What's new on the Italian Middle Paleolithic?

I'm traveling this week, participating in the Roundtable of the Middle Palaeolithic of Italy hosted by the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies(http://camnes.org), which takes place in Florence this coming Thursday and Friday (Feb. 9-10, 2012). I'm really looking forward to it, and looking at the final program, it sounds like a good range of perspectives and regional records will be discussed, which should make for good discussion. This is important given that an underappreciated dimensions of the Italian MP is how varied it is, which really is not al that surprising when you consider the topographic and geographic variability of the peninsula (see e.g., Milliken 2007 for a summary). If possible, I'll try to live blog some of the conference, and I should mention that the organizers have said that the conference presentations should be streamable in real time... I'll update this post accordingly when I have the final details.

Front Range Neanderthal Workshop - UC Denver, Dec. 11

In one of my last posts, I mentioned in passing that I'm hosting a workshop on the UC Denver campus this coming Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010. The event - the Front Range Neanderthal Workshop - is to be held in the historic Tivoli Building which currently serves as the student union on our campus (but used to house the Tivoli Brewing Company and still is the only place you can get a beer on campus these days).

The rationale for the workshop is pretty simple: there's quite a few people doing Neanderthal/Paleolithic research within about a two-hour drive from Denver, all of whom are doing really interesting research. In fact, I'd even go as far as saying that the density of Neanderthal specialists along the Front Range is among the highest outside of Europe. Yet, for a variety of reasons, we rarely come together to take full benefit of each other's expertise or bounce ideas off of one another. Sure, nowadays, you could argue that face-to-face interaction is not necessary, but my view is that nothing replaces direct interaction.

So with that in mind, I invited colleagues from my own institution, CU Boulder, Colorado State University (where I had a wonderful time when I gave a talk there last month - thanks to Chris and Mica for setting it up!), UC Colorado Springs, Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the University of Wyoming, to congregate on the UC Denver campus so we can give each other an overview of and comment on our ongoing research. As well, I've invited students to present posters on some of their own project, so that they can get some feedback on their ongoing projects from specialists in the field. Here's the program of the day:

9:15 - The Middle and Upper Pleistocene Record of Western Europe and South Africa: Similarities and Differences.
P. Villa, CU Museum of Natural History

9:40 - How to Think like a Neandertal.
T. Wynn & F. Coolidge, UC Colorado Springs

10:05 - The Paleobiogeography of Central Asia: Addressing the Validity of a Neandertal Range.
M. Glantz, Colorado State University

10:30 Coffee break

10:45 - 'Necessity is the Mother of Invention': Late Neanderthal Cultural Innovation in Context
J. Riel-Salvatore, UC Denver

11:10 - The Neandertal-Modern Human Biocultural Transition in South-Central Europe: The Evidence From Croatia.
J.C. Ahern et al., University of Wyoming

11:35 - The Early Upper Paleolithic of Eastern Europe Reconsidered..
J.F. Hoffecker, CU Boulder

12:00 - The Upper Paleolithic Levels at Ksar Akil, Lebanon, and the Levantine Aurignacian.
J. Williams, SWCA

12:30 - Student poster session:

  T. Beeton et al.: GIS Modeling of Hominin Landscape Exploitation Strategies in Central Asia.

  L. Denton: The Internal Structure of Shovel Shaped Incisors Revealed.

   I.C. Ludeke et al.: Contrasting Neanderthal and Homo sapiens Use of Space at Riparo Bombrini, Italy.

  I. Riley et al.: Evaluating the Ballistic Properties of Levallois Points from ‘Ain Difla (Jordan).

  C.J. Tinti: Understanding Patterned Behaviors through the Analysis of Femoral Neck Torsion.

Two of these posters are by some of my own students, Ingrid Ludeke and Ian Riley, who are presenting preliminary results of really interesting projects we've been working on together for the past semester.

The talks and poster session are open to the public, provided interested parties register by contacting me directly (replace the dot by, well, dots!). There's also a roundtable in the afternoon that includes my UC Denver colleagues D. Tracer and C. Musiba, as well as S. Nash of the DMNS, but that is closed to the public. If you want more info, you can also download the program in pdf format.

In any case, here's to hoping I haven't jinxed the event by talking about it before it happens (they're predicting snow on Saturday morning, of course), but I really think it's going to be a lot of fun on top of being a great occasion to hear about some really forward-looking research by very active scholars in the field.

Café Scientifique postmortem

My Colorado Café Scientifique talk this past Monday went very well, with about 100 people crammed upstairs at Brooklyn's and firing off over an hour's worth of questions at yours truly. It was great fun, and many thanks to Eric Meer and John Cohen for all their hard work setting it up and running the two incarnations of Colorado Café Scientifique. 

If you live in the Denver and have an interest in science, definitely try to attend their lectures; I can guarantee you won't regret it. I also wasn't aware of this, but I was told that the Colorado Café is one of the biggest in North America, and its monthly talks are always very well attended. Yet another reason to like life in Denver!

Field blogging

I'm in Italy conducting a bit of fieldwork for a short while. While here, I'll be giving a public conference at the Museo Archeologico del Finale in Finale Ligure next Saturday, May 29, 2010.

"30mila anni fa a Finale Ligure: Nuove acquisizioni sul Paleolitico della Caverna delle Arene Candide // 30,000 Years Ago in Finale Ligure: New insights on the Paleolithic of the Caverna delle Arene Candide."

Saturday May 29 2010, 15.30
Museo Archeologico del Finale
Chiostri di Santa Caterina in Finalborgo (Finale Ligure - SV)

So, if you're in southern France or northern Italy that day, definitely come by! Can't make it? You can read a bit about what we've been up to on UC Denver's Network site.

2010 Paleoanthropology Society preliminary program

The preliminary program of the 2010 annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society (which will take place in St. Louis on April 13-14, 2010, just prior to the Society for American Archaeology's 75th annual meeting) is now up on their web site. Looks like it'll be a good one, with lots of Paleolithic archaeology presentations, as is usual when the Paleo's are held in conjunction with the SAAs.

Paleo goodness at the 2010 SAAs

The preliminary program of the 75th annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in St. Louis (April 14-18) was waiting for me when I returned to my office after the winter break. As is usually the case when the SAAs are held jointly with the Paleoanthropology Society meetings, this year will be an interesting one for the paleo-minded among us. Among many other symposia to be held at the SAAs, these four look like they might be well worth attending:

Results of the new excavations at the Middle Paleolithic site of Roc de Marsal (Thursday morning);

The roots of the Middle Paleolithic: An uniquely Eurasian evolutionary development (Thursday afternoon);

The Aurignacian of the Swabian Jura, southwestern Germany (Friday afternoon);

Human responses to Younger Dryas in the northern hemisphere (Saturday morning).

See you there!

Paper or poster?

Martin at Aardvarchaeology has a post that, among other things, discusses how to engagingly present (he calls it "perform") a paper in the context of a scientific conference. Specifically, he suggests:

• Never ever read a prepared text out loud. Speak from brief notes or a slide show. It is better to have five lines of summary text in ball-point pen on the back of your hand than a manuscript.
• Do you have reason to believe that a considerable part of your audience a) does not know anything about the subject, b) does not yet care about the subject? Then make sure that you start your talk by setting the scene with some background info (a few maps, a time line, a landscape view or two), and above all explain why you care. Why is your subject interesting?
• When presenting a scientific study, do not rattle off data and descriptions. Start with questions, explain how you came up with them, and then present only enough data (in overview format) that you can make a plausible argument in favour of some answer to each question. If you have no questions or no argument, do not agree to make a presentation.

This is good, solid advice, if you ask me. Podium presentations need to be somewhat dynamic in order to keep an audience interested, especially those comprised of people that are not necessarily there to hear you in the first place, as is true of too many general sessions at the SAAs, for instance. A derived side effect is that you're unlikely to get good feedback on a paper that's not clear, succinct and well presented. I don't know how I feel about a complete lack of reading... from my perspective, I think that writing a conference paper using colloquial language and reading from it (note: not reading it) can be a good alternative, especially for presenters still new to the practice or whose first language is not English. Ideally, a paper written that way can be rehearsed ahead of time, with the resulting presentation being relatively fluid, comparatively jargon-free and more engaging than a straight read of an academic paper.

For people who don't have a lot of experience presenting (and who have a lot of ideas or material they want to discuss), I actually think that writing out what you want to say is good practice. That's mainly because it takes about 2 minutes to read one page of double-spaced text at a pace that won't lose your audience. So if you have 15 minutes to present a paper, what you have to say should fit in 7.5 pages. Under the best of circumstances, you can then boil down that presentation into a series of key points tethered to specific graphs and figures.

That said, when it boils down to it, why would you choose a paper as the format to present your work? There's a stigma that somehow places papers 'above' posters in terms of prestige and effectiveness in the academic imagination. To a large degree, I think it derives from the fact that professional organizations still implicitly devalue the poster option when they ask questions like "would you be willing to present your work as a poster if there is no room in the regular presentation schedule" during the submission process; I've never seen the opposite option being offered (would you be willing to present your poster as a paper), which I think is pretty telling.

And that's really a shame because, in my experience, the one constant about these two formats is that you unquestionably get more feedback, questions and one-on-one interaction as a result of presenting a poster. From my perspective, the relative merits of posters and papers depend on the context: what are you talking about, what audience are you trying to reach, how comfortable do you feel speaking in public.

First, if you're presenting research that's mainly theoretical, then yes, a paper's probably the way to go. For just about anything else, I think a poster can be just as good - and in many cases, maybe even better - a venue as a poster. If a conference presentation is a condensed version of a research paper boiled down to its most essential three or four graphs, what do you think is the more effective way of presenting these data: on separate slides that the viewer can't go back to, or as a composite on a poster which allows the viewer to jump back and forth between them? In addition, since they're hard copies, posters have the virtue of being more amenable to tweaking to emphasize certain aspects or make a point. By that I mean that I've seen posters comprising all sorts of interesting data visualization strategies that are unavailable to slide and PowerPoint presentations. For instance, I distinctly remember one poster whose presenter overlaid sets of transparencies over the stratigraphic profiles that was the main figure on her poster in order to better show concentrations of artifacts and organic compounds at a site. And at last year's Paleo meetings, there was at least one poster presenter who had set up a laptop next to his poster on which he was running the simulation he had used in his study so he could walk people through the various steps of his analysis. All of that to say, that I think you have a lot more freedom in terms of how you present your work, which overall makes for better communication and more memorable work. Also, each poster means one less potentially horrid, clunky and poorly designed PowerPoint presentation which are unfortunately too common at meetings (and yes, I mean you, Dr. Lightredfontondarkredbackground... you know who you are and you owe me some new eyes)!

But to me, the real plus of giving a poster is the interaction and exposure it can give you. For one thing, you usually have 2-3 hours during which your poster is exposed, which in theory is that much longer than 15 minutes to have people come see it. In other words, posters are easier to fit in a schedule than individual talks... since talks are almost always off schedule for some reason, this means that even people who make it to the time your podium presentation's supposed to take place may not end up seeing it. In that light, posters are good because you're at the same spot for a long time, which makes it easier for people to come see it when they have a bit of time. Additionally, many people will end up strolling through poster sessions as a productive way to kill time between papers they want to try to catch, which means that a wide range of people will at the very least see your poster. And if you see someone whose opinion you're especially interested in, you can always ask them for it when you see them walk by. And you never know who will walk by, really, which means that the likelihood of making useful, unexpected contacts is always there (and for that reason, I usually try to have 11x17 versions of my poster to hand out, along with my contact info).

Which brings me to my last point, namely that posters actually give you the chance to field questions people may have about it, which is not always possible in paper sessions, where papers are often tightly squeezed, with little time for discussion of specific aspects of individual papers. A poster can give you the opportunity to get much better and direct feedback than a paper will. What is more, you also don't have to fret about engagingly reading your poster to an audience: people can either read through it themselves or ask you for a condensed summary, which is more than OK to give in colloquial language since you're actually interacting with someone as opposed to addressing an anonymous audience. So, especially if you're a first-time presenter or not especially comfortable at public speaking, that makes for a great, less nerve-wracking experience. And if you end up standing in front of a poster than no one stops to look at (which I've never seen happen, really), just ask yourself whether that's much worse than the alternative of actually having to read out your paper to an empty room... at least with a poster, you can leave early!

The Paleolithic of the Middle East

If you're interested in the Paleolithic archaeology of the Middle East and surrounding regions, I'd like to point you towards the web site of a recent conference that addressed specifically that topic. The symposium was entitled "The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in the Middle East and Neighbouring Regions" and was hosted by the Institute for Prehistory and Archaeological Science of the University of Basel (Switzerland). The program and abstracts are available online and emphasize the range of interesting research that is currently going on in that part of the world.

Hat tip: F. Biglari.

2008 Paleoanthropology Society Meeting preliminary program is available

The preliminary program of this year's Paleoanthropology Society meetings (March 25-26, 2008) is now available as a pdf. It looks like it will be another exceedingly interesting year to attend!

2008 SAA preliminary program is up!

The preliminary program of the 2008 Society for American Archaeology annual meetings (to be held in Vancouver, Canada!) is now available online as a pdf. This one promises to be a good one for paleo-minded people. In addition to at least four general sessions devoted to the Paleolithic, the following symposia piqued my interest:

FROM THE PECOS TO THE PALEOLITHIC: PAPERS IN HONOR OF ARTHUR J. JELINEK (organized by Deb Olszewski and Harold Dibble)

SPECIALIZATION, INTENSIFICATION AND DIVERSIFICATION IN ANIMAL EXPLOITATION STRATEGIES DURING THE LATE PLEISTOCENE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN (organized by Natalie Munro and Levent Atici)

HOMININ BEHAVIORAL VARIATION DURING THE PLEISTOCENE AND EARLY HOLOCENE IN EAST ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA (organized by Christopher Norton, Yin-Man Lam and Jennie Jin)

NEW VIEWS ON ANCIENT AFRICA-PAPERS IN HONOR OF C. GARTH SAMPSON (organized by Tom Minichillo and Britt Bousman)

ANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO PALAEOLITHIC TECHNOLOGIES (organized by Stephen J. Lycett and Parth R. Chauhan)

And, in the interest of shameless self-promotion,

NICHE CONSTRUCTION THEORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY (organized by Julien Riel-Salvatore and Lydia Pyne). If you're interested, you can find out more information on our session here.

Of course, the SAAs this year coincide with the annual meetings of the Paleoanthropology Society, which should make it even more interesting to be in Vancouver the week of March 23-30! See you there

Archéologues québécois autour du monde / Québec archaeologists around the world

Here's some news about a conference entitled "Archéologues québécois autour du monde" (Québec archaeologists around the world) which will highlight the variety of archaeological research projects being undertaken by archaeologists residing in my fair province. It will be held in Montréal's Pointe-à-Callière Museum next weekend. You can check out a list of presenters and abstracts here (all in French, except for one). The topics are pretty far-ranging, but there's a couple of paleo-themed presentations that should be most interesting.

Prehistoric Art in Italy - Conference

The IIPP now has available on its web site the program (in pdf format) of its 42nd annual scientific meeting. This year's topic will be "Prehistoric Art in Italy," and the meeting will be held 9-13 October, 2007 in Trento, Riva del Garda and Val Camonica. Included are the titles of all the papers and posters to be presented at the conference, as well as a list of the excursions. If you're around those parts in October, this sounds like a must.