The 2020 IMAA workshop took place at in the School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, UK, on 15th and 16th February 2020. The workshop has been celebrated annually since 2016 and brought together specialists in geoarchaeology, NPPs, palynology, plant macroremains, and phytoliths who are working in universities, major heritage organisations, and commercial archaeology companies in order to share research and skills. The event is a 2 day workshop, which includes oral presentations, poster sessions and microscope sessions.
We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came to the workshop, presented their research and shared their slides and samples. We had a full and exciting programme of talks and microscopy sessions and the abstracts are now available online.
The themes for the 2020 workshop were:
- Agricultural revolutions and crop developments
- Archaeobotany of unusual materials
- New methodological innovations and developments in archaeobotany
- Plants, pests and parasites
- Reference collections in archaeobotany
We had integrated micr
oscopy sessions on:
Agricultural revolutions and crop developments
Plants, pests and parasites
Charcoal and wood identification
Bioturbation for archaeobotanists
and discussion sessions on phytolith extraction methods and fluorescence microscopy.
Professor Alastair Culham, School of Biological Sciences, gave a fantastic talk on the UoR Percival Wheat and Salisbury Seed Collections, and took a group of delegates to visit the Herbarium.
The members of the organising committee for the 2020 workshop were:
Dr Rowena Banerjea
Dr Cathie Barnett
Paul Flintoft
Dr Marta Portillo
Dr Lionello Morandi
Kevin Williams
Dr Dan Young
Thanks to the Association for Environmental Archaeology for sponsoring the drinks reception.
