Keynote lectures

Tuesday 7 Sept. 

• Dolores R. Piperno: Phytolith Analysis in Neotropical Paleoecology
• Volker Hilberg: Research in Viking Period Hedeby. From Nazi Investigations to UNESCO World Heritage

Wednesday 8 Sept.

• Henny Piezonka: Untying the bundle: Neolithic cultural traits seen from a global (forager) perspective

Thursday 9 Sept.

• Marzena Szmyt: Baltic-Pontic contact space in 4th and 3rd millennium BC
• Sandy Harrison: Interactions between climate change, natural ecosystems and disturbance regimes, and anthropogenic activities during the Holocene

Friday 10 Sept.

• Claudia Theune: 30 Years of Contemporary Archaeology: Gains in Knowledge - Challenges - Opportunities and Future Tasks

Saturday 11 Sept.

• Eleanor Scerri: New Perspectives on the evolution of Homo sapiens
• Mads Kähler Holst: Building collections

Interactions between climate change, natural ecosystems and disturbance regimes, and anthropogenic activities during the Holocene

Sandy Harrison

When: Thursday 9 Sept. 18:45 CEST

Transformations of natural ecosystems by humans began with the shift from hunting and gathering to cultivation during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. These impacts increased as populations expanded during the Holocene up to the present day. However, the Holocene has also witnessed climate-driven changes in vegetation and in fire regimes, and these climate and environmental changes would necessarily have impacted the resource base for humans. It is important to be able to separate natural and anthropogenic influences on ecosystems and ecosystem disturbances at a regional level. Furthermore, while many factors underpin the growth and spread of agriculture, the role of climate and climate variability on the timing of the transition remains relatively unexplored. The degree to which anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) during the pre-industrial Holocene affected global climate is controversial, and the impact of LULC changes on climate at a regional scale is also uncertain.

Several recent developments make it possible to address these issues more systematically. New statistical tools have been developed that provide independent and robust quantitative reconstructions of past changes in climate, vegetation and fire regimes through the Holocene. These reconstructions can be compared with evidence for population growth and/or agricultural practices at a regional scale both to isolate human and natural impacts on ecosystems and disturbance regimes and to examine the potential impacts of climate and environmental changes on human activities. The development of process-based models provides an alternative way of examining climate impacts on natural vegetation and disturbance regimes, as well as on agriculture. Light-use efficiency (LUE) gross primary production models, for example, have been applied to simulate the impact of climate, climate variability, changes in atmospheric CO2 levels on vegetation, and of these environmental constraints and changing agricultural practices on agricultural yields through time.

This talk will illustrate how various statistical and model-based approaches can and are being used to explore the interactions of climate, environment and people during the Holocene, focusing on ongoing work in the circum-Mediterranean region. It will also explore future opportunities to use these tools to address key questions of relevance to the archaeological community.

Biography

Sandy P. Harrison is Professor in Global Palaeoclimates and Biogeochemical Cycles in the School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science (SAGES), University of Reading, Co-Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Sandy’s research focuses on the interaction of climate and the terrestrial biosphere, in the geologic past and the present, using models and data analysis. She has extensive experience in large-scale palaeoenvironmental data synthesis, the development of quantitative climate and environmental reconstructions, and the application of palaeodata for climate model evaluation and benchmarking. She also works on the development of process-based models of the terrestrial biosphere, most recently on the development of models based on eco-evolutionary optimality theory, to predict the impact of climate changes on vegetation, disturbance and land-atmosphere exchanges, and their feedbacks to the climate system.

Research in Viking Period Hedeby. From Nazi Investigations to UNESCO World Heritage

Volker Hilberg

When: Tuesday 7 Sept. 18:45 CEST

Our knowledge of the development of urbanism in Northern Europe is largely depending on the archaeological research in the so-called emporia, early medieval urban production and distribution centres, which belonged to a new generation of ports developing from the late Merovingian period onwards.

The investigation of the early medieval port at Hedeby is one of the most extensive archaeological projects in the Baltic region since several decades. Due to its central position at the narrowest part of the Jutland Peninsula, this place was an important hub in the communication and trading network linking Scandinavia with the Continent and the North Sea with the Baltic Sea from the early 9th century to the middle of the 11th century AD.

Early medieval Hedeby is characterised by the fact that it has not been disturbed by modern building activities and by the excellent preservation of the archaeological features and their stratigraphy. For an enhanced understanding of the results and interpretations of the new fieldwork since 2002 it was also necessary to start a reassessment of the previous excavations since 1900. In combination with modern scientific analyses, this is opening up completely new possibilities for a more comprehensive understanding of the development and purpose of this early medieval trading and manufacturing centre.

Biography

Dr. Volker Hilberg, archaeologist, studied prehistoric and medieval archaeology, historical auxiliary sciences (numismatics, diplomatics, palaeography) and medieval history, graduate of Marburg University, 2001 ph.d. on the Migration Period in the Mazurian lakeland, Poland.

Since 2002 responsible for the field research in Hedeby which consists of geophysical surveying, metal-detecting and excavations, since 2004 also responsible for the museum’s archive, since 2015 for the medieval collection.

Since 2003 teaching appointments at the universities of Kiel (D), Aarhus (DK) and Brno (CZ).

Member of the „Internationales Sachsensymposion“, of the commission „Kommission zur Erforschung von Sammlungen archäologischer Funde und Unterlagen aus dem nordöstlichen Mitteleuropa“ (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz zu Berlin and Römisch-Germanische Kommission des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts and delegate for Schleswig-Holstein in the German Numismatic Commission. From 2009 onwards member of several scientific advisory boards.

Research interests are focused on the archaeology and numismatics of the early Middle Age and the Viking period in Europe, especially in the Northern Sea Area and the Baltic.

Building collections

Mads Kähler Holst

When: Saturday 11 Sept. 18:45 CEST

Collections are central to archaeology. They offer a long-term maintenance of key parts of our source material, and they provide authenticity for our mediation of the past.

Once the collections were first and foremost compilations of objects, and the quality of the collection was determined by rarity, quantity and variation. Over time the context and relations of the objects obtained increasing significance. Consequently, the process of acquisition became central to the quality of the collections, and the value could be enhanced with subsequent research and analyses.

In principle, this should have made collection building an integrated part of a more general archaeological research process. However, it is questionable if this the case in practice. There is often an institutional separation of the collection management and the acquisition of the objects with research projects having their own specific acquisition strategies and the developer-led archaeology relying on an essentially inductive acquisition premise. Furthermore, collection building is an inherent slow endeavour, which contrasts the rapidly changing research agendas in academia. It seems that even if institutions have well-developed collection strategies, these structural challenges are often so strong, that they tend to make the collections act as repositories for various external agendas.

In the presentation, I would like to discuss some of these challenges, the potentials of building new forms of collections and their role in the archaeological research process. I will primarily rely on examples from Denmark and particularly from our work at Moesgaard Museum with Iron Age wetland finds and Mesolithic submerged sites.

Biography

Mads Kähler Holst is director of Moesgaard Museum in Denmark (since 2016), honorary professor of archaeology at Aarhus University, and president of the Danish Academy in Rome. He is educated in Prehistoric Archaeology at Aarhus University with a prize dissertation on the Bronze Age burial mound tradition from 2000 and a Ph.D. dissertation on social organisation and inheritance in Iron Age villages, from 2004. Besides the Scandinavian Bronze and Iron Ages his main research interests are within archaeological methods. He has directed several large-scale archaeological excavation projects including several Bronze Age burial mound excavations, the Viking Age Unesco world heritage site of Jelling, and most recently the 1st century AD wetland deposition of a several hundred individuals large army at Alken in Eastern Jutland. He is a Fellow of the Society Antiquaries, London, Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and Board Member of the Royal Danish Society of Geography.

Untying the bundle: Neolithic cultural traits seen from a global (forager) perspective

Henny Piezonka

When: Opening Ceremony (Wednesday 8 Sept., @18:30 CEST)

In linear models of European prehistory, the Neolithic figures as one of the main periods defined. Underlying dualist concepts rooted in the modern “Global North” backgrounds of most researchers distiguish between an inanimate nature, and human societies at who’s disposal nature is to exploit. In such a mindset, the transition to farming is perceived as a major evolutionary step, often named the ”Neolithic” or ”agricultural revolution”. It is the farming economy that is regarded foundational to everything complex across the socio-political, economic and ideological spheres, from sedentary life ways to hierarchical society structure to hereditary leadership.

In my talk I will dicuss alternative views on socio-economic dynamism, exploring the field from a hunter-gatherer perspective. Concerning “Neolithisation”, hunter-gatherers in a way have remained “people without history”, although it was actually them who were the driving force behind many of the transformations now regarded as “Neolithic” traits. Discussing evidence of technological innovation, economic intensification and socio-political complexity in hunter-gatherer societies from diverse prehistoric, ethnohistoric and contemporary contexts, I suggest that rather than evolutionist, agricentric notions of “Neolithisation” as a global horizon, an different mindset is necessary to really grasp the diversity across the historical spectrum as well as underlying more universal patterns. I will argue for the incorporation of alternative ontologies into archaeological inquiry, questioning agricentric models and striking a blow for the role and agency of hunter-gatherer societies in past and present.

Biography

Henny Piezonka is Junior Professor for Anthropological Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. Originally trained in Archaeology, Classics and Art History in Berlin and Glasgow, both her Master thesis and her PhD dissertation were awarded science prices. As a research associate she worked at Bonn and Greifswald Universities and at the German Archaeological Institute, conducting fieldwork in various regions across Europe, Russia and Mongolia. As Junior Professor in Kiel since 2016, she is one of the PIs of the Cluster of Excellence „ROOTS - Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies“ and one of the founding PIs of the Collaborative Research Center 1266 „Scales of Transformation. In research and teaching Piezonka specializes in hunter-gatherer and pastoralist studies across North Eurasia, specifically regarding Neolithisation processes and the development and dispersal of Neolithic traits. Drawing from a broad temporal scope from the Late Glacial to the present, her research explores long-term socio-cultural and economic dynamics connected to diverse life ways in steppe, forest and tundra environments. Her work brings together field-based archaeological research with ethnoarchaeological work amongst contemporary hunter-fisher and herder communities in order to reach diversified, ontologically informed understandings of people and their material world.

Phytolith Analysis in Neotropical Paleoecology

Dolores R. Piperno

When: Tuesday 7 Sept. 18:45 CEST

The past ten years have seen an increase in paleoecological investigations in the Neotropics with phytolith analysis. Terrestrial soils as well as lake sediments have become foci of studies. Research questions involving vegetational and fire history also often address the scale and intensity of past human impacts on forested environments. Associated studies that continue to build modern reference collections of tropical plants are improving the resolution of the data, while making it clearer what phytoliths do and do not document in the past tropical flora. In lake sediment analysis phytoliths and pollen are complementary, each providing information the other does not on vegetational history and source area of the microfossils. In terrestrial soils where pollen often is not preserved, phytoliths provide robust information on many aspects of past forest history and human influences on it.

Biography

Dolores R. Piperno (PhD 1983, Temple University) is Senior Scientist and Curator of Archaeobotany and South America Archaeology Emerita at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. Her current projects include the investigation of prehistoric influences on Amazonian tropical forests and role of developmental plasticity in crop plant evolution. She is the author or editor of four books and more than 100 articles and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

New Perspectives on the evolution of Homo sapiens

Eleanor Scerri

When: Saturday 11 Sept. 13:00 CEST

When did humans become behaviourally, biologically, and ecologically ‘modern’, and how can the ancestry of contemporary humans around the globe be traced into the deep past? These four aspects are central to debates on human evolution, and yet represent distinctive processes that are surprisingly weakly related. In this talk, current understanding of these processes and their interrelationships are reviewed, revealing a temporally, geographically, and ecologically expansive origins story. From deserts to rainforests, the human evolutionary process between ~300 and 60 thousand years ago was pan-African, fragmented, and at times also involved parts of Southwest Asia. The emerging picture of a structured, metapopulation origin for our species bypasses inflexible definitions and problematic epistemologies to understand evolutionary processes that are both continuous and complex. While a number of evolutionary scenarios are consistent with the available data, a single African birthplace for our species can no longer be supported, leading to new questions and research avenues.

Biography

Eleanor Scerri is the W2 head of the “Lise Meitner” Pan-African Research Group, an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on early Homo sapiens demography and its cultural and ecological legacies and feedbacks. She is currently running a major fieldwork programme across a West African transect to elucidate human evolutionary processes in this understudied region. In addition to this, she has also established a fieldwork programme on Malta that is investigating climate change and the Deep Anthropocene from the perspective of an ‘island laboratory’. Her research interests also include methods development, with a particular focus on machine learning. She has authored over 50 scientific papers as well as writing regular popular science contributions. Eleanor is also an Associate Professor in Archaeology at the University of Malta and a Faculty Member of the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Cologne.

Baltic-Pontic contact space in 4th and 3rd millennium BC

Marzena Szmyt

When: Thursday 9 Sept. 13:00 CEST

The topic of the lecture will be some questions from the prehistory of areas situated between two seas: the Baltic in the north-west and the Black in the south-east. The territory in question is located between two big rivers - the Vistula and Dnieper. Despite many essential differences, in the 4th and 3rd millennium BC the areas between the Vistula and Dnieper rivers were covered by a network of multi-directional circulation of peoples, cultural patterns and innovations. This network gradually commanded an increasingly greater area populated by communities of agrarian or early pastoral way of life. Various forms of their relations have been identified including cohabitation, cooperation or competition. The intensity of these relationships justifies using the name Baltic-Pontic contact space.

Biography

Marzena Szmyt is prehistorian, professor at the Faculty of Archaeology, Adam Mickiewicz University and director of the Archaeological Museum in Poznań, Poland. Her archaeological studies are focused on 4th and 3rd mill. BC in Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. on the millennia when many important social ideas, technical innovations and cultural changes have been created. The main topic of her studies is a wide communication network known the so called Globular Amphora culture. Area of her studies developed in three steps. First it was a settlement agglomeration of the Kujawy – a region on the Polish Lowland where she excavated many sites. Later she extended her interests and studied the problem of the East European direction of spread of the Central European cultural patterns. On the next step she focused on relationships between Central and Eastern Europe in the 4th and 3rd mill. BC. Her research applies archaeological, geoarchaeological and bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct past social and economic organization and their environmental consequences.

30 Years of Contemporary Archaeology: Gains in Knowledge - Challenges - Opportunities and Future Tasks

Claudia Theune

When: Friday 10 Sept. 13:00 CEST

For about 30 years, sites of the 20th century have been archaeologically investigated in Europe and further afield. The starting point, and without doubt a strong focus, are the investigations at sites of National Socialist terror. Initially focused on Germany and Poland, internment camps were soon investigated in numerous other countries around the world, exposing the structures lying beneath the grassy surface, and recovering countless small and large objects. It became clear quickly that new insights into the world of the camps, the killing and the struggle to survive, could be gained from the close study of the material remains. Such insight could not be obtained from other sources. The excavations conducted have also brought significant challenges due in no small measure to the vast quantities of artefacts. It is a struggle to archive such material in museums and research facilities. It is also testing to address conservation and restoration. These matters require enormous effort. However, our awakening to the archaeology of our more recent past offers the opportunity to deal not only with conflicts of the 20th century, but also to look at numerous other aspects of life during this recent past and to pose questions and use the strengths of archaeological methods to realise new insights.

Biography

Claudia Theune, studies at the Philipps-Universität Marburg (1979-1988; PhD 1988), project assistant (1989-1994), post-doctoral assistant at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1994-2000; habilitation 2001), senior assistant at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2001-2006), since 2007 professor of historical archaeology at the University of Vienna. Main research areas: conflict archaeology 20th century; coping strategies in extreme situations; internment camps; settlements and living conditions in marginal environments in the Middle Ages and modern times.