Castles and Coprolites

Registrations for DIG2017 closed over the weekend so I've been collating all the information for preparing information packs and confirming catering etc. I've been playing around with the delegate information and thought I would share some fun figures. All the data is based on the registration details provided by the delegates, with designation of male or female from delegate name. The first figure shows the geographic distribution of delegates (residence rather than nationality). We have around 80 people attending from 20 different countries, making DIG2017 truly international! The highest number attending are from the UK, which makes sense given the location this year, but we also have a good number from north america, and a wide spread from across Europe. Our furthest afield is coming from Australia! I'm happy to see that we have an almost even split of early career researches/students to established researchers, and a good gender balance of 43% female 31% male. It...

We've spent the past couple of days doing burning experiments in the reconstructed mudbrick house at Catalhoyuk, as part of our Wellcome Trust project. The aim of the experiments is to collect some pilot data relating to smoke emissions when ovens and hearths are in use. We don't have time in the pilot study to conduct a detailed series of controlled experiments - there are a lot of different variables that could be adjusted to test different scenarios - but we do hope to get some basic comparisons of different fuel types and how emissions change over a few hours of burning. I think the most useful part of doing this pilot work has been the practical side of things, the experience of having to find the materials for fuel, finding out how much fuel works best (and at what point there's too much fuel and you get smoked out of the house), observing how different people react differently to smoke levels. We tried using animal dung but it smouldered really badly, which we reali...

After yesterday's musings I figured I should post about some of the fun archaeological stuff I've been up to at Catalhoyuk this week. The reason we are here this year (we being myself and project postdoc Helen Mackay ), is that we were lucky enough to be awarded a grant from the Wellcome Trust. We are collecting archive samples to export for analysis, doing some burning experiments in the reconstructed mudbrick house, and general networking and scouting for collaborators for when we (hopefully!) do the full sale research project. The focus of the Wellcome project is to investigate the potential relationships between 'biofuel' use and respiratory health in the archaeological record. The materials that people used for fuel in the Neolithic (wood, dung, reeds etc) are being promoted today as sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, however there has been a lot of research showing that these fuels are actually just as bad for respiratory health as fossil fuels. Biomass ...