Keynote Speakers
Monday, 19 October, 2026
László Bartosiewicz
Stockholm University
Navigating between disciplines: the Bökönyi centenary
Sándor Bökönyi, the founder of modern archaeozoology in Hungary, was born in 1926. Holding a degree in veterinary science, he devoted his entire life to archaeological research. Through his investigations in the Balkans and Southwest Asia, he achieved results of international importance in elucidating past animal-human relationships. Notably, he was one of the few, whose approach was truly interdisciplinary in Hungarian archaeology at the time. He played a prominent role in representing archaeology at the level of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A generation’s time has passed since his untimely death. It is therefore instructive to review the current state of archaeozoology in light of his career and the perspectives of archaeozoological research in Hungarian archaeology.
Monday, 19 October, 2026
Elisabetta Starnini
University of Pisa
Green Archaeometry for a Green Archaeology: A New Paradigm
The «green archaeometry» concept will be introduced as a new paradigm for a sustainable method of research in archaeology. Sustainable as aimed at providing the archaeologists with tools for recognizing the combination of the compositional, technological, and typological macroscopical markers, for identifying a specific production without destructive and expensive analyses, as in the case of ceramics. Moreover, in the spirit of «green archaeology» the aim is to recycle and reuse old samples for reanalysis, rather than resample for new analyses and to limit new sampling to the strict necessary. Archaeological deposits continue to be consumed all over the world and in some cases exhausted despite the awareness acquired over the years that excavation is a destructive operation, and that technological progress and scientific methodological advances instead provide us with increasingly less invasive investigation techniques. In many cases, new and groundbreaking information have been achieved simply restudying old collections of thin sections in the light of new knowledge and with new, holistic approaches. Some case-studies of green archaeometry for green archaeology will be illustrated.
Tuesday, 20 October, 2026
Jelena Živković & Vesna Bikić
University of Tübingen & Institute of Archaeology, Belgrade
Archaeology and Archaeometry in Dialogue:
Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Ceramics
in the Middle Danube Region
During the medieval and early modern periods, the Middle Danube was largely a frontier region that brought different social actors into cross-cultural exchange, as reflected in the ceramic record. While the complex dynamics of cultural continuity and discontinuity have long been recognized in archaeology, the integration of archaeometric approaches into ceramic studies has significantly improved our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these processes.
Research on the transmission of technological knowledge demonstrates the strong impact of political change on local craftsmanship. In Belgrade, the Ottoman conquest in 1521 marked the beginning of new production practices that differed from those of the period of Hungarian rule across all segments of the chaîne opératoire, as demonstrated by petrographic and chemical analyses of ceramics.
New data on ceramic production technologies along the Danube, Sava, and Drava rivers indicate the formation of two technological traditions that emerged in the Middle Danube Region during the Ottoman period. The first concerns the production of tableware and storage vessels formed by wheel-throwing, both glazed and unglazed, typical of Ottoman urban centres. The second tradition centres on pottery formed by hand and hand-turning wheel that was used for cooking and baking. Archaeological criteria indicate consistency in the use of functional vessel classes, as well as uniformity in vessel profiles within each class across the region. Provenance studies and the reconstruction of ceramic, slip, and glaze production technologies reveal the exchange of knowledge among multiple workshops within both technological traditions of the Middle Danube region. These emerging networks of knowledge exchange illustrate connectivity between socially diverse communities shaped by migrations and warfare on the frontier.
Wednesday, 21 October, 2026
Christina Papageorgopoulou
Democritus University of Thrace
Resilient Cities, Fragile Lives:
Diversity, Crisis, and Survival in Ancient Thessaloniki
CityLife is an ERC-funded project that investigates, from a bioarchaeological perspective, how past populations adapted to urban environments and developed resilience to the inherent challenges of urban life. By analyzing human skeletal remains, the project examines the role of biological factors in the durability and sustainability of pre-industrial urban societies. The research focuses on Thessaloniki, a major European urban center that provides a unique opportunity to study urban life diachronically from 300 BC to AD 1500. CityLife explores key aspects of past societies, including living conditions, economic structures, population dynamics, pathogen load, and immune responses.
This presentation highlights the use of ancient DNA analysis to investigate how trade, migration, and exogamous marriage practices contributed to increased genetic diversity at the population level in urban environments. At the same time, the formation of social, religious, and neighborhood-based subgroups may have promoted endogamy, reducing genetic diversity within those communities. In parallel, stable isotope analysis, skeletal stress markers and innovative computational tools are used to assess the resilience and sustainability of urban food systems. These approaches help determine how such systems responded to crises and long-term transformations, as well as how population growth and socioeconomic disruptions affected their efficiency.
Preliminary genetic results confirm the diverse and multicultural character of Thessaloniki’s population. Demographic evidence points to cycles of prosperity and growth, interrupted by periods of significant stress. Indicators of developmental stress, disease, and mortality—especially among infants and children—suggest that urban life posed substantial challenges from an early age. Ongoing research explores hypotheses related to food inequality, religious dietary restrictions, and shifts in diet before and after major conflicts, epidemics, and periods of social instability.
Wednesday, 21 October, 2026
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