From the 29th November to the 1st December, the SFB 806 held an information and strategy meeting on the topic of "Quaternary Research and Human Evolution" at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Cologne.
In order to discuss research profiles as well as possibilities and limits of future cooperation with related projects, we invited representatives of other institutions working on the topic of human evolution and dispersal. Prof. Dr. Madelaine Böhme and Prof. Dr. Friedemann Schrenk came as representatives of the Senckenberg Centre in Frankfurt, Prof. Dr. Nicholas Conard presented the Archaeological Institute at the University Tübingen, Prof. Dr. Miriam Haidle and Dr. Christine Hertler spoke for the ROCEEH project Role of Culture in Early Expansion of Humans) and Prof. Dr. Volker Hochschild for the ROCEEH database ROAD. Prof. Dr. Jean-Jacques Hublin represented the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI EVA) in Leipzig, and Dr. Rupert Housley was invited to speak for the RESET programme (Response of Humans to Abrupt Environmental Transitions).
In the morning, presentations were given on the research profile, goals and strategies of the participating institutions, including the QSGA, Geoverbund ABC/J, CologneAMS and SFB 806. The discussion in the afternoon was – in a first part – mainly concerned with databases and modelling approaches. During the second part, the focus was on a possible cooperation between the participating projects. The participants discussed ways to improve the connection between the projects' databases and the movements of students between the institutions. Special emphasis was given to the enhancement of cooperation in the field of demographic research. As a concrete result, it was decided that a so-called "TLC workshop" shall take place regularly. TLC stands for the research locations Tübingen (including Frankfurt), Leipzig and Cologne (including Bonn, Aachen and Jülich), the places where the workshop shall be held in rotation: the first envisaged workshop in 2013 in Tübingen on the topic of databases, the following one on demography again in Cologne.
Information exchange was as vivacious as the fountain in the hotel-adjacent park. Photo: www.tripadvisor.de |