Castles and Coprolites

Today was my first day on site at Birdoswald, a Roman fort and English Heritage site on Hadrian's Wall, where Newcastle University and Historic England are conducting a new excavation project that will run for the next few years. It feels like forever since I have been out on an excavation.  (Side note - in fact, this is the second time I've been out 'in the field' this year. The first was a site walkover at Carvoran just down the road from Birdoswald. I somehow have found myself involved in all these amazing sites along Hadrian's Wall...) Today reminded me of all the reasons why I became an archaeologist. The excitement of travelling somewhere new. Funnily, this is actually the closest excavation to home I have ever been involved in, but waiting at the train station and the journey to site had that same feeling of anticipation I have experienced working half way across the world. Watching through the window, clutching a takeaway coffee that provides the familiarit...

Some very exciting news, I'll be overseeing the environmental work for a new 5 year excavation project at Birdoswald Roman Fort , a collaboration between Newcastle University and Historic England, co-directed by Tony Wilmott and Prof. Ian Haynes . Birdoswald is a Roman Fort on Hadrian's Wall, and sits on the longest remaining section of the Wall that is still standing. There's loads of great information on the history of the site on the  English Heritage website here . The excavations will be used as a field school to train Newcastle University archaeology students, as well as being a research project. The environmental work will largely follow the Historic England guidelines which can be found here . I will be overseeing the running of the flotation tank, with a team of postgraduate students and our technicians, and also advising on any additional soil sampling for geochemistry, micromorphology etc as the excavations progress. We are lucky enough to have access to a large...

In my previous post I talked all about the exciting new kit we have purchased as part of an AHRC CapCo grant. The whole process has been quite a steep learning curve for me, and I am incredibly grateful to the research, finance and procurement teams at Newcastle who all helped to make this happen. I thought it might be useful to share some hints and tips here for anyone considering applying for a capital grant, or with any responsibility for building lab facilities. The first point to make, is planning. It was only possible to complete the project in the AHRC's short timeframe (2020  call opened 2 September, closed 13 October ) because we already had a good idea of what kit we wanted and had detailed future plans for lab development. This has largely related to REF planning, but also is an item on our lab agenda that we update fairly frequently. It is really helpful to have some ballpark figures to hand to plan how much you could reasonably include in a grant. A lot of the t...