The third International Congress on Archaeological Sciences in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (ICAS-EMME 3) was held from March 14-18, 2022 in Nicosia, Cyprus. This conference, organized by The Cyprus Institute, provided valuable opportunities for researchers engaged in various disciplines in the region to share their work with the wider scientific community. As part of this year’s organizing committee, it was my pleasure to arrange and chair – in collaboration with my fellow doctoral students at The Cyprus Institute’s Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center (STRAC) – the first graduate session, entitled Graduate Research in Archeological Sciences in the EMME Region which included both oral and poster presentations.
We received a number of excellent abstracts and were delighted to be able to accept them all. Topics ranged from zooarchaeology and human osteology to formation processes, architectural analysis, and public archaeology. The session took place on March 17th (for the conference program, see https://icasemme.cyi.ac.cy/program and given the notable praise that the student presentations received from many of the conference participants, it is safe to say that the graduate session was a success – thanks in large part to the work of the student speakers and poster presenters. Hopefully, the session will be offered again as part of the next ICAS-EMME, so that more student work can be showcased within the frame of the conference in the future.
– Carly Henkel
As one of the graduate students who participated in the conference, I can report that the vivid and challenging graduate session was indeed a great venue for fruitful discussions in a friendly environment. For me it offered the chance to present part of my Ph.D. research in a paper entitled “From excavating bones to reconstructing funerary practices: contextualizing skeletal evidence for the post-funerary treatment of the dead at the Prepalatial and Protopalatial Petras cemetery (3000-1800 BCE), Siteia, Crete.” The talk highlighted new evidence for Early and Middle Minoan funerary practices at the Petras cemetery and discussed novel ways to integrate skeletal and other archaeological evidence in order to explore past attitudes towards death and their social connotations.
It was thus a great pleasure to learn that my paper together with E. Ganiatsou’s presentation on ancient weaning practices (Title: Breastfeeding and weaning patterns in ancient Thessaloniki through the analysis of incremental human dentine) were awarded first prizes. The awards include both an opportunity to publish the papers in the distinguished Journal of Archaeological Science (Elsevier) and a small honorarium from the Society for Archaeological Science (SAS). The biggest prize, however, was the opportunity to meet new and interested researchers, to share our knowledge and experience, and to discuss the problems we face regarding both our dissertations and post doctorate plans within current academia. Most importantly, we all share the same passion and stand in solidarity with each other to help replace bullying and negative competition in the academic environment.
Sotiria Kiorpe