Castles and Coprolites

Team palynology and zooarchaeology Team archaeobotany and geoarchaeology Lovely weather here in London today, though mostly being experienced inside a meeting room at the Warburg Institute ! I'm away from Edinburgh this week, firstly for a project meeting for the Ecology of Crusading project and then for a week of lab work in Bristol - more on that to come! This weekend I am here with fellow team members Rowena Banerjea , Alex Brown , Monica Badura and PI Aleks Pluskowski , discussing our  analyses of deposits from medieval Riga. This is the first time we've all got together to integrate our data, and to get updates on the dating of the deposits. So far  we have potentially the earliest known building in Riga, on the basis of dendrochronological dates, and some great archaeobotanical data on the types of plant materials that were being used - along with the micromorphology it looks like a lot of the plant material is associated with construction, such as wood chipping...

Getting ready for upcoming fieldwork at the Ness of Brodgar by going over the micromorphology slides I collected last year from middens. Analysis of these is still ongoing, but here is a peek at some of the things we can see so far. The image below shows two different types of material, char and charcoal. On the left are the images in PPL, on the right, XPL . Charcoal can be seen in the lower left image, and obviously is the remains of burnt wood, we can see the cell structure quite clearly. On the upper left however is something that initially looks like charcoal, but on closer examination is a little different, tentatively interpreted as char. Char is a term given to burnt debris from other organic material. I haven't see this in any other slides I've analysed, but it has come up in a couple of references, where it is suggested to be the result of fat burning. At first I thought perhaps the charcoal could just be highly broken up and degraded, but it looks as if the charred...

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...