Castles and Coprolites

Well, I arrived in Oregon a couple of days ago, trying (without auccess) to get over jet lag before starting firldwork fot the NERC project tomorrow. Before I start with the stream of NERC related posts, a little update on my taphonomic experiment that I posted about back in November . Readers may recall that we came across some recently deceased racoons plus a hawk on the side of the road, and I decided they would make a fine addition to my animal bone reference collection. I set them up in a wire cage to be left to the elements, thinking that when I came back 6 months later they would be in the advanced stages of decay, perhaps even ready to extract and clean up the bones. Nope. 6 months sounds like plenty of time for two medium sized mammals plus one hawk to decay, but I didn't account for the fact that when I deposited them back in November, winter was coming, and they have been buried under two feet of snow for the best part of those 6 months! So, they pretty much look like th...

Two posts crossed my Twitter feed last week that got me thinking. Both are related to experimental archaeology and use of wetland resources. If you are a regular reader of my blog (or indeed my academic papers) you will have noticed that I talk a lot about the environment of Çatalhöyük, and how this may have influenced human activity in the Neolithic. You will also notice that I have criticised some of the early interpretations which, to me, present a simplistic interpretation of evidence that doesn’t consider the complexity of the environment, or people. Çatalhöyük was situated in a wetland environment, and there have been debates over the influence this had on agriculture. Where were people growing their crops if the local area was not suitable for agriculture?  One theory suggests people travelled to fields that were located many km away from the site, which in turn has implications for social organisation. This always bothered me, firstly because of the limitations of the ...

I think the zooarchaeology short course at Sheffield really inspired me, as now I think about animal bones as well as soils and plants in all situations. I'm currently working in central Oregon doing some preliminary work for the NERC project . As I continue to work in this region, we will need to build reference collections to work with. This is built into the NERC project, in terms of a plant microfossil reference collection. Animal skeletons in general are not so easy to get a hold of as plant specimens. Being the resourceful, perhaps slightly strange academic that I am, I noticed a few carcasses by the side of the road and figured why let them go to waste? The landscapes of the USA are so different to the UK, and something that is very noticeable is the amount of roadkill. In the UK I think animals that are hit by cars are cleared up pretty quickly. In the US the roads are much bigger, and animals that are hit just stay there. Or get removed by scavengers. This week I noticed ...

I'm happy to announce that the editorial and the majority of papers for the special issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences are now available online ahead of print publication later this year. This volume is the end result of the 6th Experimental Archaeology conference , co-organised by myself, Eva Fairnell and Helen Williams , at the University of York in 2012, and includes a great range of papers on all aspects of experimental archaeology, from scientific experiments, archaeological reconstructions, and more experiential approaches. The editorial is free to access here , but if anyone would like pdfs of any individual papers please get in touch. The 7th EAUK was in Cardiff 2013, and the 8th EAUK has just been held this week at the University of Oxford. Although I couldn't attend this year it has been great being able to follow the conference online via live Twittering (#EAUK2014), and there are a couple of papers and posters presented this year that build on th...

Here is a nice series of micrographs from a little experiment I did many years ago, back when I was a research assistant at the University of Reading, shortly after finishing my PhD. Professor John Allen had collected a clay sample associated with the Roman town of Silchester, and conducted a series of firing sessions in a kiln, each in increments of 100 °C , to provide a collection of reference slides for fired clays in thin section. As I had been working on infra red spectroscopy at the time, I used the same fired samples to produce a series of reference FT-IR spectra to compare with the micrographs. We presented this as a poster at the 5th Experimental Archaeology conference in Reading 2011, though I never really took the work further, as I became more interested in developing the use of organic geochemical techniques rather than inorganic. FT-IR is a great technique for certain materials, but archaeological samples tend to be so mixed and hetergeneous it can be hard to get defini...

Space Dagger! Apart from my latest project , which I made a seperate blog about here, there are a few things that are new this month. I am pleased to share a short article I wrote for The Post Hole , a very impressive and professional looking journal that is run by students at the University of York. I wrote a short piece related to the Teaching and Learning project I was involved in before I moved to Edinburgh, Archaeology Under the Microscope , that introduces microarchaeology and the importance of 'hands on' practical experience of laboratory work and microscopy in archaeology. You can access the article here , and do check out the rest of the website and previous issues. I also recieved a fab package in the post this month from fellow archaeology blogger Danny Welch, who writes an excellent blog, Archaeology Test Kitchen , about his experimental archaeology experiences making and using lithic artefacts. I present to you the Space Dagger , a nifty little tool hand craft...