ISA 2012 Leuven (Day 3 – Biomaterials and Bioarchaeology)

I’m currently at the 39th International Symposium on Archaeometry in Leuven, Belgium, where I have a poster to present. I’ll be writing a proper conference review when I return, but in the mean time I’ll be making informal collections of the tweets and discussing the conference here on a daily basis. There are also collections from Monday (Stone, Plaster, Pigments, Chronologies) and Tuesday (Metals and Metallurgical Ceramics) if you’re interested in earlier sessions.

You can find the programme and abstracts for the hundreds of oral and poster presentations in the Scientific Programme PDF.

The Bioarchaeology and Biomaterials session was put together by Henk Kars, however it’s not my area of expertise so I took a break from live tweeting.

Cynthia was presenting interesting work on tracing what people were doing with their pots and whether they were making dairy products or not: she had previously showed some of her experimental work looking at vegetable v dairy/meat lipid absorbtion into pottery at the Experimental Archaeology Conference UK.

As is traditional now at ISA, Wednesday morning’s papers are followed by excursion(s). I enjoyed a very relaxing afternoon in the amazingly beautiful town of Leuven, which after the hectic first two days was rather a relief!

By the evening everyone had returned to Leuven, and after some naps and relaxing, we enjoyed some of the excellent local food. Anyone wandering through the town would have seen many groups of archaeologists scattered across the bars and restaurants!