Wow! I got back from the 6th Experimental Archaeology Conference on Sunday evening, and it’s taken a few days for me to collect my thoughts.
I was presenting a paper on ‘Teaching and learning in Experimental Archaeology‘ (abstract here), which is one of the reasons I have been quiet recently. Along with proof-reading and chapter-writing deadlines, writing a conference paper on a topic outside my PhD was quite challenging and as a result I have been knuckling down.
The paper itself went over far better than I could ever have hoped. I felt like I was taking a chance, presenting a theory dominated and teaching/learning focussed paper at a practical and science dominated archaeology conference. However the attendees gave me overwhelmingly positive feedback, which was not only a relief but in fact buoyed my spirits with regard to engagement with teaching theory in archaeology.
Beyond my own paper, the conference itself was great, with a number of really great papers. I did a reasonably amount of live-tweeting the conference papers as they were given, using the hash-tag #exparch6, which was an interesting experience and I hope went some way to increasing awareness of the conference and the work of experimenters.
Rather than write a formal conference review, which I will probably do for HMSNews/PIA or similar, I’ve put together a Storify using the tweets of myself and others. It’s very informal and, well, story-like, but I hope that this too will make it an interesting read for people not specifically engaged with experimental archaeology.
Ruth Fillery-Travis 