Castles and Coprolites

I am very proud to be associated with not one but two departments which have been awarded this prestigious prize for academic excellence, the University of Reading in 2009 , and now the University of York in 2012. More on the story can be seen on the York newspage . Well done everyone!

Today was spent mostly taking apart complicated bits of kit and putting them back together again. We had a training course in GC/MS maintainance, including such delightful topics as cleaning the ion source (quite pretty and shiny I think), and troubleshooting for low sensitivity. It's really interesting getting to learn more about how this sort of equipment is put together. Reading the theory of how it all works isn't the same as seeing all the bits for yourself, and working out how it all goes together. Something that looks incredibly complex to begin with gradually becomes less scary and more familiar. I took photos of various stages of the cleaning process to remind myself what to do in future. This particular image reminded me of the USS Enterprise. Don't you think? See the door in the background, and the entrance to the Jefferies tube in the floor. No? Following the maintainance course I went to this weeks' Heritage Research seminar over in King's Manor,...

To continue the alliterative theme of the blog, this sums up nicely in 3 words my sampling visit to the Salisbury and Wiltshire Museum yesterday. The museum houses the collection of pottery from the 1967 excavations at Durrington Walls by Wainwright, which we will be using for comparison with the pottery being analysed from the Stonehenge Riverside Project . I was pleasantly suprised to see how pretty the city is - a little bit like York with random medieval buildings and bits of medieval wall dotted around the centre, and also an impressive cathedral. Maybe not quite as pretty as York Minster, but not too bad :) The cathedral is right next the the museum, though alas I didn't get a chance to look around as I had a rather large box of pottery to carry around by that point. The museum itself was rather exciting. The collections of archive material are located in a very chilly old store room complete with strangely labelled Victorian draws containing Antiquarian curiosities. It wa...