Today my desk is covered in....
Sometimes I have a moment where I realise just how odd my day to day work probably appears to non-archaeologists. And probably even amongst archaeologists some of the things I end up with on my desk are quite odd. I seem to have aquired a sort of reputation as a coprolite person, and have aquired quite the collection of material from all over the place. I didn't set out intending to be a coprolite person, it just happened as I couldn't really ignore them. During my PhD, which initially focused on formation processes of middens at Catalhoyuk , I came to realise that the middens contained quite a large quantity of coprolites, and if I wanted to understand what people were dumping (lol) into middens, I had to investigate what people were doing with this particular type of waste. For those of you not in the know, coprolite is a catch all term for ancient faecal material (though technically there are different terms depending on whether it is an actual fossilised bit of poo versus a...