Castles and Coprolites

Go team! There was liberal use of the poop emoji. The blog has been quiet this year, but there is lots to report. As well as the announcement of the Earthslides relocation to Newcastle , our NERC project is now a few months into its second year , and we are beginning to see results from all the hard work that the lab team have been doing. Back in April project research associates Dr John Blong and Dr Helen Whelton gave presentations on the palaeoecological analyses and faecal lipid residue work respectively, at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Washington DC. The papers were part of a session we organised on Coprolite Research: Archaeological and Palaeoenvironmental Potentials. Despite being amusingly puntastic, the session really highlighted how coprolites are an extremely important archive of information, despite the fact they are often dismissed in archaeological analyses. I was also very proud to see geoarchaeology PhD student Alicia Sawyer give a great pr...

It's been too long since I've looked at any new thin section samples, but today I had the chance to look at some new stuff from Catalhoyuk . Here are some lovely mixed fuel deposits from an external area, showing A. wood charcoal (Quercus?), with microcharcoal and phytoliths from grasses and sedges. B. is a close up of the ash to try and show some of the phytoliths but it is hard to get a good photo in focus even though the slide is only 30 microns thick. Probably redeposited given the random orientation of the phytoliths.