Castles and Coprolites

Let’s start with the numbers. According to Historic England’s latest Heritage Counts analysis , the heritage sector contributed £44.9 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) to the UK economy in 2022, supporting over 523,000 jobs. Of this, £15.3 billion is direct economic output, with the remainder generated through supply chains and wider spending across the economy. For every £1 directly generated by heritage, an additional £1.93 is created elsewhere in the economy. This places heritage firmly within the UK’s core economic activity, deeply embedded in construction, planning, tourism, and regional development. And this is only part of the picture - across the wider cultural and creative economy, UK sectors generated over £120 billion in GVA annually , representing around 5% of the UK GDP. Even these figures are likely conservative. Government commissioned research acknowledges that standard statistical definitions struggle to capture the full extent of heritage activity, meaning its to...

This week we had the annual research away day for the Department of Archaeology at Durham . It was the first such event I have been to since joining the department just over a year ago, and it was great to see the range of brilliant work going on across the breadth of the discipline. I presented a short provocation on what the future of archaeology might look like in an era increasingly shaped by biomolecular data.  We are unquestionably living through what has been termed a 'biomolecular turn' in archaeology. Advances in ancient DNA, proteomics, lipids and isotopic analysis have opened up extraordinary possibilities for reconstructing past lives, movements, diets and relationships. These methods have transformed the kinds of questions we can ask, and in many cases, the kinds of answers we can plausibly give. But they also raise important challenges. As with DNA evidence in forensic science, biomolecular data is powerful, but it does not speak for itself. It must be interpreted...

Last month I spent a day at the Daresbury laboratory for a RICHeS data day, to think about how we will manage data for our facilities and make it accessible. This is a daunting task, but a challenge I am excited to tackle, working together with the Heritage Science Data Service team. One of the highlights of the day was touring the Visual Computing Labs. Seeing full laser scans and digital models of entire cities (in this case Liverpool) was genuinely awe inspiring. These aren’t just impressive visualisations, but complex data‑rich representations that can be interrogated. In archaeology, where we constantly move between scales, from microscopic residues to landscapes and infrastructures, the potentials are endless. What might we learn and better understand if we can apply these technologies to ancient cities? Another highlight was seeing virtual museums integrated with a treadmill system. The user sees a virtual environment and feels as if they are moving through it. It felt like an...