Dear friends and colleagues,
We hope that you and your loved ones are all well and safe and that you are still coping ok with the pandemic crisis.
COMMUNITY BUSINESS
With the 2020 annual meeting we welcomed our new community co-chair: Dr. Annemieke Milks (United Kingdom). She received 53.5% of the 71 votes cast. Again we would also like to thank the other two candidates for their kind offer to be considered for the post: Dr. Markus Wild and Dr. Silje Evjenth Bentsen. It is great to see that members are willing to commit their time to this community.
Furthermore, we celebrated our 2nd anniversary as an EAA community and with it we also have grown considerably in our representation. This is clearly not what most of the EAA board members expected in 2018 when they approved our community. So, thanks to all of you who form this impressive member base!
EAA ANNUAL MEETING
The EAA 2020 annual meeting took place virtually, and we think it had good moments alongside more problematic aspects. We are quite sure that for some a virtual participation has its advantages, especially in terms of carbon-neutral conferences and family-friendly work schedules, and we imagine that going forward some virtual elements will remain.
Once an annual meeting is finished, the planning of the next one starts. This time it is (hopefully) going to be “Widening horizons” in Kiel/ Germany from 8th to 11th September 2021: https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA2021
The call for sessions opened on 30th September and the deadline of 12th November 2020 is fast approaching! If you consider preparing a session for the next annual meeting relating to Palaeolithic / Mesolithic / hunter-gatherer archaeology, please join our discussion forum! We had set it up last year to offer the possibility to chat about potential session proposals and to look for co-organisers. It was a moderate success but we are not giving up that easily, and hope to build on the idea! When you sign up, you can choose whether and how you want to receive emails of new posts in the forum. Please note that this is run via Google Groups, so if you are logged into a Google account when you go to the link, Google will automatically try to sign you up using that account. If you want to sign up using another email address, for example an institutional email, you may need to log out of your Google account first.
We can also offer that members use the EAA PaM community discussion group on Facebook or we can retweet your search for co-organisers on Twitter (just sent a DM to @EAAPaM).
If you propose a session relating to Palaeolithic / Mesolithic / hunter-gatherer archaeology, consider making it visible by associating it with PaM. Under the header “Session abstract” there is no dropdown option for PaM… but please enter PaM in the comment field under “Is the session associated with another entity – please specify”.
New dates and deadlines
12 November 2020: Deadline for session proposals
14 December 2020: Session organisers need to have settled their fees
16 December 2020: Call for presentations opens
11 February 2021: Deadline for presentations
23 March 2021: Announcement of contribution acceptance / rejection
31 March 2021: Deadline for early bird membership fee
22 April 2021: Deadline for membership and registration fee payment for first authors
13 July 2021: Deadline for last cancellation
8-11 September 2021: Virtual Annual Meeting in Kiel
JOB OPPORTUNITIES & SCHOLARSHIPS
PhD Opportunities
AMBILAB is looking for candidates for a 3-4 year PhD position funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (FPI Grant) focusing on micromorphology and lipid analysis at El Salt and Abric del Pastor Middle Paleolithic sites. Deadline 27 October 2020. Send a motivation letter to: cmallol@ull.edu.es
3-year funded PhD position starting February 2021 at RGZM / University of Mainz (Germany). Deadline for applications is 15 November 2020 http://seafront-project.com/post/call-for-application-for-phd-position/
Deadline for SAA’s Dienje M. E. Kenyon Fellowship for female graduate students is 11 December 2020: https://www.saa.org/career-practice/awards/dienje-kenyon-memorial-fellowship
Funded PhD position at the University of Leicester (UK) within the project “Predicting and Protecting Lithic Landscapes”: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Predicting-and-Protecting-Lithic-Landscapes.pdf. The M4C Doctoral award deadline is January 13, 2021. For further information, please contact Dr Laura Basell (l.basell@leicester.ac.uk).
15 interlinked PhD projects about archaeological material science at the Universities of Barcelona (Spain), Nice (France), Copenhagen (Denmark), York (UK) and/or the British Museum (UK) will probably be advertised early 2021 but the possible projects are already outlined here: https://sites.google.com/palaeome.org/chemarch/phd-projects
The Culture and Socio-Ecological Dynamics Group, Barcelona is looking for excellent students to apply for the new call for PhD scholarships of Catalan Goverment. Are you interested in archaeobotany, land use in the past, GIS/sat imagery, etc? Check CaSEs: Culture and Socio-Ecological Dynamics (UPF) and get in touch: https://www.upf.edu/web/cases
Postdoctoral positions
A 3-year position as Postdoctoral Research Assistant in HPLC and Compound Specific AMS Radiocarbon Dating is offered at ORAU / University of Oxford (UK). Deadline: 13 November 2020: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CBY813/postdoctoral-research-assistant-in-hplc-and-compound-specific-ams-radiocarbon-dating
WELL DONE! (NEW SECTION)
As your feedback was very positive, we would like to continue this short section in our newsletters to congratulate those who have achieved a milestone in their career (PhD, habilitation, new jobs or grants awarded, etc) with a Palaeolithic and/or Mesolithic project. However, we cannot do this without your help! So if you know a PhD student who has just (within last 6 months) passed their viva or if you yourself have just passed, or if you are or know a researcher who had some bigger funding success to celebrate, please send us a little note:
Who is it? What was the topic? Where can we read up something of the research? When and at which institution did they pass? Are there future plans? (We’ll contact the person in advance to ask for consent before including them in the newsletter.)
Felicitaciones a la Dr. Jeanne Marie Geiling!
On 5th October 2020 in a video conference, Jeanne Marie Geiling defended her dissertation entitled “Human Ecodynamics in the Late Upper Pleistocene of Northern Spain: An archaeozoological study of ungulate remains from the Lower Magdalenian and other periods in El Mirón Cave (Cantabria)” with the Spanish distinctions “cum laude” and “international relevant” at the University of Cantabria (Santander, Spain). This dissertation is an extraordinary study on the macromammal remains of various levels of occupation from the late Middle Palaeolithic to the Magdalenian of the Cueva del Mirón (Ramales de la Victoria / Cantabria). The immense, multidisciplinary work enabled to discuss complex research objectives of human behaviour adaptations, where environmental, demographic and social parameters were included. The synthesis of results, discussion and conclusions are of great interest about the hunting practices and the ways of life of the human groups that lived in the Cantabrian area during the times of Altamira and other Prehistoric Caves of Cantabria. Already published are results about
• archaeozoogical analyses (two papers),
• spatial analyses (three papers)
• and osseous industry (one paper).
Congratulazioni alla Dr. Erica Corradini!
Erica Corradini has defended her PhD “Bridging the Scales: Model-driven Integrative Interpretation of Archaeological and Geophysical Data” on 5th October 2020 in geophysics at Kiel University (Germany). Her cumulative dissertation focused especially on Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites from northern Germany and Denmark. Combining geophysical results and stratigraphic information form corings and archaeological excavations, she was able to reconstruct ancient landscapes hosting hunter-gatherers occupation. Creating 3D palaeoenvironmental models, she developed an effective planning tool for local museums and other heritage institutions. Her three papers are already published: The first about the Late Palaeolithic site of Tyrsted in Denmark is out on Quaternary International and further two papers about the research carried out at the early Mesolithic site of Duvensee are published in The Holocene and Geosciences. She will continue her transdisciplinary work between archaeology and geophysics as a postdoc in the second phase (2020-2024) of the collaborative research centre about “Scales of Transformation”. Continued work in this direction is what motivates her for trying to deconstruct the scepticism about using geophysics in Mesolithic and Palaeolithic contexts.
A new ERC Starting Grant went to a Palaeolithic project!
Our congratulations go to Dr. Ariel Malinsky-Buller for his new ERC starting grant ”TransCause: Investigating Pleistocene population dynamics in the Southern Caucasus”! Armenia, a little studied biodiversity hotspot of Eurasia, is an ideal natural laboratory for testing models of climatic impact on hominin settlement patterns and population dynamics due to its location at the crossroads of the Pleistocene hominin world. TransCause aims to expand the framework of population dynamics by building an intra-regional comparative database of Palaeolithic occupations in three ecological niches within Armenia between MIS 7-3 (250-29 kya). The TransCause research group will include more than 25 researchers from 15 institutions from Europe, the USA, Israel, and Armenia. The project will start in October 2021 and will be hosted at the Institute of Archelogy, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Israel). The project soon will be looking for two funded PhD positions.
OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Peer Community in Archaeology (PCI Archaeology) is a new, free-of-charge, open-access community for the evaluation and recommendation of article preprints in all areas of archaeology. It is now accepting submissions and has recently published its first preprint recommendation. https://archaeo.peercommunityin.org/ and Twitter: @PCI_Archaeology
EAA’s international peer-reviewed European Journal of Archaeology (EJA) would warmly welcome more contributions from the PaM community. More information about the journal and instructions for contributors can be found at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology
HOUSEKEEPING
EAA PaM Community Page (for EAA members): https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA/Navigation_Communities/Palaeolithic_and_Mesolithic_Community.aspx
EAA PaM Community Site (for non-EAA members): https://eaapalaeomesocommunity.wordpress.com/
EAA PaM discussion forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eaa-pam-discussion/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EAAPaM
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PaMCommunity/
Facebook discussion group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/312200922737965/
Got something to share with the PaM Community? If you have a short message (up to 150 words) that you would like to be included in the next email to the PaM Community around January 2021 (job opportunities, conference announcements, calls for papers), please send it to eaa.palaeomeso@gmail.com. We are also happy to share these messages on our external website (see above). If you have something specific that you would like us to tweet/retweet on Twitter, just send us a DM at @EAAPaM with the details.
Please feel free to distribute this email among your networks as you wish. You can also direct anyone who is interested in joining the Community or our external mailing list to this link, where they will find all the relevant instructions: https://eaapalaeomesocommunity.wordpress.com/get-involved/
We’ll be in touch again when the call for presentations gets out.
Until then, all the best and stay healthy and safe!
Annemieke & Sonja
