27th EAA Annual Meeting in Kiel, Germany

8 - 11 September 2021

Greetings from Kiel! We very much look forward to meeting you here at Kiel University for the 27th Annual Meeting of the EAA in Summer 2021.

The host city Kiel is located directly at the shores of the Baltic Sea. Through its unique setting on the Kiel Fjord, it is situated on the waterfront like no other Baltic metropolis, being a gateway to Scandinavia and the Baltic States. With the fjord, the sea reaches right into the city centre and large cruise liners and the ferries to Scandinavia contribute to the maritime atmosphere.

Numerous marinas along the Kiel Fjord provide ideal conditions for sports and recreation and every year in June, the city celebrates the world’s largest sailing event, the Kiel Week. Kiel’s beautiful beaches and a diverse cultural scene with a large university make it a great place to live or to spend your holidays. Kiel is the capital of Germany’s northernmost federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, “the land between the seas” as it is called, due to its position between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.

Kiel University (CAU) was founded in 1665. It is Schleswig-Holstein’s oldest, largest, and best-known university, with 27,000 students and around 3,700 staff members. Already at the time of its founding, CAU adopted the motto “Pax Optima Rerum” – peace is the greatest good – a maxim that is still relevant today, more than 350 years later.

In recent years, Kiel University has become a rapidly evolving centre for interdisciplinary archaeological research in Germany. The EAA Annual Meeting 2021 will be organised by the Johanna Mestorf Academy (JMA), which represents the research focus ‘Societal, Environmental and Cultural Change’, one of four research foci at Kiel University. Within the JMA, the two recently established research centres ‘ROOTS’ and ‘Scales of Transformation’ aim to explore social, environmental, and cultural phenomena and processes that substantially marked past human development in a broad interdisciplinary conceptual framework. Both networks are based on the assumption that humans and environments have deeply shaped each other, creating socio-environmental connectivities which still persist today.

The meeting will be organized in conjunction with the State Archaeology Department of Schleswig-Holstein, the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (ZBSA), and the Archaeological Museum Schloss Gottorf.

Within this stimulating research environment, the great infrastructure provided by Kiel University, and the relaxed holiday atmosphere of a Kiel summer, we look forward to welcoming you to a vibrant and fruitful Annual Meeting 2021!