Castles and Coprolites

I have a very important deadline tomorrow, hence it's the perfect time to do a blog post for Doug's Archaeology Blogging Carnival.  Last year I took part in a series of posts about the purpose of blogging . This time the theme is Grand Challenges facing archaeology, specifically the participant's archaeology. In my case of course this is geoarchaeology. It's a good theme for me, as it's something I've been reflecting on a lot recently. I am writing a paper on investigating 'use of space', and multi-proxy approaches in archaeology. It's half review, half critique, and is turning into a bit of a monster. What follows is some of the central thoughts I am discussing in that paper, so actually any comments and feedback would be much appreciated! One of the major challenges that I see facing geoarchaeology, is the integration of data from different scales. How do we use data collected for example at the microscale (such as geochemical patterning of floor...

All those good intentions to update my blog on a daily basis seem to have failed, though this is good in a way as it reflects how busy I have been. Since my last update I have had a behind the scenes tour of the Burke Museum (absolutely fantastic collections of art from the northwest coast, including bent boxes, incredible!), I've visited the labs in Oceanography (which by the way, has a rather fantastic coffee/lounge area, see below), and have given my first department seminar for Archaeology (which attracted a decent audience despite being a friday afternoon and having the word biomolecular in the title). Lounge area, UW Oceanography I've also made significant progress on a paper I'm co-authoring on 'jumping scales' at Çatalhöyük, which is exploring the link between the scale at which data is collected, and the scale at which interpretations are made. It turns out UW is a great place to be working on this, as the office I'm in has a huge geoarchaeology l...