Castles and Coprolites

Here is a nice series of micrographs from a little experiment I did many years ago, back when I was a research assistant at the University of Reading, shortly after finishing my PhD. Professor John Allen had collected a clay sample associated with the Roman town of Silchester, and conducted a series of firing sessions in a kiln, each in increments of 100 °C , to provide a collection of reference slides for fired clays in thin section. As I had been working on infra red spectroscopy at the time, I used the same fired samples to produce a series of reference FT-IR spectra to compare with the micrographs. We presented this as a poster at the 5th Experimental Archaeology conference in Reading 2011, though I never really took the work further, as I became more interested in developing the use of organic geochemical techniques rather than inorganic. FT-IR is a great technique for certain materials, but archaeological samples tend to be so mixed and hetergeneous it can be hard to get defini...

I will sort them into subject areas at some point Not too much to report from February. There are lots of things in progress, but I've spent a lot of time getting the facilities set up at Edinburgh, with relatively little time spent on new research. Hopefully now that most of the new lab kit has been ordered I can get going with all of the projects that have been put on hold during the moving process. Speaking of moving, having been based at three different universities over the past few years, my belongings have become somewhat spread out across the country, and I thought now would be the time to try and consolidate everything - mostly books! I had a parcel arrive from the University of Reading a few days ago, containing a whole load of books that I forgot to take when I moved to York in 2010 (I say forgot, most likely I didn't have the energy to pack up another two shelves of books from the office after clearing out everything at home). Mostly books on analytic...