 Yn oedd yma eich hollu o'r bobl yw eich hollu, a'r hollu o'r geolgeoliadoes. Fe'i oedlau'rhollu o'r myhr o rhan o'r hollu i'w rhan o'r hynny'n myllyn. Fe'n rhoi'r hollu o'r hollu yma i'n brofiadau o'r bydd, ac y pŵr o'r hollu o'r hollu o'r hollu o'r hollu. As Alex mentioned earlier, I have a project that uses geo-archological data to inform and drive heritage management research strategies across Europe on medieval castle sites. The project is called All Along Watchtowers, balancing heritage protection development and scientific research on very dark European castles, all along the watchtowers from Schult. The project came about by going to various micromorphology workshops, these are practical workshops, and realising that quite a few of us had samples from a few castle sites. This isn't very common in the world of geo-archaeology, finding other people who are working on castles, and actually the excavation and scientific research on the buried archaeology at castles can often be overlooked in favour of examining standing remains. We are using or applying soil micromorphology to understand the buried archaeology, as this technique helps you to understand the activities that take place at high resolution, and then you can link the castle and the activities to the exploitation of the wider hinterland. The project is reviewing the state of archaeological remains across Europe. We have quite a good coverage of castle sites where we have soil micromorphological data from. Britain, Scotland, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Spain and the Netherlands. The sites, because of the wide geographical spread, represent a diverse range of cultural and environmental contexts. We want to use the scientific data to inform the heritage management strategies. I will say a bit more about how we can do this in a minute, but what I also want to do is present the micromorphological evidence for activities such as crop processing, animal management, evidence of building materials. Different phases about the development and abandonment of the monuments, and then these aspects can be considered in the context of the wider landscape. So, just to show very quickly the spread of the castles that we have across Europe, so their colours around the boxes correspond with the castles of the map. So, the castles that I'm working on mainly arise from working on the ecology of crusading projects in the Baltic and also in the project that Guillermo has just presented. Castles in France, Quentown spoke about earlier, and some of the data from Guillermo will be useful in this presentation today now. I've just come back from Scotland where I've been out in Islay in the wild, working on a castle there. So, a very different cultural context to the ones in the Baltic and Melina, more clans and whisky, than wine and conquest. We have a case study from the Netherlands as well, and two case studies from Italy. So, soil microbiology is a geoarcheological technique, and we're using it to also identify potential threats to the buried archaeology. These threats can come from activities such as restoration and conservation work, where you have remodelling of areas of the standing remains. Once you start uncovering the buried archaeology, that affects its preservation, particularly if the material below is waterlogged. Excavation itself is also a threat to the buried archaeology, so we want to make the case that when it is uncovered, that then using a sort of high resolution approach to examine it is very beneficial. Both in terms of presenting the history of the castle and linking it to its wider hinterland. Castles can also be used as hotels. They make nice hotels, people want to say in them, but this is obviously a threat to the archaeological evidence. I've put a couple of things down here. Particularly in the UK and the Netherlands, there's been programmes of in situ monitoring and preservation. It's not something I'm going to sort of propose here. These projects can be very sort of time consuming, costs a lot of resources. Instead, I'm going to explain how soil microbiology can help to inform us about chemical weathering, materials and sediments, decay processes, particularly of organic remains, and biotubation, so the reworking of archaeological stratigraphy. So, soil microbiology is a technique where you take a block of soil from an archaeological site, and you want to keep this intact. It is then impregnated with resin, and I do this under vacuum. It then forms a solid block, which we cut and grind and mount onto a slide down to a thickness of 30 microns, and it allows us a high resolution, multi-scaler analysis of the archaeological stratigraphy. So, you're effectively taking part of the site, as it was, back to the lab and looking at down the microscope. I look at the intersections at a range of amplifications from times 40 to times 630. So, it helps you to understand how your stratigraphy has formed, where your materials came from, your sort of anthropogenic inclusions, but also the sediment input, and how this transformed after it was deposited. And this provides us with a very good understanding of the formation processes of a site, so it's development and abandonment, but also the use of space. Just to show what the finished product looks like, this is an intersection through the archaeological stratigraphy. This is through a midden at Carpsy Castle, and this is the polarising microscope. So, as I said, it helps you to understand materials on cultivation of the buried archaeology, processes such as fightivation, fluctuations of the water table, things like decalcification if you have ashes and mortars in your buried archaeology, the movement of clay through the profile, so the weathering processes, and if your site is sort of near a marine source, formation of pyrite. So, the castle's actual buried archaeology had very good preservation, and this is something we noticed by comparing our profiles and the intersections. This can be attributed to a variety of reasons, rapid burial due to collapse of standing remains that has sealed buried archaeology, so obviously in the context of managing a castle. If you then move that rubble to do something else with the tower or reconstruct it, you're uncovering that material that has been sealed by that collapse. Later building activities, so castles are very dynamic, there's lots of modifications, and later building material can also seal the buried archaeology and help with the preservation. Some of the castle's particular vaulted ones had waterlogging of the buried archaeology. Suddenly a rigidity at Malina, as well as the collapse of later building, led to excellent preservation of ash materials and things like fish scales as well. Some of the castle's particularly the Italian castle's underbond that I'm working on in Scotland. The later phases have been subjected to quite a lot of biotubation and weathering processes. The role of different geologies also has an effect on the preservation, I won't go too much into this now. So all the castle's were excavated as a result of different heritage perspectives. So Erlborn, Geo, Eberberg, Castle and Cair, these were excavated ahead of development, so rescue excavation. Coxy Castle in Estonia and the two Italian examples, Castle Sefrio and Montegrotto and Malina. The work has been done as part of research programmes. So I just wanted to show some of the nice profiles that we have. This is a profile through the outer Bailey of the castle at Elblon, and you can see this bit here which is blown up. These really sort of dark bands, organic bands here. This is where the samples were taken from. But once under the microscope you can just see how many, well even just cutting the samples you can see how different all the different layers are. And that sort of detail you're not getting in the field. It just looks quite homogenous. And it was full of sort of charred cereal grains, animal dung, which turned out to be from large herbivores, possibly horses. Complete intestinal parasite eggs embedded within it. And evidence for foddering of these animals through large sheets of articulated husk vitamins. And again at Coxy, exceptional preservation through a midden and a pond below. And these two examples really sort of help to highlight the development of the castle and the earliest occupation of these castles. This is often sort of lost and not really properly investigated. And it turns out you have a lot of timber structures lined beneath the stone masonry standing remains. And again we had copper lights from sheep or goats with fragments of millet embedded within. So you could see that the millet doesn't actually appear until a lot later. So it has been brought with these sort of earliest occupiers of the castle as fodder. And we can also look at middling maintenance practice with eggshell bone and very nicely preserved. So we can look at animal husbandry and then compare this to what is going on in the wider landscape. Comparing this to zooarchological remains as well. Looking at the evidence for copper lights and linking this with palynology as well for things like dung spores from herbivore dung. You can also look at resource use using the microscopic evidence. Looking for evidence for crop processing. Also looking at the management of fish resources. So this is something that came up in Parksy. The creation of the small pond by the earliest occupiers which we found fish scales on that. So they were managing fish on the castle site. So I'll skip this but we think I'm running out of time. So we really want to look at the effects on these organic remains. And soil microbiology is a very powerful tool to do this. And these are the ashes that I mentioned at Melina. These were buried by the collapse of the tower. And you can see here they look like they were thrown out yesterday. They are so well preserved. And I have microbiology samples from this. And one thing that the evidence really shows is that the preservation of the evidence is very context specific. So we have such a broad coverage of sites. You can see that the evidence preserves in different ways depending on where you are. So your copper lights preserve very nicely here in the waterlogged sites. But here you can see at Melina it's more just of an amorphous smear of phosphate, quite isotropic. But because it's calcareous we have these little things surviving. These are people's fairy lights that form in the guts of animals and their calcareous. And because this is a calcareous geology these preserve very well because they dissolve below about a pH of 7.7. Now this is the castle that I worked on in Scotland. And it's here on this promontory here. It's quite a wild and exposed place. And we have issues with salinity of the sediments which makes it very difficult to impregnate some of our samples with the resin. And it's provided quite a unique opportunity because I've been able to go there from the very beginning of the excavation. So I've actually sampled some of the modern soils that have formed on top. And I'm sampling things like turf walls that are exposed, very turf walls as well. So I can compare a range of material. And we can examine these turf walls in terms of where the material is coming from looking at the paleonological evidence. So this is actually a very good case study to sort of use to look at the sort of abandonment of a monument and its development as well. So the project has all these partners who I would like to thank. And there's also a website with a bit more information about the project.