Castles and Coprolites

I can't remember if I posted about this earlier in the year, but I was lucky enough to be awarded two student work experience placements as part of the  Newcastle NWE programme , where students complete flexible paid projects within the university. Two of my Environmental Archaeology students have been working for the past few months, digitizing my entire collection of thin section slides. At some point I hope to make these available online as an open access resource for teaching and research. They did a brilliant job! I've only just had a chance to go through all the scans, having been away on fieldwork, busy with exams, then graduation. Here is one of the scans of a thin section from medieval Riga, that I have been working on as part of the Ecology of Crusading project . Combined with the fact I have just moved the lovely Leica DM750P research microscope into my office (kindly purchased by History, Classics and Archaeology ), I can now get working on my mounting backlog of sa...

Team palynology and zooarchaeology Team archaeobotany and geoarchaeology Lovely weather here in London today, though mostly being experienced inside a meeting room at the Warburg Institute ! I'm away from Edinburgh this week, firstly for a project meeting for the Ecology of Crusading project and then for a week of lab work in Bristol - more on that to come! This weekend I am here with fellow team members Rowena Banerjea , Alex Brown , Monica Badura and PI Aleks Pluskowski , discussing our  analyses of deposits from medieval Riga. This is the first time we've all got together to integrate our data, and to get updates on the dating of the deposits. So far  we have potentially the earliest known building in Riga, on the basis of dendrochronological dates, and some great archaeobotanical data on the types of plant materials that were being used - along with the micromorphology it looks like a lot of the plant material is associated with construction, such as wood chipping...

I couldn't resist posting about this lovely micrograph, even though I blogged about this mineral quite recently . This is the same floor sample from medieval Riga, it's absolutely chock full of these iron phosphate crystals (vivianite) in various forms. The last image I posted showed the typical blue amorphous mass, here is another view, this time of a collection of smaller 'rosette' crystals, showing the monoclinic form. You can see that there is a mix of blue and yellowish/grey crystals in these rosettes. Vivianite turns blue on exposure to air, suggesting that this part of the deposit remained waterlogged whilst other parts were partially exposed. Curious that these little crystals appear to be clustering around that white area - a 'crack' in the floor.