Autumn Update

It's been a little while since I last posted, so what have I been up to?

In short, I have had my head down on several new projects. My Melting Pot project is now well into its first year, so I have been running around collecting samples from sites in York, Lincoln, Newark, and London (among others). There are still a few more to collect, but much of the next stage of process now takes place in the lab: analysing sherds under the microscope in the search for charred plant remains, drilling samples to extract absorbed lipid residues, and then processing and analysing those drilled samples. Results are just starting to emerge, so more on that anon. I'll be talking at events in York and Newcastle in December, and hopefully we'll have some preliminary results for you then.

I have also been setting up a new pilot project, entitled Cultures in Communication in the Long Viking Age, for which we were lucky enough to be granted some research priming money from the University of York. The basic idea is to search for evidence of travel and long-distance contact around the North Sea area: ie not just Britain and Scandinavia, but also Frankia and Frisia. Our dataset is metal-detected data from England (PAS),Denmark (DIME), and MEDEA, the new system in Flanders,and in due course we also hope to draw on data from the incipient Portable Antiquities Netherlands project. I'm excited about this new research. It's being undertaken in partnership with Prof Dries Tys (Co-I, Vrije University, Brussels), but much of the work is being undertaken by a postdoc, my old research student, Dr Alison Leonard. Alison is in Brussels this week, meeting with Dries, Pieterjan Deckers of MEDEA, and a number of Danish and Dutch colleagues too.

Meanwhile. I am touring Scandinavia this week, looking for new partnerships for my own research, that of colleagues in my department, and to arrange student exchange programmes between our universities. We're talking a lot about digital and artistic creativity: It's a lot of fun.

Finally, I have just taken on a new student -Mariana Munoz Rodriguez - to work on my SAAGA project on combs. This EU-funded project should allow us to apply new technologies to the corpus of combs, and address some really big questions. Very exciting, and more to come on this.

I've also been working with the Jorvik Viking Centre as they prepare for the launch of Jorvik 4. There have been some great discussions about ideas for new content, as well as the opportunity to produce text for new exhibition labels, boards, and guide boards, and a little bit of press work, as well as collaborating on some small research and outreach projects relating to elements of Jorvik's artefact collections. It's all very exciting; I think you're going to love the new centre when it opens.

So, I've not been sitting around. Just too busy to blog...