Castles and Coprolites

This post is many years in the making! Back in 2018 I was on an excavation at a site called Cronk Guckley on the Isle of Man with my colleague Prof. Chris Fowler, a brilliant theorist and Neolithic specialist, who is co-director of the Round Mounds project. This is a great project with some really exceptional finds, including this beautiful jet bead necklace. The excavation finished in 2022 and we are now completing all the post-excavation analysis. The project is investigating the nature and timing of Bronze Age ‘round mound’ construction and how funerary practices evolved, on the Isle of Man and surrounding islands. These structure are large earthern monuments that were constructed over the top of a burial. The jet necklace is an exciting piece of evidence, not just because of it's beauty, but because it gives us insights into the people - the jet has been sourced to Whitby, so is great evidence for connections between the Isle of Man and mainland Britain in the Bronze Age, an...

I made my first ever video this week. It is an attempt to visualise a concept that can be difficult to express - the relationship between micro (and sub-micro) stratigraphy that we can see under the microscope, to the macroscale deposits that most (non-micromorphologists) are familiar with in the field. It is hard to imagine something you cannot see, and as an archaeologist who has the privilege of being able to examine the 'invisible' archaeological record, I want to be able to show others these insights, which can have a significant impact on the process of interpretation. It is this thought that is the focus of a short article that has just been published on Then Dig , a peer reviewed blog hosted at Berkeley. The thoughts that I express there are a short glimpse into the theoretical (and practical) problems that I ponder frequently, and on which I hope to write something more extensive in the future. To come back to the video, I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I m...