Mback from Newcastle
I managed to do the Newcastle conference in as a day-trip. It involved a 3:30 departure and I didn’t get back till 1:30 the following day, so technically it was only a 22 hour trip. Like last year it was a good event. Not one of the papers gave me the urge to yell “For Godssake step away from the lectern and stop stealing the oxygen!” Which is always a good thing. The hosts were as friendly as ever. I can’t recall anywhere that I’ve been to where I’ve thought the hosts unfriendly, but Newcastle strikes me as a department sited on a natural spring of hospitality. It’s probably right next to the other two springs which must provide the endless supply of red and white wine that they seem to have. The only disappointment was the relative absence of classicists giving papers this year. Fortunately the archaeologists and historians made up the shortfall without a noticeable drop in quality. First up was Hannah Lynch, which I think was the only real mistake they made with the organisation. Hannah gave a talk drawn from some of her PhD work. Assessing Concepts of Values and Desire: Were Stone Axes the Aston Martins of the Neolithic? is the sort of talk I would love to be able to do. Like a lot of archaeologists / classicists I might throw in the odd modern analogy but only as a throwaway comment to make a point. Hannah’s talk was built around this analogy and was an excellent way of highlighting why a Neolithic status symbol is not the same as a modern status symbol. It’s an excellent device and the kind of creative leap that I rarely make. Still that would be pointless if the comparison was superficial. It wasn’t. She clearly is very switched on to concepts of trade and exchange, not just in the Neolithic but across many periods and she has a lot of interesting data to build her explanation on. She got the pitch for the non-specialist audience right and showed that talking in clear English doesn’t mean over-simplifying subtle points. I learned something. So what was the mistake? Hannah is good. Some of the people were giving their first talk and would have been nervous. So I would have saved the best for last.
The one out-and-out Ancient Historian was Maithe Hulskamp. She gave an excellent talk on ancient Medicine. I particularly like a point that she perhaps depreciated a little. The development of Hippocratic medicine occurred against the background of an alternative medical practice that worked perfectly. Before medicine people put their faith in the god Asklepios the god of Healing. He didn’t cure everyone, it was the will of the gods that some people died, but he cured everyone who wasn’t fated to die. This is a perfect system. Now wouldn’t it be an of impiety to cure someone who was fated to die? How did medicine relate to the cult of Asklepios, especially in its early years? Maithe thinks that the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ isn’t helpful in tackling ancient knowledge, and I’d have to agree with her. Maithe has a potentially difficult PhD, because there is some good work being done with ancient medicine at the moment, but she plainly has the talent to produce something special.
The best session for me was the final session. This is always an awkward slot because people are getting tired, but the three speakers were all engaging and taut in their presentations. Someone whose name I didn’t catch and doesn’t appear in the programme was spoke on developing and idea of how Bronze Age culture developed in Northumbria in relation to the rest of the British Isles. She isn’t happy about the standard narrative of the northeast being peripheral to the cultural powerhouse of the south and passively receiving innovation from there. As she sensibly asked, if the northeast was a periphery then why not to Scotland rather than the south? There are a lot of people who would argue these days for a more active rôle for all peoples in the Bronze Age in creating identities, but in the case of the northeast no-one has proved it. I thought she did particularly well as her PowerPoint slide show had gone missing.
Mark Wood spoke on tracing ethnicity through toponymic and genetic evidence. He was never going to convert me to the value of genetic evidence on the basis of a twenty minute talk, but he was interesting and relevant. What I really liked about his talk was the fact that he tied the genetics back to the toponymic evidence. While I think genetic gradients describe something during my MPhil course I saw no well-reasoned connection between the evidence and the desired historical event other than ‘it looks just like we expected, it must be right’. In any other field this would be slammed as post-hoc reasoning. However, he highlighted problems with the sample and was finding some peculiar results. I’ll need to go through
, but if I see more of Mark Wood’s work and he’s solved those problems then I may have to concede that Genetic Archaeology isn’t a Roll-Royce being driven into a cul-de-sac.
The last paper was Cath Neal on the geoarchaeology of dry soil valleys. She had a tough sell with her talk. Geoarchaeology is a specialised subject and ignorance of geological processes means that many archaeologists don’t understand the value of it, let alone the classicists and modern historians she was talking to. I thought she coped with the problem well. She explained what she was doing for her project and why it wasn’t going to plan, or at least not as she expected. I would love to do more with geology with my own work and Cath’s talk had a mixed effect. She has reinforced my belief that there is so much that could be done with the evidence. Unfortunately it’s also obvious that it takes an awful of lot expertise to be able to do this, and I’m never going to do this in a couple of weeks during the summer. I think she’s shown the world needs more geoarchaeologists or, because you should be careful what you wish for, more geoarchaeologists who are at least as good as her.
I wasn’t happy with my own talk, but then I never am. It wasn’t an absolute disaster, and from the bits I didn’t like I’ve learned a bit more about what to avoid. Sadly I didn’t stop as long afterwards as I would have liked, as I’d miscalculated the time it would take for me to get back, but it was good to see many of the Newcastle crowd I’d met last year and some new faces. Once again I think Newcastle did an excellent job. I’ll look forward to reading the written versions of the paper in the Postgraduate Forum. —–
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