Castles and Coprolites

Some personal good news amongst the Covid19 chaos - I have a new paper currently in press in Earth Science Reviews  (currently pre-proof so check in at a later date for definitive version with updated figures etc). This is a substantial review my team and I have been working on for a couple of years now, chipping away at it in the background as part of our NERC research project , and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. We posted it as a pre-print a few months ago on EarthArkiv , the first time I've used a pre-print server. I was hoping to engage in an open peer review process, but we didn't get any comments (do pre-prints really get peer reviewed...? A discussion for another blog post). On the plus side we did get 264 downloads before the paper made it through peer review with Earth Science Reviews. One of the points we make (albeit briefly) in this paper is that coprolites should be subject to the same strict protocols for access and analysis that have been propos...

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...

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...

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...

Me looking thrilled to be presenting my poster I just got back at the beginning of the week from the Society for American Archaeology conference, held his year in Vancouver. Although it is 'American' archaeology, the geographic spread of attendees and research topics is very international, and I ended up catching up with friends and colleagues from all over the UK as well as the US. I ended up being incredibly busy as I foolishly agreed to do three different sessions. Many months ago I was asked to participate in two sessions as a discussant, as well as submitting a poster on my NERC project. I assumed this meant a role of leading the questions at the end of the session, but on arrival realized it is almost the equivalent of a keynote, and involved giving an actual 15 minute presentation summarizing the papers and state of the field! Luckily the sessions are both topics on which I am passionate, and I managed to put together two talks that went very well. The first was ...

We are in the process of updating the School website for History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastl e. I've been asked to provide some high resolution photos for various sections, and so have been digitally digging through my image archive. I came across this amsuing photo from 2004 - my first ever visit to Catalhoyuk . It was either during my MSc or just after I finished. So long ago that I still dyed my hair black! I remember this midden - I think it was Unit 1668, and probably isn't there anymore. The first midden I worked on, looking at archived micromorphology slides at the University of Reading, and trying to compare the phytolith data from the same units. Although the Masters project had a lot of limitations (working with archive samples is very difficult when trying to compare microstratigraphic data), the lessons I learned formed the basis of the project I went on to do for my PhD. So I still have a soft spot for this particular midden! These were taken using one of...

I had one of those moments this morning when I realised how odd my career sounds to those outside academia, as I found myself Googling 'Newcastle poo blog' in an attempt to find a blog I came across a few weeks ago, when I posted a fab cartoon called ' A Day in the Life of Poo '. Are there many people out there who talk about poo on a semi-regular basis? Parents of small children perhaps. My own work on poo has been on the fossilised variety, known as coprolites, but I also follow research on modern faecal analysis, particularly biofuel research and waste water analysis, as both are related to my work and interests. My research on the use of animal dung and reeds as fuel in prehistory for example draws heavily on studies of the modern use of such fuels, and how we can use archaeological case studies to inform modern biofuel policy. Likewise, one of the main methods that I use to analyse archaeological materials, faecal biomarker analysis, was developed by environmental ...

A day in the life of poo! So I absolutely need a cartoonist to do a follow of this fab comic from Newcastle Civil Engineering and Geosciences , on showing how useful poo in it's various forms is in archaeology! Such an under-appreciated source of information, ancient poo from both humans and animals has a whole lot to contribute to our understanding of diet, health, environment, and early animal management in the past. And not forgetting that animal dung was (and is) and important fuel use in many societies. Ancient poo (aka coprolites or palaeofaeces ) provides a neat little package of information, containing everything from pollen, seeds, plant tissues and bone fragments to parasite eggs and lipid residues. The fact that it represents a snapshot of a person over just a few days has a huge advantage over more traditional methods of looking at health and diet (such as isotopes from skeletons), which tend to be more time-averaged or 'lifetime' signatures, and can miss the...

I was recently alerted to this interesting new paper (open access!) through Google Scholar citation alerts, which is a very useful service for finding out when your papers are cited by other authors (in this case my 2011 paper on faecal lipid residues at Catalhoyuk ). The authors studied a sequence of lake sediments from Lake Igaliku in SW Greenland, looking at changes in the quantity of DOC and fungal spores. DOC is a bile acid (deoxycholic acid), and is found in both human and ruminant faeces, but at a higher concentration in ruminants. Humans have higher amounts of LC (another bile acid, lithocholic acid). Interestingly no LC was found, suggesting that the DOC comes entirely from herbivores (and that the runoff 'polluting' the lake is largely agricultural, rather than coming from settlement sewage waste). The fungal spores that were found are from coprophilous fungi - i.e. fungi that grow on faeces! The amount of DOC present correlated with the number of fungal spores, wi...

I found out that today is World Toilet Day ! What better chance then to have a think about toilets and the disposal of human waste in the past. Regular readers will know (and the blog title perhaps suggests...) that coprolites, or fossilised faeces, are a regular feature of my work. A big part of World Toilet Day is about education and the problems of sanitation that many people face on a daily basis. The campaign highlights the fact that excrement is a bit of a taboo topic for many people, it's something we don't feel comfortable talking about. It's a 'hidden' activity. Has this always been the case in the past? The answer from the archaeological record is no - from prehistory to the famous public latrines of the Romans , there are many examples of a more open or communal approach to defecation. The study of human waste in archaeology, particularly faecal waste, is however a neglected topic. Coprolites don't really fit neatly into any of the major existing s...

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...

It's been a while since I've been in the lab, but last week I got to spend the entire week working in the NERC LSMSF (Life Sciences Mass Spectrometry Facility) in the Organic Geochemistry Unit at the University of Bristol. I have worked with Bristol for many years now as they have arguably the best set up in the world for archaeological and environmental geochemistry. For this visit I was working mostly on samples from the Ecology of Crusading project , with a few extra coprolite samples thrown in from Catalhoyuk and Durrington Walls (more on those at a later date!). The EoC samples are part of a larger programme of geochemical analysis, designed to look at human impacts on the landscape associated with colonisation in the medieval period. We are looking for evidence of increased faecal inputs (lovely!) associated with clearance of land for pasture, and maybe even human 'sewage' inputs from intensification of activity. Although I have developed the facilities for pot...

I've just been notified of the publication of this great new paper via Google Scholar citations, as it cites my paper on lipid analysis of coprolites . That's not the only reason I'm writing about it mind you - anything dung related gets my attention, and this is one of the first papers to come out of the Ce ntral Zagros Archaeological Project , which I was involved with a number of years ago. The CZAP project aims to understand the origin and process of animal domestication and agriculture in the Central Zagros region of Iran and Iraq, and the team have also conducted ethnographic studies in modern villages in the area, in order to help interpret the archaeology. This paper by Elliot et al reports on a mix of ethnographic studies and scientific analysis of modern dung and plants. The authors look at the dung spherulites in modern samples of sheep, goat and cows - those little spherical particles that form in the guts of animals . Despite being used frequently to support t...

There's an exciting paper out today in PNAS on Aşıklı Höyük , an early sedentary pre-pottery Neolithic site in central Anatolia, occupied a millennia earlier than that site oft discussed on this blog, Çatalhöyük . This paper by Stiner et al. is a great example of research that brings together work from different archaeological specialists to produce a coherent story, supported by multiple lines of evidence. The argument is based around the zooarchaeological analysis of animal remains, which demonstrates a shift over the occupation of the site from a broad spectrum of wild species, to a dominance of sheep by 8200 cal BC. However it is the geoarchaeological analysis that arguably provides direct evidence of deliberate animal management, and as a micromorphologist with a special interest in all things coprolite and dung related , I am very happy to see that this technique is one of the highlights of the paper! (Phytoliths also get a mention!). The researchers identify accumulation...

What a treat for you this month, another set of micrographs and it's only the end of the first week of the month! Actually, I am posting this because I need a bit of help - here we have an image of dung deposits in plane (PPL) and cross polarised light (XPL). You can see in the upper image, the layered appearance associated with ruminant dung, but we also have a lot of black 'speckling'. This appears to be concentrated in bands throughout the deposit. When we look at the deposit under XPL it turns out that these speckles are 'stains' on the dung spherulites! The only thing I have seen like this before was called microbial/fungal or manganese staining, but I can't find the reference (or it may have been something that was mentioned to me in passing?). Anyone got any insights/references? It's probably not vital to the interpretation but it could help understand the post-depositional processes going on here, and it is quite fascinating in itself (well, maybe ju...

The long awaited CZAP volume is out at the end of this month, published by Oxbow . This is the first project monograph from the Central Zagros Archaeological Project (CZAP) , and includes 2 (and a half) chapters co-authored by myself, on the biomolecular analysis of coprolites (oh that old chestnut!) and phytolith analysis. Dr Wendy Matthews coordinated the micromorphology analysis and directed sampling, and in the monograph she provides an excellent integration of micromorphology, phytolith and geochemical analysis to address questions about resource use and animal management at this early pre pottery Neolithic site. I also did the chapter on molluscs - though I am in no way an expert on this, I was the most qualified person on the 2008 excavation team (having worked on a shell midden as an undergrad!), and as we unexpectedly ended up with an incredibly large volume of molluscs from the excavation, a brief preliminary report was needed (hence half a chapter - would make a great ...

I just read an interesting blog post by Professor Stephanie Moser at the University of Southampton, commenting on the recent Guardian art blog by Jonathan Jones , where he suggest that archaeologists should emphasise the 'thrilling' and 'beautiful' attributes of the subject to popularise their research. Professor Moser's discusses the important issue of balancing scientific rigour with providing cultural enlightenment. I wholeheartedly agree that we should promote our research beyond academia, but as Moser also concludes, I am not sure about focusing on the intrinsic beauty of objects to do so. Objects certainly can be beautiful, and I appreciate them as much as anyone, but without context that's all they are, beautiful, but pointless. It is the analysis and interpretation of objects (conducted with scientific rigour) that gives them meaning. Even if that is just to marvel at the technological skill that went into creating the object - even the most simple of st...

Many boxes of medieval stratigraphy I was back at the University of Reading a few days ago to have a look through all the samples that have been collected for the Ecology of Crusading project.   Four cardboard boxes and a tray of miscellaneous samples later, I finally got them all unpacked and ready for the drying oven. It appears at least half the samples have the note ‘manure layer’ attached, so nothing new there. In fact, that'll be the third time this year I've recieved parcels of such material. I should start telling people I am interested in highland single malt whisky as well as coprolite analysis, maybe I’d start getting that in the post regularly too. Anyway. Block of medieval manure  The majority of these samples were collected from excavations of medieval deposits in the centre of Riga (Latvia). I am told that these are the first micromorphology samples ever collected from a commercial excavation in Latvia, by students who took part in the C ē s...

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...