Castles and Coprolites

This post is many years in the making! Back in 2018 I was on an excavation at a site called Cronk Guckley on the Isle of Man with my colleague Prof. Chris Fowler, a brilliant theorist and Neolithic specialist, who is co-director of the Round Mounds project. This is a great project with some really exceptional finds, including this beautiful jet bead necklace. The excavation finished in 2022 and we are now completing all the post-excavation analysis. The project is investigating the nature and timing of Bronze Age ‘round mound’ construction and how funerary practices evolved, on the Isle of Man and surrounding islands. These structure are large earthern monuments that were constructed over the top of a burial. The jet necklace is an exciting piece of evidence, not just because of it's beauty, but because it gives us insights into the people - the jet has been sourced to Whitby, so is great evidence for connections between the Isle of Man and mainland Britain in the Bronze Age, an...

I love this image. It's another one from Catalhoyuk , a nice midden in the South Area (unit 17739). I published a paper on these deposits in Antiquity which included this image , so I'll let you read the paper to find out more about this area and its significance. Here I wanted to show a close up of this image and the beautiful but daunting complexity of archaeological deposits under the microscope. What we are looking at is a tiny fragment of wall plaster mixed in with ashy debris and charcoal. A few years ago I did a post about these plaster deposits, as they are found within buildings at Catalhoyuk , on floors and walls. By counting the layers we can see the frequency with which the inhabitants were re-plastering and 'repainting' their houses - regular cycles of maintenance on an annual and seasonal basis. This layer in the midden shows a fragment which has fallen off a wall, and somehow made its way into the midden, probably through sweeping and dumping of debris, ...

I've been preparing for teaching a micromorphology lab class tomorrow, on the topic of architectural materials. Having recently dug out my old laptop ( to look at old job applications... ), I came across my huge archive of micromorphology images. I really need to figure a way of making these available online. I have so many and they are such fantastic references. I found this nice example of a partially burnt aggregate; it is perfect for showing how pseudomorphic plant voids appear in a plant-tempered clay. On the right hand side of the image, the plant temper (grasses) has been burnt, and so has preserved in the form of microcharcoal. On the left hand side, where the aggregate escaped the burning, the plants have totally decayed, leaving only the voids in the shape of the grasses. It also shows how the colour of the sediment change as they are heated, becoming a distinctly darker brown. This sample is from the Deep Sounding midden at Catalhoyuk, some of the earliest deposits that...