Submit a paper to the CAA @ EAA session, bring your data to our data clinic, or attend our computational archaeology summer school immediately after EAA!
This year the EAA (European Association of Archaeologists) Annual Meeting is taking place between 5-8 September 2018 in the lovely city of Barcelona. We have prepared an exciting set of simulation-complexity-data related events.
During the conference we will be running a standard paper session: CAA@EAA: Computational Models in Archaeology (abstract below) focusing on formal, computational models in archaeology (not exclusively simulation, but we do like our ABMs ;). The abstract deadline is 15 February. You can submit your abstract via the EAA system.
On top of that throughout the conference we will offer Data Clinic – a personalised one-to-one consultation with data and modelling specialists (summary below). In order to give us a head-start with matching archaeologists to data experts we ask participants to submit a short summary outlining their data, research questions and the ideas they may already have via the standard route of the EAA system (please note, that as an alternative format it will not count towards the paper limit imposed by the EAA).
Finally, we are very excited to announce the Summer School in Digital Archaeology which will take place immediately after the EAA, between 10-14 September 2018. A week of hands-on tutorials, seminars, team challenges and intensive learning, the Summer School will provide an in depth training in formal computational models focusing on data modelling, network science, semantic web and agent-based modelling. Thanks to the generous support of the Complex Systems Society we are able to offer a number of bursaries for the participants. For more details please see the School website; we recommend to pre-register as soon as possible (pre-registration form).
CAA @ EAA: Computational Models in Archaeology
Theme:
Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format:
Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each
Models are pervasive in archaeology. In addition to the high volume of empirical archaeological research, there is a strong and constant interest among archaeologists and historians in questions regarding the nature, mechanisms and particularities of social and socio-natural processes and interactions in the past. However, for the most part these models are constructed using non-formal verbal arguments and conceptual hypothesis building, which makes it difficult to test them against available data or to understand the behaviour of more complex models of past phenomena.
The aim of this session is to discuss the role of formal computational modelling in archaeological theory-building and to showcase applications of the approach. This session will showcase the slowly changing trend in our discipline towards more common use of formal methods.
We invite contributions applying computational and quantitative methods such as GIS, data analysis and management, simulation, network science, ontologies, and others to study past phenomena concerned with societal change, human-environment interactions and various aspects of past systems such as economy, cultural evolution or migration. Methodological and theoretical papers on the benefits and challenges of quantification, the epistemology of formal methods and the use of archaeological material as a proxy for social processes are also welcome.
Main organiser:
dr Iza Romanowska (Spain), dr Luce Prignano (Spain), María Coto-Sarmiento (Spain), dr Tom Brughmans (United Kingdom), Ignacio Morer (Spain)
Archaeological Data Clinic. Personalised consulting to get the best of your data
Theme:
Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format:
Discussion session: Personalised consulting to get the best of archaeologial data. We will set up meetings with an expert in data analysis / network science / agent-based modelling.
In the ideal world we would all have enough time to learn statistics, data analysis, R, several foreign and ancient languages and to read the complete works by Foucault. In reality, most researchers artfully walk the thin line between knowing enough and bluffing. The aim of this workshop is to streamline the process by pairing archaeologists with data and computer science specialists.
- If you have a dataset and no idea what to do with it…
- if you think PCA/least cost paths / network analysis / agent-based modelling is the way forward for your project but you don’t know how to get started…
- If you need a second opinion to ensure that what you’ve already done makes sense…
…then this drop-in clinic is for you.
Let us know about your case by submitting an abstract with the following information:
- A few sentences project outline;
- Type and amount of data;
- Research question(s);
- What type of analysis you’d like to perform? (if known).
We will set up a meeting with an expert in data analysis / network science / agent-based modelling. They will help you to query and wrangle your data, to analyse and visualise it and to guide you on the next steps. They may help you choose the right software or point you towards a study where similar problems have been solved. In a nutshell, they will save you a lot of time and frustration and make your research go further!
Keywords:
Computational Modelling, Statistics, Network Analysis
Dr Luce Prignano (Spain), Dr Iza Romanowska (Spain), Dr Sergi Lozano (Spain), Dr Francesca Fulminante (United Kingdom), Dr Rob Witcher (United Kingdom), Dr Tom Brughmans (United Kingdom)
This position might be of interest to those with some strong computer science skills. The roman 
Archaeological Networks 