Castles and Coprolites

Stonehenge is in the news again. This time, because the plans to deal with the traffic situation have finally gone ahead, and it has been decided that the problem will be solved by digging a tunnel and re-routing the problematic road away from the monument. This is a plan that has been considered and debated for many years now, and in fact one of my most read blog posts was a reflection, back in 2014, in response to the tunnel plan about what we mean by the 'landscape of Stonehenge' . My thought is that there is no such thing as a pristine landscape, and the area has so much more history than just the Neolithic. But I am very sympathetic to the traffic issues, and realise that there are multiple considerations when it comes to heritage management.  For clarity, I am not strongly for or against the tunnel. Dr Tess Machling has posted some very insightful threads on this , and I think my feeling is generally in line with hers. I don't believe the tunnel to be the best solutio...

The beginning of the semester at Newcastle is just flying by. So many exciting opportunities for the future - but right now a little something from the past. Back in 2010 I started a postdoctoral position with the BioArCh group at the University of York, investigating food residues in pottery from Durrington Walls, thought to be the settlement that housed the builders of Stonehenge. I've blogged about the progress of the project on a number of occasions , and wrote about it for the Day of Archaeology back in 2012. This week the academic paper from all that hard work was  published in Antiquity journal, along with a university press release , and it's very satisfying to see the final results in print. Being related to Stonehenge, I suspected it may be of general interest, and I was quite excited to see whether the media would run the story. I spent yesterday evening watching with a combination of awe and horror at how this process unfolds - a carefully worded story of science...

Rolling hills and jagged peaks, bubbling brooks and flowing creeks, Vast swathes of trees turn green to gold, with hues that shift in ebbs and flows, Ten thousand bricks in reds and browns, transforming clays from cliffs to towns; And here between the sea and land, the speckled straw expanse of sand, Gleaming towers, slate grey tiles and tarmac trails extend for miles, Twinkling stars and harbour lights, to sodium glare transforming nights, Shades and dancing shadows bright, creating shifting city sights; And there beyond the winding road, stand stones with tales from long ago, What tales perhaps we’ll never know, symbolic meanings come and go, In landscape then and now align, a layered view of place and time.

Stonehenge c. 1885. Wikipedia. 10th battalion CEF marching past Stonehenge1914–15 Wikipedia It was announced earlier today that the A303 road which currently runs past Stonehenge will be re-routed through a tunnel, to remove it from view of the monument. This follows the closing of the A344 earlier last year. Although this is being done for the benefit of visitors who apparently complain about the road, I myself have mixed feelings about it. Which is odd, as I am the sort of person who generally prefers landscapes of trees and 'nature' to one of city skylines and roads. I guess the major thing that bothers me is the definition of a landscape as somehow belonging to Stonehenge. I am assuming we are trying to revert to what the landscape may have been like at the time Stonehenge was in use, by Neolithic people.  A303 road in 1930 from Stonehenge: a history in photographs Even if we could provide a truly accurate picture of what the landscape was like at this time,...

English Heritage have just published a time line showing Stonehenge in a global context , and where it fits in with other major archaeological sites and monuments across the world, and also an interactive map showing what was going on in the rest of the world at the same time that Stonehenge was being built . These are the end products that came out of a report that I was commissioned to produce a couple of years ago on the world in 2500 BC, as part of the new Stonehenge visitor centre that launched earlier this year. The way archaeology is often taught, we tend think of sites in an isolated way, or simply in a regional landscape, rather than thinking of what the world as a whole was like, especially in early prehistory. Stonehenge is such an iconic monument in itself, that it is easy to forget that is was part of something bigger. The English Heritage time line is a great way to visualise world archaeology, and to demonstrate which sites were contemporary with each other. I...

What do dinosaurs and archaeology have in common? Nothing, surely! the archaeologist may say with a knowing smile. There is a bit of a running joke amongst archaeologists that one of the first questions people ask is do you dig up dinosaurs? And the response being well no, you're thinking of palaeontology. Both disciplines are associated with trowel usage, and summers of field work digging stuff up. There may even be some overlap in terms of questions asked - the nature of long term environmental and ecological change, especially the further back in time we go to the earliest origins of hominids. In general however, archaeology is focused on the study of material remains of human societies (largely anatomically modern humans), whilst palaeontology focuses on all other life forms prior to the beginning of the Holocene. And not just dinosaurs. There is another area where these two research areas overlap, and that is the way in which discoveries in these disciplines make it from the...

Happy new year from Castles and Coprolites! The first news item of 2014 is a write-up by Michael Balter about the latest research on Stonehenge, featuring snippets about my work on pottery residues as part of the Feeding Stonehenge project , as well as summaries of work by the faunal team and other specialists. There's also a brief mention of our unpublished pilot study on pottery residues at the Ness of Brodgar, which we carried out as a comparison whilst working on the Durrington Walls assemblage. If you'd like to read it and don't have access to Science online, drop me an email and I can send you a pdf. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6166/18

My postdoc work on the pottery residues for the Feeding Stonehenge project was featured on the Channel 4 documentary last night Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons. The organic residues PI, Dr Oliver Craig did a great job of explaining the methods we have been using, with a few hints at our results - full details won't be available until we publish the research towards the end of the year (and complete our statistical analysis to confirm our interpretations!). The work is also featured as one of this week's main news stories on the University of York website here and the Department of Archaeology news page here . http://www.channel4.com/programmes/secrets-of-the-stonehenge-skeletons/4od As Ol explains, this is one of the largest studies of pottery residues from a single site (over 300 individual pots were analysed), and by designing a sampling strategy with GIS and other specialists, we have been able to investigate spatial differences in pottery use across the site, be...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post as part of the Day of Archaeology which aims to give people an insight into the variety of work that archaeoklogists around the world do. There are some really fascinating stories on there, and it was great to see a few posts from fellow Çatalhöyük types ( faunal team and human remains team ) on what they are up to this year. This is the first season in a long time that I won't be heading out this summer. We are just too busy finishing off all the lab work for Feeding Stonehenge. My post outlined a typical day in the bioarchaeology lab at the University of York, featuring more of those poetry inspiring pot sherds from Durrington Walls. This is just a little follow on to explain what happened next.... So, we got to the point of putting the extracted samples on the GC/MS which works something like this: Step 4 actually involves a lot of manual checking of the data to make sure what the computer thinks the lipids are is correct - it c...

I wandered lonely in the lab, Amongst the tubes, clearing the spills When all at once I saw a bag Of broken sherds amongst the drills Beside the bench, beneath the shelves I guess they won’t extract themselves.           Continuous as the gas that flows, And dries the samples in their vials, Wherefore these sherds appear who knows? It’s like a never-ending trial: Ten thousand Grooved Ware at a glance, Am I caught in a bad romance? From postholes, pits and avenue From middens, house floors, slots of beams, There’re always more postsherds to do: Grit tempered vessels haunt my dreams. I gazed - and gazed - with little thought What wealth the sherds to me had brought For now, whilst at the bench I stand, Clad in white coat, with pensive stare, It all makes sense, I understand! I like you lots, most Grooved of Ware And now my heart with pleasure fills The sherds my friends, my secret thrills. ...

To continue the alliterative theme of the blog, this sums up nicely in 3 words my sampling visit to the Salisbury and Wiltshire Museum yesterday. The museum houses the collection of pottery from the 1967 excavations at Durrington Walls by Wainwright, which we will be using for comparison with the pottery being analysed from the Stonehenge Riverside Project . I was pleasantly suprised to see how pretty the city is - a little bit like York with random medieval buildings and bits of medieval wall dotted around the centre, and also an impressive cathedral. Maybe not quite as pretty as York Minster, but not too bad :) The cathedral is right next the the museum, though alas I didn't get a chance to look around as I had a rather large box of pottery to carry around by that point. The museum itself was rather exciting. The collections of archive material are located in a very chilly old store room complete with strangely labelled Victorian draws containing Antiquarian curiosities. It wa...

Lab day today, finishing off the last batch (for now) of pottery samples from Durrington Walls . Bit of background - my main research project at the moment is to investigate patterns of food consumption at Durrington Walls, the Neolithic settlement associated with Stonehenge. This involves selecting pottery from different parts of the site, extracting food remains, and seeing if there are differences across the site. Fatty food residues survive suprisingly well in prehistoric pottery (well, some of it, depending on the preservation conditions and other factors). They can be extracted quite easily in the lab by grinding up a small portion of the pottery and shaking it with solvent. The fatty residues dissolve into the solvent, and can then be identified by injecting the solvent into a GC/MS. In basic terms, the GC/MS seperates out all of the different parts of the food residue so we can identify the different components, and the result is something like this. Each of the peaks is a diff...