Castles and Coprolites

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...