On Thursday and Friday, 2-3rd of September, the Historical Metallurgy Society is holding its annual conference, entitled ‘Accidental and Experimental Archaeometallurgy‘.
The venue is West Dean College, near Chichester in West Sussex, which is incidentally where UCL IoA holds its undergrad ‘PrimTech’ two week outing every year, so they’re used to crazy archaeologists turning up and burning things!
You can download a booking form at the link above, but one thing to note is that cheap booking ends 30th June, with the deadline for all bookings by 32st July. Also, the booking form doesn’t mention who to make the cheques payable to! But having checked, it’s ‘The Historical Metallurgy Society Ltd’.
I’m pretty excited about going, not least because I’ve volunteered to help out, so a) I don’t have to pay! and b) I shall hopefully get to know more people and maybe even help out smelting stuff. For me, this is very, very exciting as I’ve never actually operated a furnace (well, not an ancient-style one anyway).
In other news, I’m trying to write posters for the upcoming International Symposium on Archaeometry 2010. This has been a surprising experience as I didn’t realise, until I tried writing one, just how little I knew on how to make a poster. I’ve sat through an hour’s lecture on them, aimed specifically at first year archaeology PhDs, but either I wasn’t listening or it didn’t tell me much.
Thankfully the lovely Alun sent me a bunch of suggestions which were really helpful, and I found a couple of good sites with, most importantly, some examples! Once the drafts are done I shall pop them up here for some criticism. I’ll also probably blog about making posters later – once I’ve sucessfully done so!
Ruth Fillery-Travis 