Happy Holidays!

Season’s greetings from TUBA!

To mark the end of the year, we had a little Christmas party with our friends over in the Humbugs research group! As we get together, it’s time for us to reflect on how busy and successful this year has been.

It’s a TUBA Humbug Christmas around the fireplace! (Thanks Netflix)

We’ve each presented at several international conferences: RAC/TRAC in Edinburgh, European Meeting on Forensic Archaeology in Belfast, the Ancient Protein Conference in Copenhagen, TRACamp at Vindolanda, and at the 10th Hadrian’s Wall Archaeology Forum. If you haven’t read our posts about these visits, or fancy a trip down blogging memory lane, feel free to follow the links!

We welcomed Aboli to the TUBA team during the height of the gorgeous summer, and she’s settled in excellently. We have also written several papers that have been accepted or are being peer-reviewed as we speak (we’ll share the juicy deets soon!), and starred in the Hadrian’s Wall Archaeology magazine.

TUBA Rewind:

Behind the scenes, we’ve been running lots of experiments and finishing method development for various techniques. Rhys is tying off his pXRF and 3D scanning experiments. Helga has completed her first excavation of a whole range of microcosm leather experiments. Aboli is designing HPLC protocols for examining dyed textiles, and examined enough fibres with a scanning microscope to make a tacky tasteful Christmas jumper. Finally, Gillian has done tremendous work with the construction and development of the state-of-the-art National Horizons Centre, which we’re all extremely excited to work in – please get in contact if you want to collaborate with us there!

At first we felt like this year had flown by, however, looking at this list of all the major things that TUBA have done, outdoing these achievements next year has become quite the daunting task! So, what’s next on the cards for TUBA? All three of the PhD students have their progressions in the coming months, some more conferences in February and April, intense experiment sessions at the NHC, and maybe finishing off with a little bit of world domination (first, we’ll take Manhattan and Berlin!).

TUBA

P.S. here’s a terrible archaeology Christmas cracker joke.

What do you call a very, very, very, very, very old joke?

… Pre-hysterical