Abstract submission for the 2014 conference closes in four weeks. The clock is now ticking if you haven’t yet done so. What is your paper? Are you in a symposium? Do you prefer participating in a forum panel discussion, a three-minute forum or an electronic symposium? Do you prefer presenting a poster rather than a paper this year? If so, you should get a place of choice in the Convention Centre as we encourage this type of participation. Oh, by the way, did you know that the Québec City Convention Center is the only one in Canada offering free hi-speed wifi to conference attendees?

We have revamped the submission process to make it more transparent and user friendly for you. You can go straight there from the conference home page: http://www.sha2014.com/index.html. Have a look and let us know if this move from traditional practice suits your needs.

This year, presentations are being grouped into several themes. It will thus be easier for you to fit your paper into a slot corresponding to your interests if you aren’t already participating in a organized session. This is what you will see: Archaeological Methods; Diaspora Archaeology; Environmental and Landscape Archaeology; First Nations Archaeology; Identity and Community Archaeology; Information Technology; Legislation and Archaeological Practice; Material Culture Studies; Military Archaeology; Other; Regional Studies; Theory; Underwater and Maritime Archaeologies; Urban Archaeology.

Once into the category that interests you, you can explore sessions that have been entered into the system or that the conference committee proposes for you. Are you interested in organizing a session on one of the following subjects: The Ethics of Archaeological Practice; Historical Archaeology and the Media; Commercial and Governmental Archaeology: New laws, new practices; Archaeology and UNESCO World Heritage Sites; New Research in Material culture studies: Ceramics; Historical Archaeology as Anthropology; globalization and environmental archaeology; The Historical archaeology of Central America and the Caribbean; Who owns the past: sacred sites, battlefield archaeology, sites of pain, difficult heritage. Should none of these sessions tickle your fancy, you can propose a new one.

We hope this new process and a simplified interface will make the submission process easier for you and that it will result in a strong and interesting conference for all. Contact the Conference Committee through our web site at www.sha2014.com should you have any comments on the submission process. There will be regular updates and contextual information on the SHA Facebook page. Don’t forget to follow the progression of the conference on Twitter as well at #sha2014. Both the Facebook page and the Twitter feed give you lots of opportunities to interact with conference organizers and other colleagues. We are looking forward to reading you there. And of course, we are particularly looking forward to seeing you in Québec City next January!

Submitting a session is now as easy as riding a bike! Come and see the Québec Seminary courtyard while your riding with us!

The preliminary call for papers is now available for the 47th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, to be held in Québec City, Canada, from January 8–12, 2014. The Call for Papers will open on May 1, 2013.

The organizing committee proposes the theme “Questions that count, a critical evaluation of historical archaeology in the 21st century” that will permit the archaeological community to take the measure of its development over the past quarter century, all while spanning the transition into the new millennium. Indeed, this question was last broached in Savannah, Georgia in 1987.

The SHA first asked eminent archaeologists to identify questions that count at the plenary session of the 20th Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology. We now pose this question to the broader archaeological community. The diverse sectors of the SHA and ACUA communities are invited to assess their progress, orientations and priorities. The responses may be very different from one sector to another, surprising some or confounding others. More importantly, it is crucial to allow each segment of our community to express its own views on the current and future situation of the discipline.

Historical archaeology has evolved both globally and locally. There has been a diverse integration of new technologies, forms of media, analytical methods as well as participants. Community-based programs, public and descendant archaeology, and the experience of archaeological practice have all evolved over the last quarter century. To use antiquated parlance, dirt archaeologists are faced with a dizzying array of possibilities while still challenged with maintaining quality practice in an age of an explosion of sources and media. Other archaeologists are focused almost exclusively on analytical methods. How can we encourage best practices for all amidst a new array of questions which all seem to count?

Québec City is a place to rejoice in the old and explore the new. One of the oldest cities in North America and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is also a hub for exploring new media and technology. Cutting-edge analytical methods available in local laboratories have permitted experimentation in local archaeology, and new technologies have been incorporated into the public presentation of some of our most significant sites. The city is also at the boundary of land and sea, wedged between Cap-aux-Diamants and the majestic St. Lawrence River, where an immigrant European population met with First Nations peoples during the 16th century. We propose themes that explore these boundaries while posing questions that count or that continue to count, and invite archaeologists from all communities to present new research in their archaeological practices.

The plenary session will start with distinguished scholars questioning the practice of urban archaeology and using Québec City as a case study: should we do archaeology in the city or archaeology of the city? Questions that count will echo for the length of the conference with thematic sessions such as:

• Large-scale underwater projects
• The ethics of archaeological practice
• Identity and memory in archaeology
• Revisiting facts and ideas of contact
• Recent advances in scientific analyses
• Historical archaeology as anthropology
• Community archaeology for the 21st century
• Globalization and environmental archaeology
• Historical archaeology and museum collections
• Archaeology and UNESCO World Heritage Sites
• Archaeology and text; archaeology and the media
• Global archaeology in the circumpolar north, 1250-1950
• Commercial and governmental archaeology: new laws, new practices
• Coastal and port cities: maritime archaeology on land and underwater
• Historical/Post Medieval archaeology and the roots of the anthropocene

A list of sessions with short descriptions will be posted on the SHA 2014 website (sha2014.com/) and scholars are invited to submit contributed papers and propose other symposia. It will also be possible to exchange ideas during workshops and roundtable luncheons.

Please follow us on Facebook and on Twitter (using the hashtag #SHA2014) for updates about the conference throughout the year!

Belgrave Road, Leicester, during Diwali

There are now only four weeks until the Call for Papers for the SHA 2013 conference in Leicester closes, on 10th July.The conference committee in Leicester has already received many proposals via the online submission site, here, but we could always do with more!

If you are looking for further like-minded participants for your proposed symposium, do feel free to circulate details on the many listservs, and on the SHA 2013 Facebook page. A little earlier in the year we advertised a number of sessions that were seeking presenters here, and here; if you would like your proposed session advertised on this blog, please do get in touch.

It’s never too early to plan your trip to Leicester; all of the information you need to organise your visit to the city is on the conference web page, including a guide to travelling to Leicester, and the various accommodation options once you get here. If you are a student, you will probably want to apply for the Ed and Judy Jelks Student Travel Award. Parlez-vous français? Then take a look at the Quebec City Award, for students at French-language universities. Later in the summer we will have information on how you can volunteer to help out at the conference, and on free floorspace options.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at Leicester in January 2013!

[CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] via Flickr

The Society for Historical Archaeology’s 46th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology

January 9-12, 2013 Leicester, Great Britain

If you would like to attract speakers to your proposed symposium by advertising on this blog, please get in touch. We highlighted three sessions last month, and four more can be found below. If you’re interested in participating in a session, please contact the individual session organisers.

Gendering Consumer Choices

Suzanne Spencer-Wood (Oakland University, Michigan; spencerw@oakland.edu)

Chapters in the 1987 edited volume Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology related consumption to households, family size, composition, life cycle, and occupations and probate inventories of women as well as men. However, the consumer choice framework was not explicitly gendered. Consumer choice is gendered in many ways, such as who selects consumer goods for a household and who consumes goods. Many consumer goods were often manufactured specifically for one gender or another, such as clothing, cosmetics, perfume, jewelry, hats, shoes, watches, scissors, chairs, machines, etc. Papers in this symposium explicitly theorize and analyze a variety of relationships between gender and consumer choice.

Traveling

Julie King (St Mary’s College of Maryland; jking@smcm.edu) and Philip Levy (University of South Florida; plevy@usf.edu)

Phil Levy & I are organizing a session for SHA Leicester focused on traveling; it’s open-ended at this time because the topic is so broad. If you are interested, let us know. Everyday travel, tourism past and present, migration, archaeologist as traveler, travel writing and the experience of place, war as travel… theorizing travel, case studies… any topic focused on the study of travel in some context that takes a material perspective is welcome. So far there are three or four of us. Send us an email if this is of interest and you will be at SHA.

Tearing Down Walls: The Architecture of Household Archaeology

James Nyman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Jamesnyman16@hotmail.com) and Kevin Fogle (University of South Carolina)

We are organizing an household archaeology session entitled “Tearing Down Walls: The Architecture of Household Archaeology” for the 2013 Society for Historical Archaeology meeting in Leicester. The session seeks presenters who are using innovative household theory or methods. The following is a working abstract for the session:

Household archeology is a methodological and theoretical approach to domestic sites that can address various research interests from demography and socioeconomic relationships to the use of space and the landscape approach. The goal of this session will be to bring together multiple viewpoints regarding the household as a unit of archaeological analysis. We hope to highlight recent developments with household archaeology that improve upon the ways that we traditionally conceptualize how households are made meaningful through activity and as centers for social relationships in the past. We seek a diversity of examples that span temporal and geographic space, and seek to highlight how households are connected to, and influence, multiple processes at the global and local levels.

If this proposed session interests you, please send us an abstract by June 22 2012, or email prior to that date with ideas or questions.

Modern Technology, Past Culture: Emerging Effects of Information Technologies on Archaeological Practice

Edward Gonzalez-Tennant (Monmouth University, Edward.Gonzalez-Tennant@monmouth.edu) and Quentin Lewis (UMass Amherst, quentin@anthro.umass.edu)

Recent advances within information technologies present Historical Archaeologists with an array of novel and unique practices to add to our toolkit. Geographic Information Systems, archaeological visualization, and various web technologies offer the possibility of far-reaching, or even radical changes to the discipline. Rather than accept the inevitability of such practices and techniques as progress, we want to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of the applications of these technologies to historical archaeology. This session’s primary goal is to bring together a group of researchers examining the acquisition, processing, storage, and dissemination of digital archaeological information from a theoretically-focused standpoint. We are less concerned with specific technical procedures and more interested in papers addressing the material, historical, political, and cultural implications such technologies hold for the practice of historical archaeology. As such, we will consider papers for inclusion in our session from any region or time frame, but we ask that they address the following themes:

• – The role of information technologies in transforming the ways archaeologists think about and visualize places, regions, and past cultural processes

• – The ethical and political implications of incorporating information technologies into archaeological practice, both positive and negative.

• – Issues of essentialism and representation which arise at the confluence of archaeology and emerging/emergent technologies.

• – The possibilities or limits of using new information technologies to realize new public archaeologies.

• – The potential of information technologies to construct “new” archaeological data.

Along with exploring new research that connects historical archaeology and information technologies, we hope to engender conversation(s) around the social implications of incorporating these technologies within the archaeological toolkit, as conceived both theoretically and methodologically. Please send your abstract to session organizers by June 15th. We will make our final selections no later than June 20th.

Image: “Muro Occidentale o del Pianto” (Western Wall or Wailing Wall) by Fabio Mauri (1993) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr

The Call for Papers for the SHA conference in Leicester, UK, opened at the beginning of May, and session proposals have already started to roll in.

All of the information you need to put together a proposal for a symposium, paper, or poster, is in the Call for Papers, which can be downloaded from the conference webpage, and there is a short summary in this blog post from March. Proposals can be submitted electronically here. The deadline for all submissions is 10th July 2012. Last month we featured some of the symposium proposals that are already doing the rounds, and we will feature more of them on this blog later this week. If you would like to advertise your session proposal on this blog, do get in touch. You can also post information about your session on the conference Facebook page, and tweet using the hashtag #SHA2013.

Booking your travel to Leicester and accommodation in the city early is the best way to find good deals; the SHA 2013 conference committee has put together guides to travelling to Leicester and places to stay when you get here; all of this information is available to download from the conference webpage.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all in Leicester in January!

The preliminary Call for Papers for the SHA 2013 conference in Leicester is now available to download on the conference webpage, and will also appear in the Spring 2012 issue of the SHA newsletter. Call for papers officially opens on May 1, and closes on July 10, 2012.

Globalization, immigration, and transformation

Leicester is a multicultural city that has been transformed since the middle of the 20th century through its interaction with global networks, particularly immigration from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean – a pattern of immigration that reflects the once-global nature of the former British Empire.

These issues of globalization, immigration, and the transformations brought about by those processes are central to historical and post-medieval archaeology, whether they entail the global spread of European capitalism alongside the expansion of European colonialism, the willing or forced migration of millions of individuals from their original continents to new homelands, and the local, regional, and national transformations (both within Europe and across the world) brought about by all of these processes. The 2013 Conference Committee particularly welcomes submissions that relate to these themes.

"Muro Occidentale o del Pianto" (Western Wall or Wailing Wall) by Fabio Mauri (1993)

General Information

The SHA 2013 Conference Committee hopes to encourage flexibility in the types of sessions offered.Contributions can take the form of:

* Individual papers. Papers are presentations including theoretical, methodological, or data information that synthesise broad regional or topical subjects based on completed research; focus on research currently in progress; or discuss the findings of completed small-scale studies.

* Posters and Media Displays. Free-standing, mounted exhibits with text and graphics, audio and film, etc. illustrating ongoing or completed research.

* Formal symposia. These consist of four or more papers organised around a central theme, region or project.

* Electronic symposia. These have the same basic structure as a traditional formal symposium; however completed papers are posted on the SHA website well before the conference, and individuals who plan to attend the symposium can then read the papers in advance. At the symposium participants give very brief summaries of their paper, the bulk of the symposium consisting of a discussion among the presenters and audience. Anyone interested in making use of the electronic symposium format must contact the Program Chair, Alasdair Brooks, <amb72@le.ac.uk>, by 1st July 2012, for further details and suggestions.

* Panel discussions. These are less structured gatherings, typically between one-and-a-half and three hours in length, organised around a discussion topic to be addressed by an invited panel and seeking to engage the audience.

* Three-minute forums. These are informal – but still academic – discussion groups consisting of a number of rapid three-minute presentations followed by a discussion, and were successfully used at the previous SHA conferences in Austin and Baltimore. Typically these sessions last for at least an hour and consist of blocks of four or five very short presentations, followed by 10 – 15 minutes of Q and A discussion on the papers that have just been presented.

Each session organiser may organise the time within each session as they wish. Sessions may contain any combination of papers, discussants, and/or group discussion.

If you have an idea for a session, and would like to attract paper contributions by advertising it on this blog, email Emma Dwyer: <ed108@le.ac.uk>.

You will be able to submit your session and paper proposals online via the SHA website from 1st May, and submission will close on 10th July. So do start thinking about organising a session, presenting a paper, bringing along a poster or other media display, holding a round table lunch discussion, participating in a debate…

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr