Castles and Coprolites

BioArCh PhD candidate Harry Robson excavates Flixton Back out in the field, at long last, on a day trip with fellow micromorphologist, Helen Williams (PhD candidate at the University of York). This is a bit of a change for me; normally heading off on field work involves long journeys in hot foreign places, but today I had to go no further than an hour down the road to Flixton, Scarborough. Not such a long journey and fortunately the weather was great. I’m not going to say hot as the last place I went to that was ‘hot’ was 40 ° + ( in the 100 ° s), and I think if it ever got to that temperature in the UK it would literally be breaking the record.  And an added bonus to local fieldwork - a nice cup of Yorkshire tea afterwards with Helen's parents! As I mentioned a few months ago , I will be joining the Star Carr project next year as a part-time microarchaeology specialist, which will involve advising on micromorphology, geochemistry and phytoliths amongst other things....

Fair Star Carr, we weep to see You fade away so soon: As yet the archaeologists, Have not unearthed your boon. Stay, stay Until the field seasons Have run Unto their final year; And having found your secrets, we Will leave you with good cheer. We have five years to study you, Three seasons yet to dig                The dryland and the lake, Find bone points, and antler picks. We’ll try Before the land acidifies, To take Soil samples, pollen cores; So many Mesolithic clues Beside the relict shores.    We started planning the geoarchaeological aspects of the new Star Carr excavations this afternoon. The latest round of research at the site begins this year with Nicky Milner's 5 year ERC project. It looks like it will be quite challenging from a microarchaeology perspective, not least because of the peaty sediments which are notoriously difficult to thin section! But I do like a challenge. My invo...

It's less than two weeks until my visit to UW in Seattle now! I hear it's a great place for coffee, which I'm looking forward to almost as much as the actual research visit. Coffee is a great friend of mine that I met as a graduate student at Reading, and our relationship has gone from strength to strength ever since. Hopefully next week will be a bit less hectic than the week just passed, to give me some time to recover before a very intensive month of seminars and microscope work in Seattle. I've been travelling all over the place giving lectures including an introduction to Geoarchaeology for the MA Medieval Landscape at Reading, to Lipid chemistry for archaeologists for York's BSc Bioarchaeology, followed by a seminar on Microarchaeology and architectural materials in the Near East this past friday for our newly formed micromorphology research group. I appear to have almost lost my voice, but on the plus side I have convinced non-science students that geoarchae...

I am very proud to be associated with not one but two departments which have been awarded this prestigious prize for academic excellence, the University of Reading in 2009 , and now the University of York in 2012. More on the story can be seen on the York newspage . Well done everyone!

I actually like staff meetings, even admin related ones, as it means I get to spend time at the Kings Manor. The main part of the Department of Archaeology at York is located in the town centre at the old Tudor manor house, whereas the laboratories for the BioArCh group where I spend the majority of my time, are located on campus next to the Department of Biology. The place where I have lived for the past year and a half is about a 5 minute walk from the Kings Manor. The photos below show the route I took to work the other day through the Museum Gardens, complete with flock of pigeons, Narnia-esque lamp post, and abbey ruins. When I stopped to take a picture of the pigeons all huddled in the tree, they somehow knew I was focusing on them and all descended from the tree and landed at my feet in a flurry of coos. I felt a bit guilty that I didn’t have any crumbs for them! I think living in the town centre I take for granted just what a pretty place York is – the snow makes everything lo...

I'm having a rest today after 2 hectic days of co-organising the 6th Experimental Archaeology Conference with colleagues at the University of York. Funny actually that I just wrote that, when what I am actually doing is marking student essays on the development of cities and social inequality. But it involves sprawling on the sofa with the laptop on my knee, so is sort of having a rest, compared to the past two days of session chairing. The conference went really well, with only 1 or 2 small last minute hiccups, and led to some useful discussions and ideas for future papers and whatnot. I find myself thinking more and more about subject areas that I always thought I wasn't interested in, or were not relevent to me, as a 'scientist'. In particular the philosophy of science and archaeological theory, and the nature of archaeological data. One paper at the conference also got me thinking about the way that people teach and learn archaeology, and how this then has impact...