July 24, 2023

Some upcoming conferences

There's not much exciting in the early stages of a project: a lot of emails (some of which go un-replied-to); a few phone calls; a lot of scoping conversations (more or less formal) with established collaborators, intended collaborators, critical friends, and other interested parties; and a good bit of reading. Right now the biggest progress report I have is two upcoming conference sessions related to the project in which I'll be participating: EAA Belfast and AAA Toronto.

In August, I'll be in Belfast at the annual European Archaeology Association annual meeting. As big conferences go, I enjoy EAA a lot. I have to be there because I edit the society's journal (a most excellent publication, if I say so myself), but I'd do my best to attend anyways because the conversations are excellent and the quality of presentations very high. This year, along with brilliant colleagues Dr. Maïté Rivollat and Dr. Wolfgang Haak, I'm co-organising a session titled Reconstructing biological relatedness and inferring human relations in the past.

EAA session abstract

We've got an excellent line-up (I'll post the paper list when the final conference book is published) with presentations on topics from prehistoric Europe to Polynesia and from new data to new interpretative models. We're hoping to foster a complex and wide-ranging conversation across disciplines, and I couldn't be more excited.

I've also just learned that a panel I was invited to join has been accepted for the American Anthropological Association meeting to be held later this year in Toronto. The panel is called Reconstructing Kinship Practices in Archaeology: Materiality, Socio-cultural Anthropology, and Archaeogenetics and is organised by Dr. Sabina Cveček. The paper I'll be presenting in Toronto (co-authored with my brilliant colleague Dr. Caroline Schuster) is still in progress (maybe I'll put some updates as it develops...), but the general idea is to think about funerary rites as active spaces of kinwork and kin-making. I'm bracing myself a little for Toronto in November, but I'm really excited to attend my first AAA!

For those of you reading in Australia, I'll also be attending AAA Gold Coast in December (I'm running a session there too - but not one related to KINnect). I'll likely share more nearer the date...