Last week, I attended the Society for American Archaeology conference in Austin, for the first time in several years. Austin was a great town for the conference, but sad to say I didn’t get any truly good BBQ. IronWorks was OK, and Stubbs was fine for lunch, but we didn’t have a rental car this time and Salt Lick was out of reach. Despite this, we had a great time, and I caught up with folks I hadn’t seen in years, like Chris Pierce, who’s working on semantic web database technology, Terry Hunt, Lee Lyman, and many others.
Poster sessions were terrific this year, with plenty of space to walk around and see everything; increasingly I find that spoken talks are much less interesting, particularly when people have few slides and read their written-out talks in a flat monotone. How do people expect to convince or interest an audience without a strong presentation style?
Among the interesting papers I saw were two papers on costly signaling theory by Aimee Plourde (of UCL), and Jillian Galle (Monticello). Another paper by Colin Quinn and Ian Kuijt on signaling in the Natufian was also interesting, but I need to see a written copy to follow their argument on how they link Natufian burial behavior to costly signaling.
