Have to agree with David - a lot of zooarch
presentations are full of graphs and diagrams that
only the people in the front row can see, let alone
have a hope of understanding! i think there is a need
to convey our message more clearly, perhaps by leaving
out some of the more complicated graphs and diagrams
from the lecture, but including them in any subsequent
publication. Anyone who wants to find out more can do
so by speaking directly to the person involved after
the lecture!
A point other people have touched on is that zooarch
is not taken seriously. This is often reflected in the
way conferences are organised, a case in point being a
conference that I attended last year. The zooarch
contributions were the last session, by which time a
lot of the delegates have left, because of the long
journey home (and believe me, it was a long journey!)
However, of the three lectures, one was very good,
another was not especially memorable, but the last was
fully of graphs which were too small and complicated
to be seen. What the lecturer was saying was
interesting, but it was really hard to get past the
presentation to the information beneath!
Finally, zooarch isn't alone in being a branch of
archaeology that 'tells us what we already know' -
eighteenth and nineteenth century archaeology suffers
exactly the same problems - my partner was excavating
a ditch last week, but when the artefacts that came
out of it dated it to the nineteenth century, the bare
minimum of work was done on it. If this had been a
medieval ditch it would have been more throuoghly
examined.
Charlie
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