Castles and Coprolites

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...

This follows on from my previous post , where I reflected on the value of the heritage sector in the UK, and the frustration that we have not been very good at communicating this value more broadly. This followed a UKRI board visit to the north east, where I was asked a question specifically about RICHeS (Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science)  (which readers will know I am closely involved in, as director for NEMCAS , the north east node of the distributed infrastructure). It got me thinking, perhaps more urgently than I have before, about how crucial RICHeS is both as a programme for catalysing research, but as a tool for demonstrating the economic value of the heritage sector, consolidating what has historically been very dispersed, and making the case for continued investment in heritage, and arts and humanities, broadly defined. If the first step is recognising that archaeology and heritage are a significant part of the UK economy, the next question is ...