Landscape Archaeology Conference 2014 Part 1

The initial irritation of the fact that the organisers had mistakenly told us that we have a poster – only for me to find our names in the list of oral presenters AFTER the poster was sent to the printers - disappeared with the sympathetic conference in Rome. This was organised initially remotely from Amsterdam, so you can understand that all came into the place when all people where in the same place. After all, the international institutes in Rome have a long experience in organising multi-institute conferences during the conference season. The organisation was probably not helped by the fact that the conference was very near EAA in Istanbul where 3000 archaeologists met. In Rome we were 300 and some flew directly from Istanbul.

I had to pass Istanbul for time and money issues, but those who had been in Istanbul lauded the quality and pleasantness of LAC2014. Yes, some Italian colleagues did the sending a title in English and then speaking regardless in Italian, but it was nice to see the practitioners of the Italian topographic tradition taking their natural place within the landscape archaeology. There are slight differences in emphases and methods, but in principle, the lines are so similar at least the topographers do not see the difference. This is good, since it is just richness to have plentiful traditions.

The conference was organised in the Dutch and Swedish Institutes with the Belgian Institute and University of Rome “La Sapienza” adding to the spaces where different sessions and key note speeches took place. The conference celebrated the 400 years of official diplomatic relations between the two countries, Sweden and Holland. The institutes are side by side in Valle Giulia and the gardens were joined for the conference dinner and reception.

This blog is about the conference in general. I will next week return to the topics of the conference, slightly depending on how my own workshop on Tuesday will go. If it will be fabulous, I will probably write about it and leave the many details in LAC 2014 for a quieter week. Although the conference was otherwise marvellous, there were two sources of wonder: Why a small portion of posters were place around the corner in the Dutch institute when there was a lot of space in front of the Institute where most of the posters were? You can guess where ours was... And why it took so long for the Belgian and Dutch Institute to put the air condition of their lecture halls on? It was sauna all around.

The funniest moment of the conference was when the Dutch organisers and helpers of the conference found me and my three Swedish colleagues waiting to get in before the final reception. I had had both the two-hour poster session and our joint presentation during the final afternoon and all I needed after that was cold beer. Colleagues could provide a summary of the keynote speech on the novelties of landscape archaeology whereas we had a good discussion on the work practices at the Riksantivarieämbetet on the terrace while rehydrating.