Castles and Coprolites

Writing this post as quickly as possible to make sure I don't have a month with NO POSTS! Since my merry xmas post  in December, I took a break from anything work related over the holidays, then as soon as the new year happened, I went to Belize for 2 weeks , where I had zero email or internet access. That was quite nice in some ways, and it was especially enlightening to see how long my iPhone battery lasts when it is not connected to anything ( a whole week!). The last few days of the trip we were staying at a rather fancy resort , which of course had wifi, and I spent much of that time going through a huge email backlog, desperately deleting all the 'not important' ones, to try and narrow the list of things that requires a response to something manageable. I have so many things to blog about in relation to my experience in Belize, everything from plant taxonomy to fieldwork and family, to Mayan archaeology and the similarities and differences between different subjects...

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...