EAA conference, Vilnius 2016

Last week was very busy. I was away in Vilnius, Lithuania for the European Association of Archaeologists annual meeting. The last one I went to was Pilsen in 2013 so it was good to go back and catch up with the latest research. I think I probably overdid it, giving a paper and a poster presentation, and also running the Newcastle University exhibition stand. I wasn't really able to do either effectively, having to jump in and out of sessions to sit at the desk. I ended up missing quite a few talks that I wanted to see. However, my paper presentation did go well, and I got some good questions and discussion. I was talking about Catalhoyuk, and assessing the past 25 years of 'multi-proxy' archaeology and approaches to use of space. Although some aspects were critical, the aim was to try and see what has worked and what hasn't worked, and some of the reasons why this might be. There is such a rich and unique record of the history of  excavation and methodology at Catalhoyuk; I am convinced that one of the projects' major contributions will be about the practice of archaeology and archaeological science, as much as the research questions.  I didn't feel like I got as much discussion as I would have liked though. I think trying to do a review paper in a 15 minute time slot is a bit ambitious, and there are still many issues about 'multi-proxy' research that I want to talk about with the wider geoarchaeological community. I think I will revisit the paper for a smaller scale archaeological science or geoarchaeology conference, where the papers and discussions tend to be a bit longer.

I also did a quick post about the EAA for the Human Seasons blog, which you can read here. Thanks to fellow micromorphologist Barbora Wouters for the action shot!