ALSF funds for English Heritage, NAS Conference 2008, Ancient Trade Conference, New IFA Group

ALSF funding for EH

Following the consultation between January and April 2008, Defra have determined that English Heritage will receive £1.5m per annum for the three calendar years 2008/9 to 2010/11. The consultation and responses can be found on the Defra website

The funding will be allocated exactly as proposed in the consultation documents. English Heritage will therefore distribute this funding against Theme 1 (Quarries) and Theme 2 (Marine).

The English Heritage ALSF Programme is managed by the Historic Environment Commissions Team through the same procedures as the Historic Environment Enabling Programme. For detailed information on application procedures please see the How to Apply page.

Please note that English Heritage will as a matter of course circulate applications to other distributing bodies, in particular Natural England and CEFAS.

Round 3 opened on 3rd August 2008. The scheme will run until 15th March 2011 at which point any outstanding projects will be closed and final payments retained.

Please note that all projects will need to comply with MoRPHE project management guidance, and must be aligned with an appropriate SHAPE Sub-Programme.

More information is available on the EH website.

NAS 2008 Conference

A new speaker has been added to the line-up for the conference, Dr Mark Holley of Michigan College. Mark will discuss new methods of rapid field survey of archaeological sites. Other speakers include: Matthew Harpster, Philip Robertson, Mike Williams, Rebecca Stalker, Mark Beattie-Edwards, and Gordon LePard.  Additional speakers will be announced.

If you would like to know more about the event, please visit the Conference pages of the NAS Website.

Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean Conference

This conference to be held on the 18-20 September 2008 in Madrid Spain is titled: Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean. It will seek to explore the contribution of maritime archaeology to the understanding of trade and exchange in the region of the ancient Mediterranean. Papers will examine issues such as sea routes and trade patterns, the links between shipwrecks and the ancient economy and between land-based archaeology and maritime commerce. The conference will also concentrate on the evidence from ports and shipwrecks and their connections with wider Mediterranean trading networks. Finally there will be a special session devoted to Egyptian production, ports and trading routes. For more information see here.

New IFA Special Interest Group

The inaugural Annual General Meeting of the IFA’s Geophysics Special Interest Group will be held at the offices of Birmingham Archaeology at 11.00 a.m. on Wednesday, the 1^st October, 2008.

An Agenda is attached together with a map showing the location of Birmingham Archaeology (Green Zone, Building G6) on the University of Birmingham Edgbaston Campus.

Call for Survey Participation

Flinders University masters Student Nicole Ortman is doing research for a thesis on the subject of “Exploring Practitioner’s Attitudes Towards In Situ Preservation and Storage for Underwater Cultural Heritage.”

She is currently looking for volunteers to assist in this project by completing a questionnaire which covers certain aspects of this topic. This questionnaire will be available via the software SurveyMonkey and should take no longer than 30 minutes to complete.

If you are interested in participating in this questionnaire, please contact: ortm0004@flinders.edu.au.

Other News

Thames Wrecks: Seven (that’s right) seven shipwrecks including a 17^th century warship and small vessels are being salvaged from the River Thames in a major archaeological operation. You can follow this story on Thames Shipwrecks: A Race against Time,  on Tuesday 26^th August 8-9pm on BBC 2.

Canoe Workshop: Members with a good memory may remember a dugout canoe workshop in Estonia that featured on a previous update. You can follow pictures and video of the workshop in Karuskose, Soomaa National Park on flickr and YouTube. (Don’t try this at home)

TAG Maritime Session, North Atlantic Research Agenda, European Maritime Archaeology Programmes, Festival of British Archaeology

TAG Maritime Conference Session: Maritime identities: museum, communal and personal uses of heritage

The forthcoming TAG conference in Southampton includes a maritime session. The call for papers is now open, and the deadline for submissions is the 1st September 2008.

This session explores the ever-expanding intersection of uses of the sea and uses of the past. Maritime heritage is a distinctive area of heritage and museum studies, maritime history and archaeology, as indicated by the rapidly growing genres of maritime museums and maritime history. The diverse meanings and manifestations in this arena are not simply united by descriptive coincidence or reductive supraculturalism, but constitute a rising research agenda brimming with a comparative potential that preserves and renews case specificity. However, the idea of what constitutes maritime heritage as a realm of cultural production, remains remarkably narrow and conceptually immature. Given the fundamental relationship between identity and heritage, the processes of identity construction and negotiation within and across the spheres of maritimity and heritage require special attention.

The two-fold aim of this session is thus to expand conceptions of maritime heritage as an ethnographic object of study, while pushing forward a more clearly articulated framework for this area of heritage and museological analysis. We invite papers analysing constructions of maritime heritage and maritime ‘pasts’ by museums, nation-states, communities and individuals with notions of identity at their centre. Papers will be focused on meaning-making rather than methodologies, as well as the tensions and interactions of varied voices and experiences.

The call for papers is now open, and the deadline for submissions is the 1st September 2008. Further details on the session are available on the TAG website. Submissions to the session can be made online.

Research Agenda for the North Atlantic Conference

A Research Agenda meeting for the North Atlantic, is to be held at the University of Bradford between the 29th August and the 1st September 2008.

The meeting is designed to review and report on existing research projects and to formulate an Agenda for Future Archaeological Research in the North Atlantic. The conference is in two parts; discussant-led theme sessions with invited specialist contributions will provide the framework for the research agenda, alongside open sessions on current research. Paper contributions to be published in the new Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). For more information contact the conference organisers , by email NABO08.bradford@googlemail.com, or the meeting website.

European Maritime Archaeology Programmes

MAG has been notified of additional maritime archaeology course available in Europe. Potential post graduate candidates for Underwater Archaeology Courses at the Instituto Politécnico de Tomar and the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa are invited to apply. More information is available at the course website (Portuguese language site).

The Syddansk Universitet is also offering a two year masters programme in maritime archaeology, free for EU/EEA students. This course also offers the opportunity to obtain a commercial SCUBA qualification. More information is available on the course website.
.

National Archaeology Week set to be called the Festival of British Archaeology in 2009

The Council for British Archaeology has announced the Festival of British Archaeology, the new name for National Archaeology Week.

Due to the continued success of National Archaeology Week, from 2009 it will be extended to a fortnight long festival of archaeologically inspired events.

The Festival of British Archaeology 2009 will run from Sat 18th July – Sun 2nd August. It will retain the general format of National Archaeology Week but with more opportunies to participate in a wide range of archaeology related activities across the UK.

Other News

Montenegro has ratified the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage on July 18th, 2008. This ratification brings the number of signatory State Parties to 18, which means only two more signatories are needed before it can enter into force.

The Antikythera mechanism has revealed details of lost ancient Greek calendars following careful analysis of the mechanism using X-Ray CT analysis. The findings are reported in Nature.

Ruins found in west Greenland, that may be the remains of a ship dock may indicate the most northerly Viking hunting outpost on the island.

The remains of a submerged landscape have been identified off Rathlin Island in the north of Ireland