Trent Environmental Archaeology Lab
1600 West Bank Drive K9L 0G2 Peterborough, ON, Canada

New paper out today in American Antiquity from Eric Guiry examining the possible impacts of Late Woodland agriculture on wild animal populations and their interactions with human hunters. https://www.cambridge.org//94030CB1132A76EC9A30D5B79A22478D

Curious about stable isotope mixing models in archaeology? Check out this paper out today by Christina Cheung and Paul Szpak. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-020-09492-5

Our lab group was very well represented at the Canadian Association for Physical Anthropology's virtual meeting. We had five talks or posters by six current members or former members. Also, the organizers of the conference did a great job of pulling off this virtual format.

https://www.sciencedirect.com//a/abs/pii/S2352409X16306824 Not a new article, but a blast from the past. This paper (from Paul Szpak, Jessica Metcalfe, and Rebecca Macdonald) is now the most cited paper ever published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (not bad for a journal that has published over 2,000 papers!).

We were very happy to be joined by Dr. Petra Vaiglova for our lab meeting this morning who talked about her recent research that used isotopic analyses to better understand why the Byzantine Empire withdrew from the Negev Desert.

Very proud of the TEAL Class of 2020 master's students, all of whom defended their fantastic theses on time: Corrie Hyland, Jennifer Routledge, and Michael Scott. This is a truly great crop of emerging scholars and we wish them great success.

New research from our lab on sulfur isotopes in Arctic marine mammals. https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v653/p205-216/

Congratulations to Michael Scott, who successfully defended his M.A. thesis this morning! The title of his thesis was Chew the Fat: An Examination of the Preservation of Fatty Acids in Archaeological Bone. Michael will be pursuing a PhD in archaeological science at the University of Oxford this fall and we wish him the best of luck.

We were very lucky to be joined by Dr. Christina Cheung (Aix-Marseille Université) for our lab meeting today. Dr. Cheung discussed her isotopic work on sacrificial victims from Yinxu, a very famous Bronze Age site in China. https://www.sciencedirect.com//arti/pii/S0278416517300041

Congratulations to Jennifer Routledge, who successfully defended her M.A. thesis this week! The title of her thesis was Ostrich Eggshell from the Far Eastern Steppe: Stable Isotopic Exploration of Range, Commodification, and Extirpation. Jen will be pursuing a PhD in environmental science at the Trent University this fall and remaining a member of the TEAL team.

Congratulations to Corrie Hyland, who successfully defended her M.A. thesis this morning! Corrie will be moving on to pursue a PhD in archaeological science at the University of Oxford this fall.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-020-01166-3 A new paper about a very cool dog from Russia by Robert Losey, also including TEAL members Eric Guiry and Paul Szpak.

Masked MA student Corrie Hyland displaying her beautifully packed reduction column.

We are finally back to generating some data! It's been too long!

Diet Switch Update #6 The diet switching has ended, but the keratinous sample collection continues. I was going to say that I've embraced my inner Howard Hughes with this sample collection but apparently he cut his hair and nails only once per year, rather than systematically every 3 and 7 days. Once we get through some higher priority research samples, we can start to see some data from this little experiment.

In yesterday's lab meeting we gonged for Banting postdoctoral fellow Dr. Eric Guiry's last official meeting with our group. As of July 1, he will be starting his new position as a Lecturer in Biomolecular Archaeology at the University of Leicester .

Looking for a postdoctoral fellowship? Anybody following our page must have a pretty good idea of the kind of research that we do in our lab. If you know any recently minted PhDs that might be interested in this kind of research, please call their attention to the Banting postdoctoral fellows program. These are the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships in Canada and can be held by both Canadian citizens and international candidates. At Trent there is an institutional scre...ening for potential candidates prior to a nomination being put forward at the national level. More information can be found in the links below. For information about the possibility of applying for one of these fellowships with our research group, please contact Paul Szpak. https://banting.fellowships-bourses.gc.ca//home-accueil.ht https://www.trentu.ca//undergraduate-graduate-and-postdoct

New paper out from TEAL lab's Banting postdoctoral fellow Dr. Eric Guiry and Paul Szpak on sulfur isotopes and the seaweed eating sheep from North Ronaldsay in the Orkney Islands. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rcm.8868

For a little fun we've been ending lab meetings with some Jackbox Party games. So far we liked murder mystery trivia the best and the 'find the alien' game the least.

Diet Switch Update #6 The nearly vegan phase ended almost two weeks ago and now I am about ten days into a vegetarian phase. I suspect this will be isotopically identical to the terrestrial meat-heavy phase because all of the animal protein in this vegetarian phase is ultimately derived from cattle, which has relatively high 15N values. In the terrestrial meat-heavy phase, much of the animal protein was derived from chicken, which has low 15N values. Looking forward to generating these isotopic data and the first step towards that will be TEAL's limited reopening this coming Monday!