Castles and Coprolites

I've just been notified of the publication of this great new paper via Google Scholar citations, as it cites my paper on lipid analysis of coprolites . That's not the only reason I'm writing about it mind you - anything dung related gets my attention, and this is one of the first papers to come out of the Ce ntral Zagros Archaeological Project , which I was involved with a number of years ago. The CZAP project aims to understand the origin and process of animal domestication and agriculture in the Central Zagros region of Iran and Iraq, and the team have also conducted ethnographic studies in modern villages in the area, in order to help interpret the archaeology. This paper by Elliot et al reports on a mix of ethnographic studies and scientific analysis of modern dung and plants. The authors look at the dung spherulites in modern samples of sheep, goat and cows - those little spherical particles that form in the guts of animals . Despite being used frequently to support t...

This post follows on from the Manganese Micrograph Mystery I posted a while ago. Blog followers will remember I posted some images of layered ruminant dung which had a distinctive black 'speckled' appearance, a bit similar but not quite the same as Mn staining. Thanks to my readers the mystery was solved through the kind contributions of Hans Huisman. Huisman is a geoarchaeologist with expertise in degradation and preservation of archaeological materials. He suggests that manganese would produce more dendritic like patterns, and that instead this appears to be iron sulphide staining. Iron sulphides include minerals such as pyrite, which can oxidise to rust . This type of staining can be recognised in OIL as having a 'metallic' lustre, or smaller particles, such as we have here, can be examined using reflectance microscopy at a high magnification. So I'll be doing that asap. For now I wanted to share this image showing the possible impact this staining has had on ...