ISA 2012 Leuven (Day 5 – Sensing, Prospecting, Field Archaeology, Colour and Culture, Glass 2)

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), Tuesday (Metals and Metallurgical Ceramics), Wednesday (Biomaterials and Bioarchaeology) and Thursday (Ceramics, Glasses, Glazes and Vitreous Materials).

Details of the programme and abstracts for all of the oral and poster presentations can be found in the Scientific Programme PDF.

The morning session following the Conference Dinner has a reputation for being sparsely attended, and whilst a good hundred attendees were present there were notable absences amongst those colleagues we had left in the bar in the early hours of Friday morning!

The first session of the day was Remote Sensing, Geophysical Prospection and Field Archaeology convened by Luis Barba.

Though this session had only three papers, remote sensing was actually the cradle for ISA. The Symposium developed out of a set of annual or near-annual meetings organised for archaeologist using or owning a particularly magnetometer. It’s a shame that so few papers were offered in this area, but geophysical archaeology does have its own meetings.

After these papers we went straight into the second session on Human-Environment Interactions convened by Mark Pollard.

This was a very interesting analysis of snail populations that was well presented. According to Amy snail populations can be used as a proxy for sea surface temperature, sometimes with a sub-monthly resolution. As a result she was able to say that the seasonality range of Late Pleistocene in North Africa was slightly higher than in the modern period, being cooler and drier with periods of aridity.

Caught on camera in the process of live tweeting! I have to admit it was a shame that there were no other tweeters present at the conference. In past conferences I’ve really enjoyed the back-channel debates and conversations produced over twitter. It enables you to discuss the paper live without impacting the real-life presentation, and it really helps you engage critically and actively with the papers rather than just sit and passively absorb them.

Throughout the morning attendees trickled into the hall, a number looking decidedly sleepy! Amy’s paper was followed by Eileen Eckmeier discussing human impact on soil formation and the change from natural to cultural landscape in NW-Germany.

By this point we were all gasping for a cup of coffee, so I think Carolyn Chenery et al had quite a hard audience, but she presented some important analytical work showing that sulphur isotope values in the UK are much higher in the coastal areas, impacting archaeological dating.

It is traditional at ISA to have at least one ‘special session’, which is usually a thematic session that looks at a particular issue or concept in materials analysis or archaeometry. This year it was Colour and Culture, and so after coffee we all returned for Colour and Culture 1 convened by Patrick Degryse.

This session was very well attended, though there was the repeated problem of people not knowing what time to come back from coffee and as a result lots of people (myself included) trickled in late to Ian’s paper.

For more information on Late Classical and Hellenistic painting materials see Kakoulli 2002 in Reviews in Conservation 3, 56-67, and Kakoulli 2009 Greek Painting Techniques and Materials from 4th-1st C BC, Archetype Publications.

Andrew’s paper was really fascinating, and I got a real feeling that he was interested not just in analysing objects but in looking at their socio-economic contexts in order to generate real understanding of the motives and methods of production. He was looking at mid-to-late 18th Dynasty Egyptian glass, which he considered the height of glassmaking in ancient Egypt.

Andrew’s argument that colour choice in Egyptian glass was ritually driven got people talking, particularly as he suggested that the rippled/wave design on the blue and yellow glass vessels was actually an expression of the hieroglyph for water. He left us with a number of interesting ideas, including a suggestion that glass production may have been the domain of priests.

After lunch and another hour to enjoy the posters we returned for Colour and Culture 2, convened by Dennis Braekmans.

Helene showed us that Neanderthals were producing pigments from rocks by a number of methods which included scraping them with a sharp point and concussion.

Instead of a coffee break mid-afternoon, we went straight into the final session Glass 2 convened by Andrew Shortland which was the remainder of the glass sessions which had started the previous day. ISA does tend to have a bit of a punishing schedule, and the seven papers of the Friday afternoon were a bit hard going without a break!

Papers in this session included Julian Henderson et al on trace element analysis of Islamic glasses; Thomas R Fenn et al on elemental and isotopic analyses of a variety of glasses; Roxana Bugoi et al on Byzantine glass bracelets; and Maria Cristina Caggiani et al on Swabian and Mamluk gilded and enamelled glass objects. These papers were really excellent and it was a shame that, being in the last slot of the afternoon, a number of attendees had already left for their long journeys home.

The last part of the Symposium the announcement of the location of ISA 2014, which will be Los Angeles with Marc Walton and Ionna Kakoulli at UCLA and the Getty Institute. Looks like we’ll have to start saving now!

Whilst most people were heading straight home, my colleagues and I retired for a quiet dinner and a chance to sample a last lovely Belgian beer before a much needed early night. Thanks again to the organisers at Leuven for what was a well organised conference in a lovely location.