Castles and Coprolites

This month we have a beautiful set of micrographs from a limestone cave on the Rove Penninsula of Fiji. These samples were collected as part of a pilot study with the University of the South Pacific way back in 2007, when I was avoiding finishing PhD write up and decided to go do some field work in the South Pacific, as you do. The samples come from a test pit that was excavated to identify the sequence of sediments within the cave, and to assess whether there was any Lapita occupation. The micromorphology samples were collected to identify activity traces that may be associated with the occupation. In the end the samples were not prioritised as the dates suggested that the occupations were much more recent, within the past 1000 years. However I do like to go back to them time to time, and will hopefully write something properly on them when I have time. For now I will share these beautiful images, maybe some of the most beautiful I have seen! The cave was incredibly humid, in fact t...

Been working on this for a while, inspired by the baby burial from the Neolithic settle ment of Catalhoyuk last year . I've always felt neutral about working with human remains, and the picture of the tiny skeleton being uncovered by Barbara Betz in 2013 was the first time it's given me a lump in the back of my throat. The scientist in me is all for studying human remains, but I wonder what these people would have felt about their infant being excavated. W e're talking here about a culture that was fascinated with skull removal so who knows! Perhaps these new feelings are a result of being a parent (I almost said recently but it's getting close to 1 ye ar!) - a good example of how our own personal situation influences the way we perceive the past. Beneath the floors are hidden treasures, In secret kept, the bones are sealed Of those now gone who’ll dream forever, They wait their time to be revealed. The days they pass without perception The night...

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 ...