(Figure Above): Delegates to the RESET finale meeting, 7 June 2013
This three-day meeting was held to explore the links between abrupt environmental change and human dispersal and development during the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic periods. It constituted the Finale Event of the RESET Consortium Project. The RESET team, in association with many collaborators in Europe and beyond, has been testing the degree to which non-visible volcanic ash layers (termed ‘cryptotephra’) can refine the chronology of important environmental and archaeological events during the past 100,000 years or so. At the core of the RESET strategy has been the construction of a ‘tephra lattice’, the main tool employed for synchronising events.
(Figure Above): Delegates to the RESET finale meeting, 7 June 2013
The principal outcomes of the RESET project were presented in this three-day meeting, in which project members and associates took stock of what we understand about the links between humans and abrupt environmental change over the period of interest. To widen the perspective and debate beyond the lens of RESET, several guest speakers were invited to give their views on the subject. The final session of the meeting involved an Open Forum, in which issues aired at the meeting were discussed, together with a forward look to the future. The Open Science Meeting (Thursday 6 and Friday 7 June) was attended about c. 110 research scientists and the Public-Engagement–with-Science Day (Saturday 8 June) drew an audience of c. 225 interested members of the public. RESET would like to thank Nick Ashton and the staff of the British Museum for hosting this event and providing an excellent venue. For the programme and abstract booklet, click here
Almost two years to the day RESET returned to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London for a one-day progress meeting. The aim of this event was to assess how well the different strands of research are knitting together and the degree of progress achieved in developing the 'tephra lattice'. Synthesis of data is particularly important in the last stages of the project ahead of our final Advisory Panel meeting in September and the end-of–project conference, scheduled for June 2013 in the British Museum.
Since many of the PhD students are well-advanced in writing their theses, there were many good datasets presented. The eastern Mediterranean and Balkans are proving to be the most promising regions for land-sea correlations and for connecting terrestrial environmental sequences with earlier Upper Palaeolithic sites. Northern Europe and the sub-Alpine foothills are providing data on many things, including the eruptive history of Iceland. A few key nodes are proving crucial in connecting different volcanic centres (Italian, Eifel, Iceland and the Hellenic arc) via shared tephra horizons. At the meeting several promising remaining pieces of research were identified which could be achieved in the final 15 months of the project. Overall it was a valuable day of talks and discussion and many thanks must be extended to Chris Stringer, Mark Lewis and Lucy Reeve for the local organisation.
This five-day event took place in Salerno, Italy close to the volcanic centres of Campi Flegrei, Somma-Vesuvius and Ischia. It was attended by about 60 researchers including members of the RESET team and scientific collaborators from a number of other European institutions. Three days of presentations focused on results made by the Consortium, complimented by talks on cognate science given by our invited associates. The lecture days were supplemented by two days in the field in which volcanic localities and archaeological sites with relevant eruption horizons were visited. The meeting showcased the results of RESET over the last 30 months and in particular demonstrated the way that time-synchronous tephra markers are being discovered in both climate-sensitive marine and terrestrial sedimentary records and in archaeological contexts. The meeting identified a number of promising publication opportunities. In the next few months the Consortium will focus on realizing these opportunities through a series of scientific papers, whilst continuing to build and strengthen the 'tephra lattice' across Europe.
(Figure Above): RESET members and associated collaborators during the visit to Somma-Vesuvius (photograph courtesy of Adam Walanus)
The sixth and final day in Salerno was given over to the 2nd meeting of the RESET Advisory Panel. The membership was as before except for Joergen-Peder Steffensen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen replaced Sune Rasmussen, whilst our NERC representative, Michal Filtness, gave her apologies - not being able to attend. By participation in the mid-programme meeting, the external Panel members benefited from the presentations and associated discussions, thus one half-day proved sufficient for the business. From these discussions came many new recommendations, which were communicated to the work package leaders. A written summary of these action points is available on the private area of the website.
Another one-day event brought together the RESET team to review progress in the various components of the Consortium and to identify unifying themes to the research. The meeting was held in the NHM in South Kensington, London.
A large proportion of the meeting was given over to oral presentations by selected RESET staff and PhD students. These talks outlined the results achieved so far in terms of microtephra layers identified and geochemical analyses made on a wide range of sites - marine, lacustrine, loessic, mire and archaeological. The map (below) shows the localities visited by the Consortium and charts the position where samples for microtephra analysis have been taken.
The final part of the day was a discussion chaired by John Lowe on the issues encountered by the project and the requirements ahead of the mid-programme meeting in Campania in September. The meeting was attended by Prof. Mauro Rosi, a RESET associate from Pisa who has been particularly helpful in providing access to proximal samples from the volcanic regions of Italy. His contributions to the day, and to the research of WP-4 more generally, are much appreciated.
The first meeting of the RESET Advisory Panel took place on the 18-19 May in the village of Chiseldon (Wiltshire), near to the Swindon headquarters of the NERC. It was attended by 4 external advisers (Professor Barbara Wohlfarth of Stockholm University, Professor Clive Oppenheimer of Cambridge University, Dr Sune Rasmussen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Dr Martin Street of the Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz in Neuwied), 1 representative from NERC (Dr Michal Filtness) and 4 representatives from the RESET institutions (Professor John Lowe, Professor Mark Pollard, Professor Eelco Rohling & Professor Chris Stringer). In attendance was the secretary to the committee, Dr Rupert Housley.
(Figure above): External members of the RESET Advisory Panel, from left to right: Barbara Wohlfarth, Martin Street, Clive Oppenheimer, Sune Rasmussen, Michal Filtness
This one-day meeting brought together around 30 people comprising members of the Consortium together with interested persons from other educational institutions. The meeting was hosted by the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art in Oxford.
The meeting began with the leaders of the work packages outlining the strategic direction of their research to date and the likely future avenues of inquiry. The afternoon featured the RESET staff talking about the highlights of the research currently completed, together with brief statements by the Consortium’s PhD students outlining the likely focus / progress of their doctoral studies. The final session of the day was a discussion led by John Lowe on the next steps of the Consortium and the challenges which lie ahead.
The Consortium would particularly like to thank the associates from non-RESET institutions who attended the meeting and who participated in the discussions - Professor Francesco D'Errico, Dr Siwan Davies, Dr William Davies and Dr Felix Riede. Their input to the meeting, and continued collaboration, is very much appreciated.
This two-day meeting in Southampton brought together for the first time all the members of RESET - principal investigators, appointed staff and students. Southampton was the chosen venue for this launch or 'kick-off' meeting as it is the home of the National Oceanography Centre - one of the four institutional partners that makes up the RESET consortium. The meeting had both an educational and a team building purpose, the talks and the social programme providing an opportunity for newly appointed staff and students to meet others from different institutions within the consortium whilst learning about what RESET stands for and what it hopes to achieve in the next five years.
The meeting began in the evening with two talks by Martin Menzies and Simon Blockley who together outlined the principles and methodology of tephrostratigraphy and tephrochronology as applied to proximal and distal volcanic deposits. This was followed by a morning tour of NOCS where we were introduced to the work of the centre with its various analytical facilities which will play an important role in furthering the objectives of RESET. In the afternoon John Lowe gave a talk where he outlined the purpose and history of RESET from its initial formulation in 2004 to the present. This was followed by talks by the leaders of the 3 archaeological work packages (Chris Stringer, Nick Barton, Clive Gamble) who successfully explained the anthropogenic research questions to which tephra studies are to be applied. The final morning of the meeting comprised a further set of lectures, Martin Menzies explained the pivotal role that tephra geochemistry will have in differentiating eruptive centres and events; Simon Blockley outlined the importance of lacustrine and loess sequences in RESET for linking archaeological events to marine and ice core records; Eelco Rohling discussed how microtephras associated with abrupt environmental transitions (AETs) in marine core sequences in the Mediterranean and Red Sea will lead to a better understanding of earth climate processes; and Christopher Bronk Ramsey demonstrated the methods by which temporal data will be combined in a Bayesian framework to better refine the age models associated with AETs.
Altogether the meeting proved both useful and enjoyable and provided a good launch platform for the forthcoming work of the project.
2008 Team photo, including a representative from NERC (Nichola Badcock)