Castles and Coprolites

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...

Some personal good news amongst the Covid19 chaos - I have a new paper currently in press in Earth Science Reviews  (currently pre-proof so check in at a later date for definitive version with updated figures etc). This is a substantial review my team and I have been working on for a couple of years now, chipping away at it in the background as part of our NERC research project , and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. We posted it as a pre-print a few months ago on EarthArkiv , the first time I've used a pre-print server. I was hoping to engage in an open peer review process, but we didn't get any comments (do pre-prints really get peer reviewed...? A discussion for another blog post). On the plus side we did get 264 downloads before the paper made it through peer review with Earth Science Reviews. One of the points we make (albeit briefly) in this paper is that coprolites should be subject to the same strict protocols for access and analysis that have been propos...

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...