2012 Joint Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology/Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology Conference
This conference aims to draw together the shared interests of researchers in historical and maritime archaeology by linking aspects of land and sea – ‘Surf and Turf’. Together, such sites form a holistic landscape that can be documented and interpreted to provide a better understanding of past events, activities and human behaviour.
Areas of interest to archaeologists such as exploration, colonisation, trade and communication have similar conjunctions with no distinction between the low tide mark. Papers and posters will explore the networks and connections between land and sea both conceptually and archaeologically.
Keynote speaker
The conference’s keynote speaker is Christer Westerdahl from the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Westerdahl has written extensively on maritime cultural landscapes, with many papers and articles (c. 700) on the topic and related prehistoric cosmology based on the relationship between sea and land, concepts of maritime cultural theory, and how the sea is tied with the inland by transport.