A popular #AskAnArchaeologist question is what is the most exciting thing you have found? My answer is always...ancient poop! I’ve found 10,000 yr old goat poop in Iran that showed people were keeping animals in pens way before the animals became domesticated...

Loads of human poop at @catalhoyuk_arch some of which have parasites in them, showing us about prehistoric health and sanitation. The fact these are right next to houses in open areas also suggests our ‘disgust’ at was not shared by people in the past.

Most recently, 14,000 yr old human from Oregon, N America, showing people were living here at the end of the Ice Age, and they had super varied diets that were nothing like the modern popular ‘palaeodiet’, inc things like insects, small rodents and loads of different plants.

Scientists have been studying ancient poop for a long time. Palaeontologists look at ancient poop from dinosaurs & extinct animals to understand their diets & ecology. Archaeology borrowed the word ‘coprolite’ from palaeontology, which means ‘dung stone’, to refer to ancient

...though the we study is not actually fossilised. Coprolite just sounds more acceptable than calling it ancient sh*t, faeces or poop. Even though we’re scientists we are influenced by cultural ideas of what is acceptable to talk about.

This is nothing new! When looking into the history of ancient , I found it amusing that the chemist William Wollaston, in a letter to famous geologist William Buckland (who came up with the word coprolite) confessed...

“though such matters may be instructive and therefore to a certain degree interesting, it may be as well for you and me not to have the reputation of too frequently and too minutely examining faecal products”

I think this might be the most popular thing I’ve ever tweeted! If you want to read more about ancient poop (and other archaeological science) check out my blog https://castlesandcoprolites.blogspot.com/search/label/coprolites?m=1