Castles and Coprolites

A couple of months ago, I was invited to become a Fellow of the Geological Society of London . It was a nice moment of recognition, and one I was very happy to accept. At the same time, I’m also aware that this is not entirely unusual - learned societies are, understandably, looking to broaden their memberships, and a Professor of Geoarchaeology is an obvious easy win. Still, there is something genuinely meaningful about being welcomed into an organisation with such a long and influential history. The Geological Society of London, founded in 1807, is the oldest geological society in the world, and one that has played a central role in shaping how we understand the Earth. It has been home to many of the figures whose work underpins not just geology, but also archaeology, palaeoecology, and environmental science more broadly. To be part of that lineage, however loosely, feels significant. I am especially happy as the Society actually is closely linked to the history of my own research. C...

For a discipline fundamentally concerned with people, archaeology has long relied on a surprisingly narrow definition of what constitutes the human body in the past. Human remains, in most archaeological and heritage contexts, effectively mean bones. Occasionally teeth and cremated material. But much of what bodies actually produce, shed, and leave behind falls outside these dominant categories and, as a result, outside many of our analytical priorities and ethical frameworks. My recent paper in World Archaeology, More than bones: rethinking ethics and epistemologies of bodily exuviae in archaeology , reflects on this imbalance. It brings together a range of what can be termed bodily exuviae, coprolites, dental calculus, material traces of bodily processes, and suggests that we take them seriously, both analytically and ethically. It has been encouraging to see that the paper is already among the journal’s most-read articles over the past 12 months, which hopefully indicates that peopl...

I attended a fascinating lunchtime seminar this week on the potentials for archaeology and AI, which brought together perspectives from across different departments at Durham University . One of the talks was by Prof Jelena Ninic , a civil engineer whose work focuses on structural assessment and maintenance of infrastructure, particularly ageing transport networks such as railways and bridges. Her presentation discussed how heritage is not something separate from modern engineering but fundamentally embedded within it. Much of the infrastructure we rely on every day is in fact, historic. Across the UK and elsewhere, roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, often have origins in the nineteenth century, if not earlier. These are complex, evolving systems that have been repaired, adapted, and extended over decades or centuries. As such, they present a series of challenges that are as much archaeological as they are engineering in nature.  A key challenge is maintaining historic infrastructu...