Castles and Coprolites

  I’m writing a book! “Archaeological Excrements and the Study of Foodways”, for the CUP Elements series, has been occupying most of my brain for the past few months. The heavy writing is now finished, which means I’ve reached my favourite stage, preparing the figures. In other words, an entirely valid excuse to spend quality time at the microscope, revisiting some old friends in the slide cabinet. This week’s nostalgia trip took me back to 2012, when I’d recently finished my PhD and was working as a research assistant. At the time, I’d started a small pilot study at the brilliant Boncuklu site in Türkiye. The idea was to compare the midden deposits there with those from Çatalhöyük, that were the focus of my PhD. Unfortunately a postdoc never materialised to take this project further, but writing the book has given me the perfect opportunity to look at these slides again properly. They are very different to the Çatalhöyük middens, not only in terms of taphonomy, but in the actual ...

I’m sitting in a playground, on a Sunday afternoon, watching decay happen in real time, like a small-scale experiment in taphonomy. Google tells me playground paint has a lifespan of around ten years. I can’t help thinking about where it goes. Tiny particles released into the surrounding soil, tracked away on shoes, washed into drains by rain. What are they carrying with them? Pigments, binders, trace metals? Potential pollutants moving through the environment, I wonder how far they become dispersed beyond the original structure?  I am thinking about how this would read archaeologically. A surface repeatedly repainted versus one left to crumble. Some structures maintained long past their original design life alongside elements allowed to fail. How far do the tiny particles we see in sediment micromorphology samples represent a local activity and how much comes from dispersal?   

As we come to the end of 2025, my final blog post of the year is a reflection on research outputs. Here are the three academic papers I published this year as part of collaborative projects with fantastic teams of co-authors. The first paper of the year was an overview of the pan‑European TerraSAgE project, published in Geoarchaeology , led by Tim Kinnaird. This comes from our AHRC project  that started in 2019, and had a few unfortunate hiccups due to COVID (totally scuppered our fieldwork schedule). There will be more to come from this project at a later date, but this paper presents our framework for understanding terrace life cycles from construction to abandonment across the Aegean, Croatia, Italy, Spain, and Galicia, showing how these ancient systems inspire sustainable land‑management today. Our micromorphology deep‑dive into Fodongdi Cave, published in Journal of Archaeological Science , was led by Jinxu Wu, whose high-resolution thin-section analysis revealed how tiny...