The EAA 6th Annual Meeting took place in Lisbon, Portugal, 12-17 September 2000. The meeting was organized by the Instituto Portugues de Arqueologia (IPA) and hosted at the beautiful Centro Cultural de Belem, next door to the national archaeological museum at Jeronimos monastery.

From 12 to 17 September the 6th Annual Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) took place in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. The conference was attended by around 650 archaeologists from all over Europe, and by representatives from other parts of the world, including. the USA, Canada and Japan. It was supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture and the Wenner Gren Foundation and organised by IPA, the Instituto Português de Arqueologia.

The EAA was created after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990 and formally constituted at an inaugural meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1994. Its membership currently numbers about 200 institutional and 1200 individual members, who work in heritage management, academic research, museums, and in private enterprise.

During the conference, Professor Willem J.H. Willems (The Netherlands, Ministry of Culture and Leiden Univer-sity) was re-elected President (2000-2003). Dr. Françoise Audouze (Centre National des Récherches Scientifiques, Paris) and Dr. Dagmar Dreslerova (Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences, Prague) were elected members of the Executive Board.

At the opening ceremony of the conference on 13 September the Portuguese Secretary of State for Culture, João Alexandre Baptista, presented the European Archaeological Heritage Prize for 2000. The Prize is intended for an outstanding achievement in the field of archaeological heritage management that is of European scope and importance. It is awarded by an international jury consisting of Professors and Heads of national institutes for heritage management. The Prize was established in 1999 with the help of a grant from English Heritage and has now been awarded for the second time. The recipient this year was the former Swedish Riksantikvar, Dr. Margareta Biörnstad, for the central role she has played in the modernisation of archaeological heritage management in Sweden and in Europe during the last 25 years.


Highlights of the conference included, in addition to a number of important academic symposia:

The start of European co-operation under the EAA umbrella between national associations of professional archaeologists such as the Institute of Field Archaeologists (IFA) in the United Kingdom and the Nederlandse Vereniging van Archeologen (NVvA) in The Netherlands.

A round table in which the widely differing new archaeology legislation proposed by the French and Dutch Governments were presented and compared with existing legislation in England, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere in Europe. Recent legal changes have been triggered by the implementation of the 1992 Malta Convention in national law.

Both initiatives show that there is a great need to develop common European positions, at least as far as shared principles or standards are concerned. The EAA has been granted consultative status as an NGO with the Council of Europe and has been asked to take initiatives with the Council, and also with the European Union, to achieve this.