Castles and Coprolites

Sitting on a train back from London to Newcastle so I thought I would make wise use of 4 hours and get round to a much needed blog update. But what to update about? You can tell by the uninspired blog title it's going to be a random mix of stuff. There is a lot going on at the moment (both academic and general life), some of which is super exciting but I have to wait to talk about until it is finished. I've just about recovered from the whirlwind that was the  DIG2017 conference , just in time to get started on the edited volume that goes with it. The conference was a great success, and we were lucky enough to get funding to cover the recording and publishing of the talks (speakers permitting), the majority of which are  now online  (unfortunately I can't actually watch them on my train journey as Youtube streaming is blocked...). This is going to make a great research teaching tool - we have presentations of papers available to view, and also updated written papers appea...

Writing this post as quickly as possible to make sure I don't have a month with NO POSTS! Since my merry xmas post  in December, I took a break from anything work related over the holidays, then as soon as the new year happened, I went to Belize for 2 weeks , where I had zero email or internet access. That was quite nice in some ways, and it was especially enlightening to see how long my iPhone battery lasts when it is not connected to anything ( a whole week!). The last few days of the trip we were staying at a rather fancy resort , which of course had wifi, and I spent much of that time going through a huge email backlog, desperately deleting all the 'not important' ones, to try and narrow the list of things that requires a response to something manageable. I have so many things to blog about in relation to my experience in Belize, everything from plant taxonomy to fieldwork and family, to Mayan archaeology and the similarities and differences between different subjects...

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...

2016 - the year where the exciting news just keeps on coming! I found out recently that I've been selected to take part in a NERC training course, Fieldwork Skills in the Tropics, run by the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh , as part of their MSc in Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants . The course runs over two weeks next year, in Belize! It's been over a decade since I first left the UK on my first fieldwork abroad, but the thought of travelling somewhere new is still as exciting now as it was then. Probably even more so as I have some idea what I'm doing now. This course covers vegetation survey, monitoring and plant identification, with some GIS. Part of the application process involved a statement of why you would like to attend, with priority given to those with NERC funding, ECRs and students. Whilst I now work as an archaeologist, my background is in geosciences/geography, and I've always maintained that perspective in my research and teaching. My long term aim is...

There has been an opinion piece doing the rounds on twitter - The Secret Life of an archaeologist: soil in your sandwiches and sexism.  Having been subject to sexism both privately and professionally, I can sympathize with aspects of this, however there is a lot in this piece which made me frown. Enough so that I decided to do my own blog post about it. When I saw the title I thought it was going to focus on the problems of sexism and harassment in the field, something which has received a lot of attention recently, both in archaeology and in other field-based disciplines. But the thing that irked me was its presentation of what 'real' archaeology is like. There seem to be two extremes in the way archaeology is perceived, it's either Indiana Jones and digging up 'treasure' (i.e. pretty objects, preferably precious metal), or there are the pieces like this, which want to tell everyone how boring and hard work it actually is. This reminded me of an excellent post (go ...

Like many archaeologists, and people in general, I am deeply saddened by the ongoing destruction of cultural heritage in Syria, and the plight of the people who have become refugees. Every time there is a new horror story in the news, I've been going back to my photographs from the time I spent in Syria in 2010 . I didn't have time to go and see Palmyra, and it saddens me that I will never get the chance now. What saddens me more is that I have no way of knowing what has happened to the Syrians I met while I was working there. The lovely guy who helped me with my paperwork at the border crossing from Turkey, and made sure I got on the right bus to get to Baniyas. The lovely family I met, who gave me a Syrian pop music CD and a carved cowry shell. The shopkeepers at Al-Hamidiyah Souq who sold me olive soap and beautiful inlaid boxes. The local man who showed me around Margat castle - we couldn't communicate well as he had no English and I have even less Arabic, but we someho...