TAG 2009 Conference Poster. © 2009 Durham University.

Just a heads up that the 31st meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group will be at Durham University, next week, running from Thursday December 17th to Saturday December 19th. This is, admittedly, rather late notice and, if the reader has any interest in this kind of thing at all, then he/ she most likely has the dates circled in red on his/ her calendar.

For various reasons, I will not be able to attend. I’m terribly disappointed about this, as I was hoping to catch up the old-fashioned way (i.e. face-to-face) with Durham colleagues from the Binchester project.

In addition, there are panels being organized and papers being presented by friends and colleagues that I’d really like to see. If you happen to be at TAG this year, be sure to drop by:

• Serena Love’s co-chaired panel on The Affective Properties of Architecture.
• David Petts’s co-chaired panel on Archaeology and Englishness and his paper, “A Mirror of England: H.J. Massingham and Archaeology.”
• David Petts’s paper on “Telling time: Time and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England”, in the panel on Medieval Sensory Perceptions: Beyond the Classical Senses.

The plenary session on The Death of Theory also promises to be unmissable, with speakers including Richard Hingley and Lynn Meskell.

Two other important conferences coming up, this time stateside: the 124th meeting of the American Historical Association and the 111th joint meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Philological Association.

Both are in early January 2010 and on the same weekend. Fortunately for those who might be interested in attending both, the two conferences are at least in the same part of the same state. It is perhaps an indicator of how long I’ve been in the USA that I now consider a one-and-a-half hour drive a relatively minor undertaking …