Conference Announcements - European Association of Archaeologists

The European Archaeologist – Issue No. 44: Spring 2015
Conference Announcements
3rd Young Researchers’ Conference in Aegean Archaeology
24 April 2015
University of Warsaw, Poland
https://www.facebook.com/events/1402646503367359/
The organizers invite proposals on all themes related to Aegean Archaeology, that is Aegean
areas and cultures in the Bronze Age (i.e. art, crafts, everyday life, social/funerary/political
landscapes, long-distance relations, Aegeans overseas, impact on other cultures, etc.), also
in a broader context (new methods/approaches/technologies applied to the research, new
technologies in data/research/site management, etc.). Proposals are welcomed from doctoral
students, PhD candidates and scholars who have recently completed doctoral research.
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Cultural Landscapes & Heritage Values
13-15 May 2015
Univerisity of Massachusetts, USA
http://www.umass.edu/chs/news/conference2015.html
The goal of the conference is to bring together a broad range of interdisciplinary scholars and
heritage professionals to explore key issues in cultural landscapes and heritage values.
Cultural landscapes may be urban or rural, and they include parks, gardens, historic sites,
agricultural landscapes, and areas of cultural and historical associations and significance. In
the broader field of Heritage Management, the study of cultural landscapes is of particular
and current interest. Landscapes are at once “cultural” and “natural,” calling into question
traditional divisions of cultural and natural heritage resources and landscape management
(e.g., “Cultural Landscapes” vs. “Natural Landscapes” in the World Heritage categories).
Landscapes constitute a living heritage, reflecting the mutual influences of diverse groups of
people and the equally varied places they inhabit. Like societies, landscapes are continually
evolving, and their management demands that social and environmental change be
understood and embraced. Landscapes define the sense of a “place,” and are the
embodiment of the inextricability of tangible and intangible heritage. For these reasons and
others, landscapes are a critical subject in heritage studies.
The themes of the conference emphasize the need to acknowledge and engage change in
the successful interpretation, conservation, and management of landscapes; the often
unproductive dichotomy of “natural” and “cultural” resources; the factors of social and
economic inequality inherent in the designation and management of living landscapes; and
other critical issues in heritage studies today that are raised and provoked by cultural
landscape research and conservation.
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(Re)discovering the Great War
Multidisciplinary Research of Modern Conflicts
22-24 May 2015
Ljubljana-Kobarid, Slovenia
http://www.muzej-nz.si/en/pages.php?id_meni=240&id=171
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The European Archaeologist – Issue No. 44: Spring 2015
On 24 May 2015 one hundred years will have passed since the beginning of the armed
conflict between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy on the Soča / Isonzo
Front. The organizers would like to mark the occasion of the centenary with the first
international conference on multidisciplinary research of modern conflicts, focusing on the
Great War and its numerous legacies, to take place in Slovenia.
The conference aims at presentations from different scientific fields, especially from
archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, heritology, museology, and others related to
research into the Great War.
Papers should focus on different aspects of research on the First World War, from its
physical remains in the field, where the use of modern approaches including remote sensing
and the use of GIS analysis are highly appreciated, to the museum and family legacies,
memory, commemorational aspects and the preservation of the heritage of the Great War.
The main topics are:
• Historical source research (analysis of aerial photographs, maps and other archive
• sources);
• Modern research tools (remote sensing and other research techniques used for the
research of modern conflicts);
• Field surveys of conflict landscapes and their remains;
• Anthropological approaches to the Great War and its legacies;
• Documentation, preservation and management of the heritage of the Great War.
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Computer Applications & Quantitative Methods in Archaeology
28-29 May 2015
Cieszyn, Poland
http://pl.caa-international.org/
A regional chapter of Computer Applications in Archaeology conference will be held in a
border-town Cieszyn. 2015 meeting is a cross-border enterprise aimed at integrating the
archaeologists using computer and remote sensing methods in their work from the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
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13th Annual International Conference on History & Archaeology:
From Ancient to Modern
29 June-2 July 2015
Athens, Greece
http://www.atiner.gr/history.htm
The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars and students of all areas of history,
archaeology and other related disciplines. Abstracts can be submitted until 4 May 2015,
using the abstract submission form available at http://www.atiner.gr/2015/FORM-HIS.doc.
Decisions are reached in less than four weeks after the abstract submission.
Deadline to submit full papers: 25 May 2015. Please submit the paper only if the abstract
submission has been officially accepted. ATINER does not consider papers for publication if
they are not presented by the author at one of its conferences. Please submit your paper via
email only and only to this email: [email protected].
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The European Archaeologist – Issue No. 44: Spring 2015
Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies
CHAGS 11
7-11 September 2015
Vienna, Austria
http://chags.univie.ac.at/
The Vienna conference will be a joint effort by four major anthropological institutions in town
– the World Museum Vienna (formerly the Museum of Ethnology), the Institute for Social
Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Department of Social and Cultural
Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and the Anthropological Society Vienna.
With the landmark conference Man the Hunter in 1966 the study of hunter-gatherer societies
became a major topic within the social and human sciences. Since then, some of the topics
and concerns – egalitarianism, sharing, and mobility – remain central, while others – such as
social and technological evolution – have seen better times. Thus, while scholarly trends
change over time, the goal of the initial conference, to establish a unified field of huntergatherer studies, is still valid. The general question of CHAGS 11 therefore is how the results
of the last 50 years and new research agendas can be utilized for the present and future.
While many hunter-gatherers are forced to give up their ways of life and subsistence
practices, they figure prominently in public discourses on ecological and ideological
alternatives to industrial society. Thus, CHAGS 11 will attempt to attract a variety of
stakeholders in these debates – indigenous representatives, NGOs, scholars, etc. Based on
fieldwork and research from the full spectrum of hunter-gatherer ways of life and from all
perspectives our disciplines have to offer, the goal of CHAGS 11 is to bring hunter-gatherer
studies back to the center of the human and social sciences.
The International Society for Hunter Gatherer Research (ISHGR) provides the institutional
framework for CHAGS, the Hunter Gatherer Research journal (HGR), and other events of the
international hunter-gatherer research community.
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3rd Heritage Forum of Central Europe. The City
16-18 September 2015
Cracow, Poland
http://www.mck.krakow.pl/conference/the-3rd-heritage-forum-of-central-europe-the-city
Cities, as mirrors and hallmarks of our civilisation, some of the most spectacular human
inventions, are phenomena which challenge full understanding. They are multilayered
compositions of social interactions, economics, infrastructure and a growing number of
inhabitants. As Jane Jacobs has said, they are a complex problem of interacting factors that
are interrelated into an organic whole; at the same time they generate problems of climate
change, crime and inequality and, on the other hand, originate creative solutions as well as
hopes and dreams for many. Analysing the city brings together researchers and practitioners
from various disciplines: urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists,
anthropologists, historians and art historians.
It is this interdisciplinarity and innovation that the organisers hope to attract to the debates
and sessions of its 3rd Heritage Forum of Central Europe focused on “The City”. Plenary
discussions, lectures and parallel sessions will deal among cities’ narrations, revitalisation
practices, space of the city, creative heritage cities, other issues with historic urban
landscape, ownership of cities and cities’ resilience.
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Destroy the Copy! Part II
8-10 October 2015
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
In the last decades research on plaster cast collections of ancient sculpture has developed
into a sub-discipline of classical archaeology and reception studies. A few exceptions aside
the topic is usually approached from an archival point of view. It remains centered on the
history of the collections, their formation and development and how they served as a medium
for circulating and establishing the canon of antique sculpture and European art.
Two larger fields of inquiry, however, have so far been neglected: first, the specific process
and reasons for the systematic destruction or neglect of cast collections; second, the use,
display and reception of plaster casts outside of Europe, most notably in areas which were
not familiar with Western (replicated) antiquity.
These are the topics the conference wants to concentrate on. At first sight seemingly
unrelated, they combine a view from the so-called margins or periphery, prompting questions
of how casts and the values they reified have been challenged, decontextualized and
transformed. In addition, it is hoped to get a better understanding of which aspects in the
reception of cast collections including their rise and decline were a global or a local
phenomenon.
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Money and Ritual in the Greco-Roman World
15-16 October 2015
Tübingen University, Germany
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/moneyandritual
In the last two decades, the archaeology of Greek and Roman ritual has become one of the
central research topics in international scholarship. Archaeologists, ancient historians,
anthropologists, and scholars in religious studies have recognized the materiality of ancient
ritual practices and its various manifestations as key scholarly themes.
While the meaning of votive statuary and so-called monumental sacred architecture or the
function(s) of ‘humbler’ materials such as figurines, pottery, and lead tablets have been long
studied carefully, coins recovered in ritual contexts have not yet received the attention they
certainly deserve.
Our understanding of coins – as opposed to other objects used in a ritual context – is biased
largely by our assumption that they function solely as currency in the context of trade and
commerce. The picture that emerges from numismatic studies that place coins in their
archaeological context is significantly different. A growing amount of material evidence
indicates that coins played an important role in the performance of rituals and served both
ceremonial and religious functions in various spheres of daily life in the Ancient
Mediterranean. Thanks to their functional complexity and polyvalence, they occupied a
prominent place in ancient ritual. Thus, for example, coins could symbolize or substitute
actual objects, act as tokens for the pecuniary value of votive offerings, or serve as
dedicatory objects in their own (monetary and/or aesthetic) right.
This international workshop aims to address the nexus of coin use and ritual practice in a
diachronic approach that will cover primarily the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
Discussions will include both the religious agency of coins as objects and the human
involvement in the mental and practical process of symbolically charging and selecting,
depositing, and finally curating coins in a sacred context. Archaeologists, numismatists,
anthropologists, and historians are invited to present their research and thus actively contribute
to this timely topic. Papers that explore methodology or specific case studies are welcome.
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20th Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies.
Urban Archaeology and Public Relations
2-4 November 2015
City Hall of Vienna, Austria
http://www.chnt.at/
Preliminary Programme:
• Public relations and archaeology – presenting cultural heritage in urban area;
• Public appearance – heritage researchers, stakeholders and public interaction;
• New realities: virtual, augmented reality and other techniques in cultural heritage for
the general public;
• The Use of UAVs in virtual heritage;
• Disclosing the dead;
• Conflict as cultural heritage: cultural heritage in conflict;
• Cultural heritage in danger;
• Newbies & Young Scientists;
• Storytelling for Tourism in the Virtual Age. High Tech Travel for the 21st Century.
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2nd Conference on Daily Life in a Cosmopolitan World:
Pottery and Culture during the Hellenistic Period
5-8 November 2015
Lyon, France
http://www.iarpothp.org/conferences_en.html
When the nineteenth century scholar J.G. Droysen applied the designation « Hellenistic » to
the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great, he imagined an era in which Greek
culture permeated the newly conquered territories and was adopted by local peoples. By the
later twentieth century, scholars had replaced this idea with a paradigm of interconnection
and cultural transfer between and among Greek settlers and native populations. The
challenge remains to identify and assess these connections and transfers. Pottery is one of
the best categories of evidence available since ceramic vessels were used everywhere and
produced in almost every town or village in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
People settling far from their native lands brought with them customs and tastes from home –
in cooking, dining, drinking, and also in burial and worship practices. Both colonists and
locals were confronted with differing traditions and ideas, and faced the choices that confront
all peoples in such situations – deciding what to hold fast and what to change. Our aim is to
try to understand, at least at a regional level, how people really lived using (or rejecting)
various vessels, and what it meant for them to be part of a multicultural and somehow
‘globalized’ world.
Researchers are invited to contribute papers that address the intersection of global
Hellenistic culture and native/local ways of life. We hope the conference will help illuminate
various issues, such as:
• How involved were different regions in long distance exchanges, whether of
commodities or objects? What can the presence of Greek table wares, Aegean
amphorae, and imported cooking vessels tell us?
• Where and when did new pottery production centers develop? What can the
distribution of their products tell us about the movements of people and ideas?
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•
•
How should we interpret the wide diffusion of new table ware shapes such as fishplates, echinus bowls, and mould-made bowls? What is the relationship between
such new forms and ideas or behaviors?
How did the appearance of new shapes of cooking vessels affect culinary habits and
attitudes? What is the relationship between cuisine and culture?
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The Sword – Form & Thought
19-20 November 2015
Deutsches Klingenmuseum Solingen, Germany
http://www.klingenmuseum.de/_english/dkm/veranstaltungen1/ausstellungen/ausstellungsvor
schau/das-schwert.html
The sword is one of the central objects of human culture, both as a deadly weapon and as a
powerful symbol. Based on the results of the 2012 conference “Das Schwert – Symbol &
Waffe”, the interdisciplinary conference “The Sword – Form & Thought” will continue to
explore the various aspects of this object. Some of the themes for possible papers include
material characteristics, decoration and symbolic value, use as weapon, and cultural
discourse on the sword; of central interest is how these aspects are interwoven.
To highlight the interactions between the different aspects of the sword at a given age, the
panels will be structured chronologically:
1. Bronze and Iron Age (c. 2000 B.CE.-c.o C.E.);
2. Roman Empire, Migration Period, Early Middle Age/Viking Age, High Middle Ages
(c.o C.E.-1300);
3. Late Middle Age, Renaissance, Early Modern Age (1300-1789);
4. Modern Age until present (1789-2015);
5. Non-European swords and swordsmanship.
Because the conference will be part of the homonymous exhibition at the Klingenmuseum,
the quality of the sword as a material object shall be stressed.
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Roman Archaeology Conference 2016
16-19 March 2016
Sapienza Universita di Roma
http://romansocietyrac.ac.uk/
Deadline 15 May 2015
[email protected]
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