks like it will be quite challenging from a microarchaeology perspective, not least because of the peaty sediments which are notoriously difficult to thin section! But I do like a challenge. My invo...