Castles and Coprolites

Well October has gone by incredibly quickly! Despite not posting much, there has been a lot happening, so much in fact that I have quite the backlog of things to talk about. For now just a few thoughts on academia and 'impact'. I read this article today that talked about focusing on impact as 'selling out' (for non UK readers, this is the drive towards having some sort of measurable impact beyond academia that is becoming increasingly required for grants and rankings). I get that, as I used to feel the same way. During my PhD I thought very much that the quality of the academic work is all that should matter. I guess this comes about because of the way we are trained as academics - we go from school, where the focus is on doing well, getting good grades, through university, undergrad to postgrad. Again, the focus is very much on your achievements as an individual, and the academic merit of your ideas and your writing.  In my experience, it is not until I started my str...

When I started at Newcastle one of the first major roles I undertook was taking over as Director of the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory. This sounds rather grand, but in reality it mostly involves managing room bookings and making sure everyone has all the kit they need for practicals, research and teaching. Part of the job involves looking after a zooarchaeology reference collection, hence the post last month about attending the zooarchaeology  short course at Sheffield . I have also made various wonderful purchasing decisions, vastly expanding our suite of microscopes to include a range of Leica DM750P scopes for teaching, and dedicated scopes for research with even fancier specs including reflected light capabilities, image analysis software etc. The next stage will be to transform the side room, currently used mostly for storage, into a dedicated space for research. With a new lab based PhD and PDRA started in January, and possibly a Fellow later in 2017 (if all goes to plan), i...

For the past three days I've been doing a short course in Zooarchaeology at Sheffield . The Sheffield lab is one of the best places in the UK, and probably Europe, for animal bone research, and I was amazed at the extent of their reference collections. An absolutely fantastic resource. Although I have spent many years working with zooarchaeologists, and have a basic understanding of the subject, I've never worked directly with this material myself. As I am now responsible for the Wolfson Laboratory at Newcastle , and therefore our animal bone reference collection, I figured I should learn a bit more about them! It was very interesting to hear about a lot of research themes that I am interested in from the perspective another specialism. Taphonomy for example is something that I deal with myself a lot in the analysis of environmental samples, and it was very informative to hear how other people approach this topic. Whilst a lot of zooarchaeology focuses on the relationships be...