Castles and Coprolites

You wait a whole year for a blog post, then two come along at once etc. Following the existential musings of the previous post, I figured I'd better post some fun geoarchaeological stuff. I have been working with a number of colleagues on various projects for the past couple of years, that are loosely related, and fall under the general banner of Human-environment interactions in the Hadrian's Wall Landscape. Regular blog readers will remember in 2021 I talked about the new  excavations at Birdoswald . These have been progressing nicely, and we have uncovered all sorts of amazing finds and environmental material. I have also been working with Dr Eline Van Asperen, and Masters student Damian Rudge, looking at long term changes in the environment, and whether these relate to Roman or earlier activities such as lead mining. In 2022 we were awarded a small grant from the Royal Archaeological Institute  to collect some peat cores with the aid of local volunteer groups. Eline a...

Some very exciting news, I'll be overseeing the environmental work for a new 5 year excavation project at Birdoswald Roman Fort , a collaboration between Newcastle University and Historic England, co-directed by Tony Wilmott and Prof. Ian Haynes . Birdoswald is a Roman Fort on Hadrian's Wall, and sits on the longest remaining section of the Wall that is still standing. There's loads of great information on the history of the site on the  English Heritage website here . The excavations will be used as a field school to train Newcastle University archaeology students, as well as being a research project. The environmental work will largely follow the Historic England guidelines which can be found here . I will be overseeing the running of the flotation tank, with a team of postgraduate students and our technicians, and also advising on any additional soil sampling for geochemistry, micromorphology etc as the excavations progress. We are lucky enough to have access to a large...