Castles and Coprolites

What a year. Where to begin? Like everyone, my life has been turned upside down by the Covid19 pandemic. At first it didn't bother me that much if I'm honest. As an introvert who worked from home a fair bit anyways, having to stay at home didn't seem so bad. The most disruptive thing was the closing of the labs, but even then I could at least bring a microscope home to get on with a backlog of prepared slides (guess what, I haven't looked at any). My husband and I decided to share childcare of our two daughters on a daily basis, with me looking after them in the morning, and him looking after them in the afternoon. Again, this worked ok at first. A morning playing with the kids, an afternoon on Zoom meetings and catching up with emails. This soon descended into chaos as the kids inevitably got utterly bored with being in the house, the older one wanting to binge watch Power Rangers (don't ask) and the younger being soley interested in pre-school bright colours repet...

I'm a bit late posting about this as all the buzz was almost two weeks ago, but I'm happy to say that we have recently published one of the major papers from our NERC project at Paisley Caves . The project is almost at an end, and I'm pleased we managed to get everything done on schedule and within budget (including an extension due to my maternity leave halfway through!). What a wonderful 4 years it has been working on this amazing site. I can't believe it's been 3 years since I was blogging about our fieldwork  out in Oregon. So much hard work has gone in since then, especially from our postdoctoral researchers John Blong and Helen Whelton, and I'm really proud of the whole team. In summary, we applied a new lipid biomarker approach to identify the species of coprolites. Previously these had been identified using ancient DNA, but there were concerns regarding possible contamination and movement of DNA in the sediments. There is a lot we still don't know ab...

As promised, a new post that is actually on geoarchaeology. I never used to be into industrial archaeology. Having grown up in the north east, I always thought the buildings were ugly. The skyline from our house was filled with the cranes of Swan Hunters shipyards, and I remember the siren that used to go off to call people to work. My dad would grab his bait box and walk there, down the path into what is now Segedunum Roman Fort. He likes to tell me the story of how the end of the wall was right outside the cabin where he would sit with his mates on a break. This was all just whatever at the time. I prefered nature - beaches, rocks and trees - to being in the urban landscape. After my dad was made redundant when the Shipyards was closing down for good, the industrial landscape became associated with decline, poverty instead of pride. A reminder that we were poor and lived in an ugly place with ugly old buildings. I was so happy to move away from that at age 18 when I went to univers...