The 21st Roman Military Equipment Conference will take place in Brno next year, June 2-6. Conference topic is "Body armour and defensive equipment" which, of course, will include some textile elements. 

If you're interested in the conference, you can find out more about it on their webpage.  

Sometimes, info turns up at unexpected times and unexpected places - just like this info about a conference with Stone Age clothing as the focus topic. There's not so much evidence (because of not so much in organic finds from back then), but the programme also includes body ornamentation.

The conference is in Halle/Saale, taking place September 25-28, and conference language is English. You can find out more about it, and register, on this webpage. Registration is open until September 15.

One of the things I really love about conferences is getting to meet and to connect with new people as well as catching up with folks that I already know. 

When I was going to my first conferences, I was still quite shy in approaching people - and I do remember that it felt so nice when, as you're approaching one of the small tables in a coffee break that people stand around, someone shifts to make space for you to join. (That, back then, was an easy way to join a random group of people, because you obviously need some place to put your coffee cup to be able to wrangle your coffee break snack... so it didn't feel so much like I was sneaking up and trying to impose myself on other people.)

Since then, I've gotten less shy regarding the approach of new people - but I still remember how nice it was to be welcomed by someone shifting to tacitly invite me into their circle. So, since then, I have always tried to shift and make space when someone comes close to the table I'm at. And today, by random chance, I found out that there's a name for this: The Pac-Man Rule. The short version is: When you're part of a circle in a conference (whether around a table or not), always leave an open space in the circle for someone else to join. (But do go and read the full post behind the link, it's worth it.)

Leeds International Medieval Congress is having its CfPs running, and one of the sessions will be "Threads of Knowledge": 

Enter your text here ...

I'm off on the "Neu verflechten" conference, where I will be presenting (together with Tracy Niepold) once more about the Shiny Dead Cow Guts, also known as membrane thread project. This time, the title is so long that it almost feels like it's half a presentation by itself:

I'm always vaguely amused when titles (or subtitles) end up rather long. I don't mind them at all, since it's usually quite descriptive and so you know what awaits you - but it seems to be a thing especially in archaeology context. When I was studying, we had to fill out forms to get our "Schein" for attending something, and you'd usually run out of space because stuff was so wordy. It started already with trying to fit "Archäologie des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit" on the rather short line for what you are studying, and went on to cramming "Very long and rather descriptive title with mention of the timespan in words or if it's in numbers then something else making it really long" into the part of the form that wanted you to state the name of the course. Good times! (And no wonder we'd internally all write "AMANZ".)

As I'll be on the conference for the next two days, too, there will be no blogging until next week!

The Early Textiles Study Group conference this year is taking place in Cambridge, Britain - or you can join in virtually online. Registrations for both kinds of attendance is now open, and you can have a look at the preliminary programme on their website, too.

 Edges are definitely a very interesting topic!

I'm currently working on translating (and shortening...) our NESAT presentation for an upcoming conference in German, and this, together with some other things, has made me ponder how presentations at NESAT, but also other conferences, have changed during the past years. Or maybe I should really say decades, but that makes me feel old.

Back when I started out in Uni, standard was still having slides, and one of the guidelines that a tutoring archaeologist gave us was two slides (shown in parallel) per minute when you are planning your presentation. 

Then came the advent of PowerPoint, and the utter freedom to have as much text, and as many pictures, as you wanted. In as quick a sequence as you wished to, because you're doing the clicking yourself and don't have to say "weiter" (or knock) so your helper puts in the next slide.

At the last NESAT, we had one old-style paper presentation (with powerpoint, but the rest of how it was designed was really more like back when slides were the usual thing), and the rest of them were all "modern style". The big difference, for me, was that the old-style presentation was slow enough in both text and images that you had enough time to jot down the key points and you could even have made a quick sketch of the key parts of the images. With the modern style presentations, you stand no chance. Information density and slide speed is so high that you cannot write fast enough for all the key points, let alone try and sketch something. Very few exceptions apply, but for me, the way to get the most out of the papers in modern style is to write down the things I find important or interesting that the speaker says, but that are not written as bullet points on the corresponding slide - and I make a photo of the slide in addition to that. 

Thinking back, this has changed over the past years too, I remember being able to write down more of the content that was presented. I don't think I have gotten that much slower in writing; my impression really is that the papers have become more densely packed with information all the time. (I do confess guilty of trying to fit as much into my presentations as possible, so I have definitely played my part in this development. Case in point - our NESAT presentation had 47 slides in total, for a run time of max 20 minutes. That's about 25.5 seconds per slide if you distribute the time equally.)

Looking at it like this, it's a small wonder we were all so tired after the conference days! It also seems to be quite different in other disciplines... which I also find very interesting. Maybe I should venture out to more neighbouring discipline conferences in the near future, to compare.