International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology

Due to the covid pandemics, the ninth International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology, initially scheduled for Sept 22nd-25th 2020, will finally be held on June 1st-4th 2021 at the Centre Pierre Baudis, Toulouse, France (https://www.centre-congres-toulouse.fr/fr). It is the first time that this conference is organized in France, a country showing an exceptional bio-cultural heritage and a long-standing tradition in archaeological sciences. The conference is expected to attract 500+ international delegates, spanning the whole range of positions in academia, from first-year graduate students to worldwide leaders in the field of biomolecular sciences, including 30+ ERC awardees. It will include 2 keynote talks, 16 parallel sessions and 2 poster sessions. Additionally, a total of twelve young scholars will be shortlisted across the full range of topics to present their work in the last two sessions of the conference. On this occasion, the best speaker will receive the first ISBA Future's fellow award. The last decade, and the major technological innovations that have emerged in high-throughput DNA sequencing, mass spectrometry, imaging and computational science, have truly revolutionized archaeological science. This has provided unprecedented opportunities to leverage the full archaeological record, including small organic residues and biomolecules, and reconstruct our evolutionary past at unprecedented resolution. Biomolecular archaeology provides a direct snapshot of how ancient societies and groups lived. Past (human) groups can for example be tracked through space and time, but also how they became adapted to their environment and responded to global environmental crises and historical epidemics. Biomolecular archaeology can also measure how our activities impacted the environment and modified the communities of species we interact with. The conference will represent the whole breadth of research areas in biomolecular archaeology at a time when the list of what has now become possible is increasing by the day. It will also address new emerging technologies as well as best current methodological standards.