So, preparations underway for the 38th International Symposium on Archaeometry, Tampa, Florida, 10th-15th May, 2010. Some of my colleagues and I hope to attend to present posters and papers, and as it looks like we’ve all got funding from the university, I booked the flights today!
If you’re interested in going, the submission date for abstracts has been and gone. But cost of attendance will be $150 dollars for students and $300 for non-students until March 15th. Not only is that pretty damn cheap, but they’re offering cheap campus accommodation at $35 a night for a single room. How splendid is that? Accommodation is usually the most expensive thing in a conference, and it’s so great to see that the ISA organisers are making the effort to open up attendance to students. Many (thankful!) congratulations to them.
The symposium is the conference for archaeological science. It’s biennial, which means unfortunately there won’t be chance for my to present in my second year, which would have been ideal. So I’m hoping to present, or at least do a poster, on my masters work this year. Maybe next time I’ll manage something on my Roman slag work, but that’ll be my third year so there’s a chance I’ll be way too busy.
Unfortunately, there actual website for the conference is malfunctioning [edit – it’s been fixed and you can see it here]. But here’s a link to the Society for Archaeological Science‘s page on it. Speaking of which, I really should join them!
I’m hoping to get a paper on the metallurgy and enamels of the Horse and Rider brooch group I studied a couple of years ago in to the conference, but as I’m straddling two of the session themes (metals and glasses) who knows. I also have a poster on some statistical analysis of 1200 cases of compositional data for Romano-British copper alloy objects. I do find the whole thing very stressful – I’m not sure whether I actually want to do a paper or not, the whole concept being rather intimidating. I’m just certain that I should try and do one! Fingers crossed we should find out in a week or two.
Ruth Fillery-Travis 