There's a number of conferences coming up, and I thought you might be interested, so here they come:

African Experimental Archaeology Conference, March 20-22, Johannesburg. More info and registration here.

The 12th North American Textile Conservation Conference will take place in Canada, September 23-29, 2019. Their CfP is now open, and the topic is "Lessons Learned: Textile Conservation - Then and Now".

There's a conference on experimental Music Archaeology, April 12-14, in Brandenburg; more info and contact information here.

The CTR in Copenhagen is running a Saxo Summer School programme: "Textiles and Fashion in Theory and Practice through 3000 Years". It's a 10-day programme, more info on the CTR homepage.

The Dombauhütte Paderborn will have a bell founding event June 23-29, where a bell of 11th century style will be cast using 1th century methods. More info can be found on the facebook event page and on the Dombauhütte website.

 

Just in case you are looking for an excuse to travel to sunny Spain in September, there will be the European Association of Archaeologists' conference. And if you happen to be interested in and researching about Elite culture, here's a specific call for papers for a session about this, that is session #431: “Elite culture in medieval and post-medieval archaeology” at the 24^th EAA Annual Meeting, which will be held in Barcelona, Spain from 5-8 September 2018 (https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA2018/).

Session organisers are Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rainer Atzbach, Aarhus University, Denmark, PD Dr. Felix Biermann, University of Greifswald, Germany and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Müller, Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Germany.

Their session seeks to explore new ways to identify elites in the archaeological source material during the 12th until the 18th centuries. Elite is understood as a group of persons belonging to the upper echelons of society in a town, territory or dominion in terms of military, economic, religious or political power, and even education. This group of peers is characterised by being involved in decision-making processes in their homestead. Moreover, its network includes contacts to similar groups in other areas. The contributions in this session are invited to focus upon archaeological approaches available to identify remains of this powerful group. Therefore, presentations should discuss diachronic or supra-regional features and not just single contexts such as graves, monuments, latrines, or outstanding precious finds. Critical reviews of traditional approaches based upon import, prestigious goods, written sources etc., or new perspectives on these classic elite markers are welcome.

The session intends to discuss the following questions:
Theoretical background - what characterises elite? Staging and distinction – is elite defined by other societal classes and/or its members? How far is it possible to spot elite while tracing innovative or traditional products? In terms of norms and practice: is it possible to identify rule setters and rule breakers in archaeological source material? Do the upper layer of society and the elite group always coincide? Supply and demand: what is the relationship between procurement of exotic/import/vintage goods and elites? Between conspicuous consumption and understatement – what does elite show off?

The Call for Papers is now open at: https://eaa.klinkhamergroup.com/eaa2018/
For submitting your abstract you have to verify your EAA membership with your EAA credentials (EAA ID, username, password). For assistance with retrieving your credentials, please contact the EAA Secretariat at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. New members, please sign up for EAA membership first at www.e-a-a.org. You can either pay your membership fees upon signing up or at any time before 31 March 2018 when registering for the Annual Meeting at www.e-a-a.org/eaa2018.

Deadline for sending your abstract is the 15^th of February 2018, 23:59 CET.

 

As every year, sometime in the spring, planning starts for that certain week-long event in November that makes me exhausted, happy, incredibly tired, stressed out and full of old-textile-y bliss all at the same time. Oh, and full of coffee and chocolate, too.

I am, of course, talking about the European Textile Forum, which will again take place in November this year, again in beautiful Mayen on the premises of LEA. This year, we'll be looking at silk as our focus topic (but as always, we're open to other topics as well). The Forum week will be November 6 to 12, as usually with a mix of theoretical and practical. The Call for Papers is out now, and registration is open, too.

I am really, really looking forward to getting to know more textile people, learning more on different aspects of silk and possibly also getting an experiment or two under way again. Waiting for registrations and paper proposals to come in always feels a bit like waiting to open a present!

So - I'm all happy, pleasant anticipation for now. If you want to know more about the Forum, or (even better!) want to participate, you can read more and register via the links above.

Aaaah, Textile Forum. One full week of lovely textile madness... coming right up.

Here you go, actual archaeology-related content:

The next Experimental Archaeology Conference (the tenth!) will take place in Leiden, Netherlands, Thursday, 20 April, 2017 to Saturday, 22 April, 2017. The Call for Papers is currently up, so if you'd like to submit something or just want more information, you can go here.

This is not your cup of tea? Or your loaf of cheese? Well, maybe this is: A bronze age ceramic pot found in Denmark contains residue of animal fat that might be from an attempt to make cheese.

Still not interesting? Maybe I can get you with this, then - Means of Exchange: Dealing with Silver in the Viking Age is the current free e-book of the month from Aarhus University.

The 10th Experimental Archaeology Conference will be held in Leiden, Netherlands, on April 20-22 2017. The Call for Papers is still open until September 1, so if you'd like to offer a presentation, you should do so soon.

The Virtual Library for Art, arthistoricum.net, has a full-text server called ART-Dok, made available by Heidelberg University Library. It offers members of the academic community worldwide the opportunity to publish their texts in electronic format on the internet at no charge. As for now, it provides free full-text access to 4,194 publications. You can also do fulltext searches through the texts. Intrigued? Go here to find the publications archive.

Textilis has a blog post about transferring embroidery designs in the 18th century.

The paper about the dyeing experiments done at the European Textile Forum in relation to the Pompeii lead vats, published in EXARC, has now gone open access: Investigating the Influence of the Kettle Material on Dyeing in the Industry of Pompeii.
And finally, totally unrelated and only here because of its sheer weirdness - did you know that there was a trend to dye armpit hair in bright colours, a while ago? I didn't, until this morning...

We've been planning the next European Textile Forum for a while - in fact, starting to look for a good date usually takes place very shortly after a Forum has finished, and we have all recovered a little bit. Then come a few months of not much ETF-related work (apart from thinking about a focus topic), and then, suddenly, it occurs to me that it's high time to write and send out a Call for Papers.

This is accompanied by putting together and testing a registration form, which usually meant quite a bit of headache and cursing. This year, it was actually easier even though I had to do the form again from scratch, as the Forum webpage has migrated to Joomla!. I'm quite, quite happy about this change, as it means more possibilities and less html-writing work for me.

So - I've finished writing the CfP, the website is almost ready to go live with the registration, I'm only waiting for a last little bit of feedback so I can set things in motion tomorrow... and I'm already looking forward to a wonderful conference again!

Oh, and if you'd like to have more info about the Forum, here's a brand new review of last year's conference.

 

There are two Calls for Papers open currently that have come to my attention (which usually happens through an email in my inbox). The first one is for Assemblage, Sheffield's peer-reviewed graduate journal of archaeology. Assemblage is currently seeking submissions for its 15th issue. Since 1996, assemblage has been run by postgraduate students at the University of Sheffield, and publishes articles and features on a wide array of topics related to the field of archaeology.

The publishers invite postgraduates and early career researchers to email articles between 3,000 and 5,000 words to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 1 April, 2016.

You can access previous issues and view submission guidelines at http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/.

The second CfP is really exciting, at least to me - as it's for NESAT! The next conference now has not only a place (Liberec in the Czech Republic), but also a date (May 22-26). The CfP is also open and will remain so until May 31. The organisers encourage papers that present lesser-known or recently excavated textiles, techniques and iconography that will generate discussion and exchange of information among conference attendees. In addition, this conference will include a poster session. Posters can be focused on any topic related to
archaeological textiles, but should be primarily visual.

You can find the schedule for the conference preparation here on the NESAT website, and the first entry also links to the full call as a pdf file.