In June 2018, Giacomo Capuzzo and Kevin Salesse attended the 18th UISPP World Congress held in Paris to present their works. Dr Capuzzo and colleagues gave a talk titled “Macro-scale European population trends and the impact of regional climate dynamics towards the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition” in the session II-5 about climatic variability and societal responses during the Metal Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean (3000-300 BC) organized by Dr Davide Delfino (University of Coimbra), Dr Dirk Brandherm (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr Gill Plunkett (Queen’s University Belfast).
Dr Salesse presented a poster titled “Isotopic Brexit: a split between the United Kingdom and the continental Europe as to isotopic studies in Classical and Late Antiquity spotted by IsoArcH” in an exciting session about Big Data initiatives and large databases in archaeology co-organized by Paola Moscati (Italian National Research Council) and François Djindjian (Pantheon-Sorbonne University). The meeting was a good opportunity to figure out how big is actually “Big Data” and how researchers define it. This was made through an overview of the newest data repositories designed for archaeological purposes.
The team showed up at the inspiring session entitled “Fire as an artifact: Advances in the study of Palaeolithic combustion features” led by Mareike Stahlschmidt, Christopher E. Miller and Carolina Mallol. The speakers introduced their works about Palaeolithic combustion features. Overall, the session was the occasion to bring forward and promote the inter- disciplinary study of Palaeolithic fire.
Dr Capuzzo and Dr Salesse were glad to meet again colleagues and friends at the conference and intend to attend the next UISPP World Congress which will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, during summer 2020 to present their forthcoming results.