Castles and Coprolites

Back from the field now and making sense of all the photos and paperwork. As well as taking samples from Paisley Caves itself, we also spent a day doing a survey of the local vegetation and collecting samples for a botanical reference collection. Part of the project involves analysis of pollen and other plant remains from sediments and coprolites, and whilst there are several available collections and published material on the likely species that we will find, it is always helpful to build a project specific reference collection, and this will be added to the growing library of material based in the Wolfson lab at Newcastle. This will be one of the major tasks undertaken by project research associate John Blong , and he will be collaborating with project affiliate Katelyn McDonough , who analysed material from Paisley for her Masters and is currently working on botanical remains at the nearby Connelly Caves for her PhD. This is the first fieldwork where I have had the chance to put m...

Today is the end of the Semester, and I'm definitely ready for a break after an extremely busy few months. Lots of great news this year, with two successful grant applications - the NERC project which I've been posting about, and a new Wellcome seed award which will be starting next year, developing further work at Catalhoyuk in Turkey. I have also had my own assignment deadline this week, for the NERC training course that I am going on in January . Everyone in the group has been assigned a plant family, and we had to do a bit of research on the genera and species that are found in Belize, and write a short information sheet on key characteristics. I think the expedition leader took pity on me as one of the participants without a background in botany, and I was assigned the Asteraecae (Compositae), which happen to be one of the easier families to identify. Or at least, it is one I am familiar with - daisies and sunflowers! Some of the terminology was familiar, ringing bells fro...

This weekend I went to my first AEA conference . As a student, then as a fixed term post-doc, it is difficult to fund conference attendance, and also to find the time when there are so many conferences to choose from. Having done a few years of the big conferences ( SAA and EAA ) to maximise audience and networking opportunities, I’ve decided to spend some time at the smaller ones, where I can focus on my specific interests. Overall it has been an enjoyable weekend, and it was great to be back in York and catch up with old friends and colleagues, including Matthew Collins , who I can’t thank enough for writing me many references over these past few years (I bet he’s relieved that I finally got a job so he can stop writing them!). There are three ‘themes’ that stood out for me at the conference. The first was the study of taphonomy, and how wildly different this is between different techniques in environmental archaeology. The second was the recognition of the advantages of inte...

The past few weeks have been pollen themed. Teaching pollen for Environmental Archaeology, and a new paper out on pollen analysis (and geoarchaeology) at Radzyń Chełminski in Poland . The latter is from my time working on the Ecology of Crusading project , and is a nice case study in using multi-proxy approaches, including historical documentary sources, to investigate landscape change. Pollen analysis is not my area of research expertise, but I have spent a long time working with pollen data. As a geography undergraduate I had several pollen classes for modules in  Quaternary   Environments  and Biogeography, and it also featured heavily in my MSc Geoarchaeology. Pollen analysis does what it says on the tin - we extract pollen grains from sequential layers in sediment cores, and count them to see how vegetation has changed over time. If we have a sediment layer dated to 1000 years ago that is full of oak pollen for example, we can reasonably assume that there was an oa...