Sustainability and Heritage: How Can the Past Contribute to a Sustainable Future?

International Conference: Call for Papers
May 29th-30th 2012
Orkney College, University of the Highlands and
Islands, Kirkwall, Scotland

Heritage is recognised as being vitally important to sustainability. Heritage reflects our ongoing relationship with the environment and plays a role in defining modern culture and identity. It is not thus simply concerned with the past but is about balancing conservation and change today and in the future. Sustainability is best understood through long-term perspectives on the interactions of people and environment. This reflexive relationship is crucial to inform future practice and research in sustainable development and cultural environment management, and for promoting cultural diversity, sustainability literacy and education. Heritage is embedded in place and forms a strong link between humans and local landscapes. Heritage thus provides an important avenue to place based learning, education for sustainability, and developing a genuine sense of stewardship and management for the long term future. With ever diminishing resources, especially with respect to the impacts of climate change, there is now a real need for innovation in methods of assessing, monitoring, and valuing heritage, for developing new approaches to education and heritage and, moreover, for critically appraising what the past can contribute to the future sustainability of society.

This interdisciplinary conference will bring together academics and practitioners to discuss and critically analyse Heritage and Sustainability through presentations, posters and round table discussion, under the following themes:

• Medium-long term trajectories (millennial-centennial scales) of key sustainability issues such as resource utilisation, and the impacts of climate/environmental change in communities in the past;
• Heritage and resource management, sustainable development and participation;
• The role and potential of heritage in education for sustainability and in underpinning sustainability literacy initiatives (such as Education for Sustainable Development & Education For Sustainability).

Submission of abstracts

Please submit paper and poster abstracts of maximum 300 words, the contact details of all authors, and a correspondence address, by 29th February 2012. Submit to Conference Secretary: anne.billing@orkney.uhi.ac.uk. For further details on the conference see www.uhi.ac.uk/en/research-enterprise/sustainability-conference.

Conference organisers

Jane Downes, Ingrid Mainland, Julie Gibson & Martin Price, University of the Highlands & Islands; Tom McGovern & Sophia Perdikaris, City University of New York; Ian Simpson & Richard Oram, University of Stirling; Andy Dugmore, University of Edinburgh; Julie Bond & Steve Dockrill, University of Bradford.

Download flyer (pdf)

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The origins and spread of Neolithic life-ways represent a pivotal change in human ecology and society.Communities transformed their relationships with the world around them, shifting away from reliance upon hunted and collected wild resources, to the management and domestication of plants and animals, alongside a pattern of increasing sedentism. These processes were played out at differing temporal and spatial scales; from the life-cycle of a single organism of a population on the path to domestication, to the dissemination of ‘new' farming economies around the world.

The varied fields within environmental archaeology are providing increasingly detailed understanding of the agencies, processes and pathways in these transformations. These include work in the established fields of geoarchaeology, archaeobotany and zooarchaeology, alongside the major advances and exciting vistas opened in recent decades by techniques such as stable isotope analysis, geometric morphometrics and genetic studies, as well as interdisciplinary studies that integrate these approaches.

The organising committee invites oral and poster presentations that examine any aspect of Neolithisation at the varying scales of analysis that environmental archaeology can offer, from changes within a single site to those played out over continents. We encourage interdisciplinary contributions, as well as those that integrate archaeological science and cultural interpretations.

Please send proposals for papers and posters to AEA2012@reading.ac.uk . Abstracts should be sent as text documents (preferably in Word format) by 15 June 2012. Please include a title, complete name(s) of author(s), affiliation(s), and full postal and email addresses. Abstracts should be a maximum of 200 words and contain a clear description of the topic of the presentation.

The conference programme will devote two days to presentations and discussions and will offer a third day of optional field excursions. Further details will be posted on the websites of the Association for Environmental Archaeology and the University of Reading, Department of Archaeology: www.envarch.net/events

http://www.reading.ac.uk/archaeology/

We will also be pleased to respond to informal enquiries (to be directed to the email address above).