Castles and Coprolites

When I started at Newcastle one of the first major roles I undertook was taking over as Director of the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory. This sounds rather grand, but in reality it mostly involves managing room bookings and making sure everyone has all the kit they need for practicals, research and teaching. Part of the job involves looking after a zooarchaeology reference collection, hence the post last month about attending the zooarchaeology  short course at Sheffield . I have also made various wonderful purchasing decisions, vastly expanding our suite of microscopes to include a range of Leica DM750P scopes for teaching, and dedicated scopes for research with even fancier specs including reflected light capabilities, image analysis software etc. The next stage will be to transform the side room, currently used mostly for storage, into a dedicated space for research. With a new lab based PhD and PDRA started in January, and possibly a Fellow later in 2017 (if all goes to plan), i...

I can't believe it's already June, getting close to a year in my job at Newcastle . I can't even call it my new job anymore! It's been an amazing year so far. Even though I have been swamped with designing new modules and getting used to the teaching and admin processes here, I have really enjoyed everything. I even managed to get some research related activities in. I applied for a NERC new investigator grant back in January, which in itself was a learning process. 10,000 words in total for that application, and that wasn't even the hard part; sorting out the finances for an international project split between two institutions (my co-I is at Bristol) was more of a headache that I expected. Then the reviewing process, oh the reviewing process. Despite being told that being interdisciplinary is one of my major strengths, and I do believe that it leads to better, more innovative research, it makes things surprisingly hard when it comes to applying for funding. There...

Back in March I mentioned that I was involved in a sciart collaboration, where artists and scientists come together to work on collaborative art projects, inspired by scientific research. I love this idea. I was always really into both art and science growing up (and took Art as an A Level subject!), and although I choose to go down the 'science' route for my career, I have maintained a keen interest in art, and particularly how we can use artistic expression to communicate scientific research. The artist I have been working with is Molly McEwan , an Edinburgh based artist and graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and talented ceramicist.  The photos to the left are a sneak preview from Molly's exhibition at Wednesday's Girl, a free exhibition showcasing the work of female artists from Scotland, held at Space Club and supported by Somewhere To , an organisation provides spaces and venues for young people across the UK. Molly's solo exhibition , ...

I found out this weekend that my application to take part in an exciting art/science collaborative project was successful! It was only by chance that I found out about the project, through some random browsing around Twitter. Joining Twitter was one of the best things I ever did, so many opportunities and connections to be made that I would never get the chance to see otherwise. The project I am joining is ASCUS/TNS Engage project. ASCUS is a non-profit organisation that supports collaboration between arts and sciences, and builds connections between different organisations, institutions, individuals and the public. TNS is The Number Shop , an art studio and gallery. Artists from the studio will be developing new work based on dialogues with scientists, as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival . Some of the work will actually be produced during Open Studios during the festival, so that the public can come and experience the work being produced. The idea is to bring the ...

I read on the interwebs recently that the new Ghostbusters are women! I also read that some people thought this was "unrealistic". So I thought I would check out the original characters and see what is so unrealistic about them being played by women. Why am I blogging about this you may ask? Where is the archaeological connection? Well, it so happens that one of the original Ghostbusters did a PhD in Egyptology! Now it's been many years since I watched the films, and I was of an age where I didn't take in the details of people's professions and whatnot, but that's pretty awesome. And ghosts, you know, archaeology, dead people, cursed artefacts etc. There's a connection in there somewhere. Dr Watt, Prof Jackson, Prof Ikram & Prof. Ferlaino The original dudes were parapsychologists. As psychology is a rather large field, I wasn't sure where to start, but I managed to find Dr Caroline Watt, at my own University of Edinburgh , who researches th...

Who'd have thought I'd find myself as co-convener for a third year Theoretical Archaeology module? Such is the situation I find myself in towards the end of my first year at the University of Edinburgh. I used to be one of those people who thought theory was all a bit confusing with no relevance to 'real' archaeology. This is an attitude I have found especially of researchers in archaeology who have a background in the sciences. What is the point of theory? Or I'm a scientist, I don't need theory! As an undergraduate I had a compulsory Philosophy of Science module, but I'm not sure how common this is for most science degrees. I think sometimes we don't realise that even as scientists with 'hard data', we have to interpret our data - and in archaeology especially, these data are always flawed in some way, and our interpretations steeped in our own experiences. It's a myth that scientific results can only have one interpretation. The way we us...