My Favourite Pictures of the Year

Time to pick out my favourite pictures of the year. This isn't just about the quality of the image, but of the significance and what it means to me.

Number 5 - East Mainland, Orkney. This has been my laptop background since June. I absolutely loved going to Orkney, such a quiet place and I met some interesting people!

Number 4 - A Self-Timed photo from Skalavik, Iceland when I was there in August. A picture of me in my natural environment; waterproofs covered in mud, spade in hand, out in the open. Over the horizon is the Denmark Strait and Greenland. Proof that I was carrying an extra pound or two then as well!

Number 3 - Iceland again, this time making sure I wasn't getting caught driving on the wrong side of the road again! Marker pen and masking tape to the inside of the 4x4!

Number 2 - A piece of burnt stone, around 2/5 of a mm in size, from the fishing site on the shores of Kinloch Hourn, Scotland. Proof that the occupants of this site were using it for an industrial purpose. This was a site I worked on in 2007 but done the labwork for early this year. 2008 was the year I finally got my head round micromorphology!
Number 1 - Murrayfield, 8th March 2008. I got a phonecall a few days before saying I got tickets for the Calcutta Cup, so off I went with Lindsey. I was hungover from the night before, but to go from the low of a hangover to the sheer joy of beating your oldest, fiercest rivals has to be one of the best feelings I've ever had. It took days to wipe the smile off my face!

A Favourite Picture

 

Today has been spent trying out new things on the internet, upgrading some programmes and installing new ones. Picasa, the image programme from Google is one of my favourites, so I thought I'd use the Blogger function to share this photo taken in Iceland in 2004 a little north of Husavik. It was taken using a bog-standard APS camera and the digitised negatives were on my laptop. I reckon it is one of the nicest views I've ever caught on camera, however if I find any more they'll get uploaded too.

Iceland, Commercial Fishing and Radiocarbon Dating

The results are back and now I should theoretically be able to get my research analysed and published. But before I divulge in sharing my results with the wider world, no doubt a practice which is frowned upon by the academic community, it's best to shape up the 'research question'. What am I looking for, what can I expect and what will it tell me.

Step One - Chronology. There's no real point in analysing soils and sediments as part of a stratigraphy in an interdisciplinary study if you cannot integrate them into a chronological framework. For this you need to pick the best dating technique, weighing up cost and accuracy.

The cheapest is tephrochronology, the analysis of volcanic ejecta. Each eruption is like a fingerprint, individual and unique in its composition and they can be cross-referenced with contemporary sources and laminated ice-cores. If you dig a hole and the layer of tephra is there, you theoretically have a date! Iceland, a volcanic island is perfect, however Vestfirdir (my study area) is not a volcanically active region, so that's out!

Next up is OSL Dating (Optically Stimulated Luminescence) and costs around £500 a pop. I'm not going to pretend I know the finer points of it, but I do understand quartz particles retain an age of the last time they were exposed to light. Iceland isn't abundant in quartz so that's that out!

The last one, and chosen method is radiocarbon dating. I was first aware of this technique when I visited the island of Ulva with my folks on holiday when it was used to date waste in a cave belonging to the parents of explorer David Livingstone. The cost is around £200 a pop, and it calculated the age based on the breakdown of carbon on the basis of its half life.

So what should I expect from my findings? Well i'm interested in how and when commercial fishing developed. Was it immediately after Landnam, the first settlement of Iceland or a few centuries after? Was this a natural evolution, from small scale to international export over hundreds of years, or were they exporting from a very early age implying that the technique was developed in Norway and transferred overseas. There should be little gap in the chronology between the original settled farm and the outlying specialist fishing station if this is true.

Findings are currently being analysed and i'll post again when the interpretations have been submitted to a journal!