Castles and Coprolites

This year has been very productive from a research perspective. We are at the point of the NERC project where all the results are starting to come in , and it has made me remember the excitement of doing research, rather than the headache of applying for grants and all the admin associated with a complex international project. The postdoc team, Dr John Blong and Dr Helen Whelton , are in Copenhagen this week, collecting the final set of samples for the project, currently archived at the University of Copenhagen's Centre for Geogenetics . Up until now we have been working on samples from the archive in Oregon, and samples we collected during our fieldwork. The samples at Copenhagen are some of the most important from Paisley Caves, the ones that provide the earliest occupation dates from the site, that were found to contain human aDNA. By applying lipid biomarker analysis to these samples, we will be able to compare the DNA and lipid results, something I have been keen to do from a...

I am so happy that I've actually managed to get some microscope work done over the past couple of weeks. It feels like forever since I had the time to do any lab work, or spend time looking down the microscope. Even on my research leave, I have been so busy writing papers and grant applications that microscope time has taken a back seat. I am currently working on the 30 or so slides we collected as part of a NERC project at Paisley Caves in Oregon . This week I have been focusing on characterising the different types of faeces that are found in the sediments. There are lots of different types - rat and bat dung , ovicaprid type pellets, and of most interest of course, the potential human coprolites. I say potential, as we can't know for sure if they are human without conducting additional biomolecular analysis , but the pictures below show a likely human candidate. In any case we can say that it is omnivore coprolite, containing both digested bone fragments and plant tissues. T...

Yesterday marked the end of the official first year of the NERC project . The past year has gone by so quickly, and it was reassuring to actually sit down with the research officer who looks after the accounts, and see that actually everything is in place and we're not too far off on the budget, despite a few hiccups and changes to the project timetable. I've learned a great deal about being a PI and the whole process of running a large collaborative project. Mainly that the job of a PI is very much research management rather than actually doing the research. It has been difficult to get used to delegating tasks to team members and resisting the urge to try and do everything myself. I miss being in the lab - but I hope to get back to doing at least a little bit at the end of January next year when I have a semester of research leave. Hopefully this will also mean I have time to do more regular blog updates, with more fun micromorphology images from all the slides that I will be...

I'm in the middle of writing a brief introductory paper about the work we are doing at Paisley Caves, which includes some of the micromorphology results from our pilot study. The slides from this site are complex, and also so fascinating. Complex because the are very heterogeneous and include a huge variety of biogenic material, including lots of fragments of plant tissues, and there is also some weird stuff going on with the chemistry in the cave environment. Here is an example of a small fragment of wood, within a layer of mixed material overlying a layer of microfaunal dung pellets. The layer is between two radiocarbon dates approximately 8180 and 9565 years cal BP. In the picture below I've shown it at a range of magnifications, and images C and D show it in PPL (C) and XPL (D). Modern wood in XPL usually looks a bit fluorescent because cellulose is birefringent. Usually with archaeological material I'm much more accustomed to seeing wood in the form of charcoal! The on...

Many many samples We are coming to the end of the field season for the NERC project at Paisley Caves. Only a few days until I return to Newcastle, and I've been spending the last few days packing up all the samples and sorting out the paper work for exporting them. One box is heading straight to Earthslides for micromorphology slide prep, and the others are going back to Newcastle for microfossil and biomarker work. In the meantime team member John Blong is heading to Eugene to spend a few weeks at the Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History , collecting extra material from the excavation archives. I have discovered that cool boxes are a great way to pack samples; the boxes are very lightweight and also pretty sturdy, and I am hoping the fact there is a lid + obvious top and bottom will mean that they are not shaken about too much on their journey back to the UK. Cool boxes are fairly pricey new back in the UK, but you can get them fairly cheap in the US, and I can gua...

Back from the field now and making sense of all the photos and paperwork. As well as taking samples from Paisley Caves itself, we also spent a day doing a survey of the local vegetation and collecting samples for a botanical reference collection. Part of the project involves analysis of pollen and other plant remains from sediments and coprolites, and whilst there are several available collections and published material on the likely species that we will find, it is always helpful to build a project specific reference collection, and this will be added to the growing library of material based in the Wolfson lab at Newcastle. This will be one of the major tasks undertaken by project research associate John Blong , and he will be collaborating with project affiliate Katelyn McDonough , who analysed material from Paisley for her Masters and is currently working on botanical remains at the nearby Connelly Caves for her PhD. This is the first fieldwork where I have had the chance to put m...

It's the end of the first week in Oregon as part of our NERC project at Paisley Caves. As usual fieldwork fills me full of ideas for blogging, with none of the time or internet access to post them. The weather has been hugely variable here. For the first few days it was below freezing at night time. I was in my tent in a super warm sleeping bag, with fleece jogging bottoms and beanie hat, and I was still not really that warm. Then after the second day the weather switched to baking hot, and by the end of the week we were all in t-shirts and covered in sunscreen. The view of the landscape from the entrance to the Paisley Caves is amazing - a huge expanse of sagebrush desert with the occasional agricultural feature in the distance. Dirt tracks snake across the landscape, heading towards the town of Paisley on the left, and Summer Lake hotsprings on the right. I'm going to miss this view. The day begins at 5.30, waking up in the tent to varying degrees of chill, getting d...

The NERC project officially started on the 1st November. Since then we've held interviews for the first PDRA post, and last week I traveled to Oregon for the first project meeting with partners Dr Dennis Jenkins and Dr Tom Stafford, at the Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History . It felt very surreal, finally having got the grant that we talked about for so long, and to be honest, did not quite expect to get! Not that we all don't think it's an amazing and worthwhile project, but getting funding for archaeological science is pretty difficult, and the success rate for NERC is really low ( 11% for the standard grants, new investigator scheme in 2015 ). I've made this journey many times, as I have family in central Oregon, but I must be getting old or something as the jet lag really kicked in this time. Still, many coffees later we had a productive meeting, going over the schedule for the next three years, planning the first session of fieldwork in the Spring, and g...

If you follow me on twitter you may have seen a series of posts over this year relating to a NERC application I submitted. From writing the thing, >10,000 words (that's a whole undergraduate dissertation!), going through the internal review process, finally submitting it in January. Then anxiously waiting for reviewer feedback, frantically responding to reviewer queries within a very short time frame, then waiting for another couple of months to hear...the amazing news that I was awarded the grant! When the administrative process is complete, I'll write a proper post about the project and what it is we hope to do, but for now I wanted to tell the story of how I ended up working on a project that initially seems far removed from working on Neolithic middens in the Near East, or even Neolithic pottery in Britain. I like this story, as it goes to show how opportunities turn up in strange ways, often when you don't expect them, and that the research process can take you in ...

Paisley Caves became well known a few years ago for it's famous coprolites, or fossil faeces, which were found to contain human DNA, dated between 14,170 and 14,340 cal. BP. Although there have been questions over the identification of these as human (and work is still ongoing), this ancient DNA analysis currently provides some of the earliest evidence for human occupation of North America. The research at Paisley has been key in demonstrating the utility of coprolites as an archaeological ecofact that can contribute to the wider picture of the human past, rather than simply a 'novelty' area of study or one which is purely ecological . But human poop isn't the only kind we find at Paisley Caves, in fact it isn't even the most common, by far! In this month's micrographs we have pictures of the poop that occurs most frequently at the site, bat poop. This stuff is fascinating, and is a huge contributor to the sediment profile of the caves. In the upper left at the...

Today was the first day of the 2013 EAA conference , held this year in Pilsen, Czech Republic. I've been to quite a few of the EAAs now, and they are always great for catching up with colleagues from across Europe and beyond, and this year is no exception. I've probably spend more of the conference today discussing work over coffee than seeing papers! So far I've met colleagues from Bristol, Reading and York as well as some Edinburgh folk. This year, rather than giving a paper, I'm doing something a little different. Together with Julie Boreham from Earthslides, UK , I have put together a photographic exhibition of micromorphology slides from Paisley Caves. Julie did a similar exhibition a few years ago for the WAC 2008 conference in Dublin, which was a great success. The idea is to showcase 'Hidden Worlds' of archaeology under the microscope, and to communicate thin section micromorphology to a non-specialist archaeological audience. The large poster sized pho...

This is an example of where having a background in geosciences can be very useful as an archaeological micromorphologist. Although a lot of the materials that I look at are anthropogenic, there are also many processes occuring that involve natural sediments. In these micrographs you can see some nice examples of water-laid sediment crusts. Water-laid crusts are quite distinctive, and form when an inwash of water carries particles which then settle under gravity according to their size. The coarsest material requires the most energy to stay in suspension, so settles first, and gradually finer and finer particles settle out of the water, creating the banding effect, with the very fine clay particles settling out last. It occurs on a much larger scale in certain river environments wherever there is a change in the energy of the river. This is the same idea that I was talking about that is used to seperate out the clay fraction from sediments during phytolith processing - the coarser ph...

So, I’m back from holidays in sunny Florida and have finally got through the email backlog. My September to do list is getting longer and longer, but it’s not all bad! Just before I went on hols I submitted an application to the University of York Teaching and Learning Development Fund, and it was successful! So one of my new tasks is to set up a microscope teaching laboratory at BioArCh, which will provide state of the art teaching facilities for microscopy, including microfossil analysis, artefact analysis and thin section micromorphology. The funding covers purchase of a new suite of teaching microscopes with image acquisition facilities, as well as reference collections for key areas of teaching. This is great news; we’ve had a number of students interested in working with microscopic analysis and have so far made do with our research microscope and my own personal research kit. The new facility will mean that we can incorporate further microanalysis into teaching, particular...

To most people, recieving a box of excrement in the post would probably be quite a distressing experience, and  a sign that you had aquired a pretty extreme stalker and/or a critic who really disagreed with that paper you published. For me however, such an occassion tends to be a cause of excitement, and has happened  not once but twice so far this year . Today's offering of poop is in the form of thin section micromorphology slides from Paisley Caves, Oregon. I have been waiting on these rather nifty samples for about a year now, due to the slow process firstly of exporting them, then having them turned into thin sections. But it was worth the wait. Paisley Caves is famous for its poop, being the site of the earliest human DNA in North America , recovered from a coprolite. My poop is not quite as exciting, consisting largely of tiny little bat pellets that form layers between (hopefully) anthropogenic features such as ash layers from hearths. Though a first glance suggests t...