McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research annual report 2018-19

Research
Conferences and courses
In addition to our well-established seminar series, we
organized numerous conferences and courses. To give a
few examples, Erik Gjesjeld and Enrico Crema organized
a very successful international conference on ‘Big Data in
Archaeology: Practicalities and possibilities’. Laerke Recht
led the conference ‘Fierce Lions, Angry Mice and Fattailed
Sheep: Animal encounters in the ancient Near East’,
and Preston Miracle organized ‘Mend the Gap: Human/
environment interactions from the Last Glacial Maximum to
the mid Holocene’.
A one-day intensive workshop on the R statistical
computing language was also organized and well attended,
as were several training sessions on portable XRF, 3D
scanning, and the use of our new Keyence microscope. As
part of the Horizon 2020 Twinning Project Promised, Cyprian
Broodbank, Giulio Lucarini and Matthew Collins taught
archaeological science at an international training course
at the Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture
Research Center (STARC) of the Cyprus Institute. Matthew
Collins led a micro-workshop organized by Lisa Onaga at
the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG)
on ‘Proteins and Fibres, Scaffolding History’. The Beasts to
Craft Project held a three-day workshop on ‘The Parchment
Record and the Biology of the Book’ in May, at the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
We also delivered dozens of conference presentations
internationally, and are particularly proud that many of them
were led by our graduate students. A particular highlight
of the conference circuit was the ‘Archaeometallurgy in
Europe’ conference in Miskolc, Hungary: here, Cambridge
researchers made up the largest institutional cohort and
showcased one of our growing strengths, offering as many
as 11 presentations on copper, bronze, iron, silver and gold,
ranging from the Bronze Age to the post-medieval period.
There was also a great showing at the Annual Conference
of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and
Osteoarchaeology in London, with many presentations and
posters by Cambridge researchers at all levels, including a
poster by Alice Rose on multi-isotope analyses of medieval
human remains, which won the Bill White Award.
Keynote speeches were delivered by Cambridge researchers
at the ‘Developing International Geoarchaeology’
conference (Charly French), the International Congress on
the Archaeology of Gold, the Latin American Archaeometry
Congress, and the Cyprus Institute (Marcos Martinón-
Torres), the Annual Conference of the British Association
for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (Tamsin
O’Connell), and the ICAZ Archaeozoology, Genetics,
Proteomics and Morphometrics Working Group (Matthew
Collins).
Our PhD students and postdocs have also been
instrumental in leading on many outreach and public
engagement activities, including open days, lab tours,
Science Week, Festival of Ideas, and many other events. They
demonstrate that cutting-edge science is compatible with
popular communication, and their commitment to sharing
their work is commendable.
Erik Gjesfjeld
Participants at the Big Data in Archaeology Conference.
Archaeology at Cambridge 2018–2019 21