Castles and Coprolites

To most people, recieving a box of excrement in the post would probably be quite a distressing experience, and  a sign that you had aquired a pretty extreme stalker and/or a critic who really disagreed with that paper you published. For me however, such an occassion tends to be a cause of excitement, and has happened  not once but twice so far this year . Today's offering of poop is in the form of thin section micromorphology slides from Paisley Caves, Oregon. I have been waiting on these rather nifty samples for about a year now, due to the slow process firstly of exporting them, then having them turned into thin sections. But it was worth the wait. Paisley Caves is famous for its poop, being the site of the earliest human DNA in North America , recovered from a coprolite. My poop is not quite as exciting, consisting largely of tiny little bat pellets that form layers between (hopefully) anthropogenic features such as ash layers from hearths. Though a first glance suggests t...

Back in the lab after a week in the field in Latvia, taking micromorphology samples for the Ecology of Crusading project at Cesis Castle . As I was only there for the week I missed all the fun of actually excavating the trench and uncovering exciting stuff like the fully articulated horse skeleton (hence the nickname 'horse trench'!), and horse related paraphernalia including bridle bosses, spurs and stirrups. Wet muddy trench of doom This did mean that I had a nice fully exposed section to work with, which makes it much easier to work out the best locations for taking micromorphology blocks - in this case to identify the surface residues on the floor and test the hypothesis that this was stable. The benefit of this however was perhaps outweighed by the fact the trench was filling up with water as I collected the samples, and the presence of a huge waterlogged beam conveniently located right where I needed to stand, making it a rather muddy business with some preca...

Finally back in the UK after 6 weeks in the US as a WUN visiting fellow at UW and subsequently conference participant at the SAA 77th Annual Meeting in Memphis . Since my previous update, I gave another seminar as part of UW Anthropology FAALS , this time on my micromorphology work at Catalhoyuk. Rather than giving the same presentation I normally do, I decided to incorporate some of the very latest work I've been doing at the site, including the analysis I did at UW, and even a bit of theory. It was great to get lots of questions and positive responses, and the discussion gave me some useful ideas on how to integrate larger scale spatial analysis with micromorphology (the focus of which, in my research at least, has been temporal). I was sad to have to leave UW after only 1 month - I intially thought this would be plenty of time, but it went by so quickly. Hopefully I'll be able to go back when my lab work with Feeding Stonehenge has finished. Before returning to the UK I s...