Dear friends and colleagues,
The EAA PaM Community has now celebrated its first birthday, and it’s been a busy year! The Bern conference went very well, with a great range of PaM-related sessions, some energetic debates, and a lovely PaM social event (thanks again go to Marcel Cornelissen for his work in organising this). We also held a Community Meeting in Bern – if you are an EAA member, you can find the full meeting minutes in the PaM Community section of the EAA website, in the Resource Library.
However, the EAA’s schedule means that we are now straight back into organising mode, so here we go!
SESSION PROPOSALS FOR BUDAPEST 2020
The next EAA Annual Meeting will be held in Budapest, Hungary, from 26-30 August 2020 (full details here). Although August 2020 is a long way off, the call for session proposals is already open and the deadline is coming up very soon – Thursday 7 November 2019.
Last year we worked to co-ordinate efforts between PaM members to submit sessions, in order to avoid duplication of efforts and create a good range of session proposals. Based on discussions of how to improve this process at the PaM community meeting in Bern, this year we are going to try something a little different – we have set up a web forum (yes, just like the 1990s!) where you can chat about your potential session proposals, look for co-organisers, etc.
You can join the forum here. 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 e.g. an institutional email address, you may need to log out of your Google account first.
We hope that this helps you to co-ordinate your efforts in session organisation for this year. This is very much an experiment, so we will keep an eye on things and see how they go.
If you’ve never organised a conference session before, and are wondering whether to propose one this year, EAA is a great place to organise a session for the first time – it’s extremely well-run and session organisation is very straightforward. There’s lots of information available on the conference website (here) about session proposal requirements. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us (eaa.palaeomeso@gmail.com) if you have any questions.
ROUND TABLE BUDAPEST 2020
Our round table in Bern on Standardization of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic lithic analysis went really well and turned into a very active debate. Thanks again to all those who participated and engaged in the discussion! It was really interesting to see the points of difference and similarity, and the advantages of embracing this great diversity in our field. One concrete result was that we would all welcome something like a best practice guide on reporting lithic analyses. We will prepare something about this and get back with a plan to the community soon.
As this went so well we would like to organise another PaM-related round table in Budapest. We’ve come up with a few potential topics:
The place of archaeological science in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology: aDNA, ZooMS, isotope analyses, radiocarbon/OSL/ESR etc dating, GIS, 3-D scanning etc. – using results from archaeological sciences has become part of our daily working routines but how do they fit with more traditional techniques in archaeology? Does archaeology see the archaeological sciences as support services, neighbour-disciplines, or as archaeology by other methods? How do archaeological scientists consider their place in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology? How do natural science-based concepts fit into the traditional humanities-based ideas of archaeology?
Social media and Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology: What are our main aims in using social media as Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeologists? Public engagement? Intra-/inter-disciplinary communication? In practice, what are we most effective at doing with social media? Are there potential conflicts? What are the challenges and benefits? What are some examples of good/bad practice?
Conceptualising Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology: We wish to understand past human societies but how do we get from archaeological remains to people? What concepts are we already using? Are we thinking in the boxes of cultural taxonomies or do we use these as analytical tools? Should we reconsider them? What would we need to set up new concepts?
We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas and any alternative ideas you might have – please email us at eaa.palaeomeso@gmail.com
EAA BUSINESS
If you’re an EAA member, an invitation to a survey about EAA members’ needs should have reached you within the last few days. We strongly encourage you to take ten minutes before 11 November 2019 to fill out the survey and help improve the EAA experience in the future.
HOUSEKEEPING
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 in January 2020 (job opportunities, conference announcements, calls for papers), please send it to eaa.palaeomeso@gmail.com
Need some publicity on Twitter? If you have something specific that you would like us to tweet/retweet, just send us a DM at @EAAPaM with the details.
If you’re on Facebook, you can follow our page here.
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 at the beginning of January, with information on Palaeolithic and Mesolithic-related sessions that will be taking place in Budapest next year.
Until then, all the best,
Sonja & Natasha
