We are glad to invite you to the 43rd Conference of the Association for Evironmental Archaeology (AEA2023Tgn)! The conference will take place on 24-26th of November 2023 at the wonderful Mediterranean city of Tarragona, Catalonia.
With the title “Telling Environmental Archaeology Stories”, the conference aims to explore how environmental archaeology has helped explain and reinterpret the past.
The interpretation of sites, soils, stratigraphies, cultural artifacts, and bioarchaeological remains using archaeological methods provides a rich source of material to investigate past behaviours and ultimately explain the human stories behind scientific data. The increasing interdisciplinarity and the development of new methodologies to treat archaeological primary data have opened new possibilities to deepen our interpretations and go one step further in understanding our cultural heritage.
Greater engagement in theoretical debates and approaches has further contributed to a multivocality and a proliferation of narratives that entangle different scales of analysis to explain the past. Environmental archaeology has made great strides, moving on from the ‘appendix’ of site reports listing species to occupying an important role and shedding light from different angles on key archaeological questions.
In this conference, we seek to explore the contributions of environmental archaeology to these ‘stories’ of the past. The aim will be to move the focus away from the data, techniques, and methodological advances to the narrative, to explore how our research has helped explain and interpret the past and which are our key contributions in creating history.
Another important area will be the examination of effective communication strategies of our stories and research achievements to colleagues of other academic fields and the public and how these can contribute real impact on modern society through either a better understanding of the past or lessons and practical guidance for the future.
Topics of interest:
- Social relations and the role of different social groups in shaping society and economy.
- The role of immigration/movement in changing society, how this took place, and its repercussions.
- Past cosmologies and belief systems.
- How people or groups of people perceived and acted on issues of health and medicine.
- How people or groups of people engaged with their environment: reconstructing rural or urban histories of interactions.
- People and societies as the main actors impacting landscapes, geographies, and environments.
- Local versus global narratives.
- Key events of the past (agricultural and farming developments, the emergence of new forms of socio-economic organisation, and what these meant or how they changed life, etc.).
