A few things/notices/links have accumulated again, and here's getting them out to you:

 - The European Association of Archaeology will have its annual meeting 1-5 September, in the Netherlands. The conference will include a session called "Threads to the past: novel methods for investigation of archaeological textiles and other organic materials". You can get more info on the conference homepage http://www.eaa2010.nl/.

 - The International Symposium and Exhibition on Natural Dyes and Colorants (ISEND) 2011 Europe will take place in La Rochelle, on the west coast of France, from 24 - 30 April 2011. Call for Papers is still open until 30 April 2010. You can find more information about ISEND 2011 Europe on the website http://www.isend2011.com.


 - And don't forget the Textile Forum Call for Papers and registration!

Not only one, but two (almost three) calls that I can call out here today. If you know somebody who might be interested in either of these events, please pass the Call on!

First of all, the Call for Papers for the EXAR conference 2010 is up and running. EXAR's topic is Experimental Archaeology in Universities 2010. You can get to the full invitation and the registration form for the conference in Berlin, which will take place on October 8-10 2010, via EXAR's website.

And then there is the Call for Papers and Call for Workshops for our own dear Textile Forum:

Working in historical textile crafts can be a very lonely affair. To help remedy this, we are again organising the European Textile Forum for people working in historical textile crafts. The event will take place September 6-12 2010 in ArcheoParc Schnals, South Tyrol/Italy.
The programme consists of three parts: Free time to work, try out things and talk about textile techniques in the mornings; the possibility to attend workshops about historical techniques in the afternoon; and a series of short paper sessions in the evening hours. We would like to present current projects, reconstructions, technical problems or research work during those talks. Poster presentations, including a "show-and-tell" of your current project in progress, are also very welcome.

The museum that generously hosts our Forum is very close to the place where Ötzi was found, in a valley in the South Tyrolean Alps. With this quite early background for the Forum week, we do not want to set a focus on single techniques; instead, we would like to think about and discuss the question of what makes a textile. Is it the material? The production technique? The use? The properties of the piece? What is the difference between a mat woven from grass and a mat woven from stiff threads? What concept does every single one of us have in mind when the word "textile" falls?
Papers or posters about this topic, or papers and posters about objects that are not "standard textile", are thus especially welcome.

We want to give up to thirty textile experts and enthusiasts the opportunity to meet at the museum for one whole week, each with his or her project(s), and there is free time to work, chat, demonstrate and talk about textiles and textile crafts during the day. The museum is open to the public and we welcome other weavers, spinners, dyers, to come so they can also sit, work and talk with both guests and participants. With this opportunity for everybody interested in textiles, we want to help establish a better communication between professionals and non-professionals like Living History enthusiasts. Evening paper sessions and workshop participation are for participants only.

We have organised an accommodation and full board for the participants. The lodgings are two- to six-bed rooms in a guesthouse, all rooms with shower and toilet en suite. If you prefer a more luxurious room, you can book your own accommodation in Unser Frau in Schnals. Full board consists of breakfast, lunch and dinner; water to drink will be available at all times, and coffee or tea can be bought at the museum café during the afternoon and the evening. Meals will be served in the museum café, providing even more opportunity to talk textiles. The conference fee, including accommodations and full board during the week, is 350 Euro per person. Workshops can be booked at additional cost.


For the Forum, we are looking for both paper or poster presentations and workshop offers. Workshops will take place in the afternoon and can take up to four hours per afternoon. They will be booked separately by the participants, and teachers will receive a reimbursement.
Due to space restrictions, there will be no market held at the Forum this year. We regret having to take this decision, but we hope to offer you a market opportunity again in the next Forum. However, we will put up a little "exhibition stand" for small goods, info leaflets or books that participants might want to present or sell on Saturday. If you have something for the exhibition stand, please contact us per mail and tell us about it.

To register for the Forum with or without a poster or paper presentation, please submit your current area of research, the title and abstract of your presentation (papers not longer than 20 minutes) until May 2 via the registration form http://www.textileforum.org/register_2010.html. If you would like to offer a workshop, please register and send an e-mail to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein. telling us the title and topic of your proposed workshop, time and space requirements, minimum and maximum number of participants and the cost per person (workshop cost plus approximate cost for materials). Please note that workshop offers have an earlier deadline and need to be made by April 15. The Forum workshops will be announced on the website on April 20.

For any questions left, you can contact us directly via Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein..

We are looking forward to a wonderful conference with you!

An hour or two after I had blogged yesterday, I received an e-mail from the layout lady at the publishing house telling me that the proofs are in the post, on their way to my place. So there's the second round of proofing coming up for today or, at latest, tomorrow.

In other news, the conference proceedings book from NESAT X is out, and date and main topic for NESAT XI have been announced - it will take place in Esslingen in 2011, focus will be methods in textile archaeology, and the poster session especially welcomes experimental archaeology topics. More info and registration form can be found on the official website www.nesat.org.

First of all, sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - the 6th of January is a holiday in Germany (and I think in several other countries as well), and I got sucked into that holiday spirit so much that I totally forgot to either tell you on the 5th or holiday-blog on the 6th. (Holiday spirit, in this case, means sleeping a little longer, then working on the still-lots-of-unpacked-stuff-situation, with some cake and some knitting sprinkled in.)

Regarding non-knitting, still-textile news, the homepage of NESAT has been updated - NESAT 11 will take place in 2011 in Esslingen, Germany. There is no more info up yet, though - so it's still suspense time!

In case you do not know NESAT (though if you read this blog, chances are you have heard of it), the name is an acronym for "North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles". The first conference was very small and took place back in the Eighties, and "North European" has since developed to include most of Europe - not only the North. The conferences take place every three years, in a different place, and include about all the big names and lots of juicy, brand-new archaeological textiles science. The publications are absolutely wonderful, and I have spent delightful hours with each and every one from the series (which is listed here).

Last time was the 10th NESAT conference, and it was the first time that the event was "opened up" and participants not giving a paper were allowed in. Before, it was always just a small circle of people, and there was no public call for papers. I think that taking this conference more public was a brilliant move, and it seems that lots of others thought so too - we were over one hundred conference participants. And I hope that NESAT 11 will be as wonderful, exciting and fun as the last one was (and I'll do my very best to be part of the fun).

Through a mail from my old Uni, I have just stumbled upon "Gradnet", an association that wants to make life a little easier for grad students by hosting an interdisciplinary and international conference, an opportunity for productive and critical exchange.

I haven't heard about them before (that's a small wonder and has much to do with both my topic and my work style, and little to do with them), but the programme of the next conference is online, and it looks quite large and quite nice.

The next conference takes place in Erlangen, from 20 to 22 November - so pretty soon - and you can check out their programme on the Gradnet website www.gradnet.de.

I probably won't be able to hop over there due to the move coming up on the next weekend, but I'd love to hear about it, so should you go there, please drop me a comment!

I'm back home again, up and running - and blogging (even if it's slightly later than usual due to a much-needed battle against sleep deficiencies). So what have I been up to in these last two weeks?

First, there was Tannenberg. The traditional season's end market and, like Freienfels, usually resembling something like a fair to see different craftspeople and sellers of medieval tools and paraphernalia. This year, however, Tannenberg was rather subdued in atmosphere and with much less participants than the years before. We all wondered why - maybe all the fear-mongering about bad times and recession, combined with real-life struggling of craftspeople and participants, have finally had their impact on the modern middle ages as well. Still, we had a very nice time in Tannenberg, with quite good weather - only one day of rain and drizzle, and not much muddyness at all - and met and chatted with many of our friends and colleagues.

After return on Monday, it was unpacking, drying, sorting out of things and then, for me, preparing for Hungary straight away. Since I had to finish the presentation too, Tuesday was quite short for that - but everything got packed up in time, clothes stuffed into a bag, the trusty laptop bundled up, and off I went to a wonderful and truly memorable conference in Százhalombatta, a town some thirty km from Budapest. The conference was both the EXARC meeting and the last meeting of liveARCH, a project connecting eight archaeological open air museums from eight different countries. It was wonderfully organised by the Matrica Museum and archaeological park of Százhalombatta, including lodgings and transfer from and to the airport (what luxury not to book anything beyond the flight). It was everything I wish for in a conference: lots of people with different experiences and points of view meeting for good, interesting and sometimes thought-provoking presentations, many academic discussions, common meals, excursions to both stretch the legs and see something else for a while (including something typical for the country and/or region), enough coffee breaks with sweets (yes, the local sweets are actually something I enjoy maybe too much on a conference) and more long, varied discussions. Because everything except, of course, the excursions, took place at the hotel and meals were also organised by the conference team, everyone was kept closely together, and there was no scattering to different watering holes for meals and during free time. And that is another thing that makes a successful conference, to me: Keeping everyone together so that networking, chatting, joking and discussing is made easy, because all the others are quite within reach.

And because during liveARCH it became very clear to everybody that there is one single key to good cooperation and to success with networking, perfectly summarised during one of the lectures as "communication, communication, communication", every evening the "liveARCH Social Club" was opened for having a drink and a chat or five between friends. And every evening I got to bed later and later... explaining the sleep deficiencies and, thus, the lateness of today's blog post.

I have received a call for papers (on the usual labyrinthine ways these things take) for next year's Early Textiles Study Group conference that will be held in the UK. The theme will be colour and the organisers are aiming for an even contribution of technical and sartorial papers.

So since the organiser in her original mail asked to pass this on to interested parties, for all the dyers and colour people out there, you can find the full CfP as a .pdf behind this link.