Previous Meetings

- 1st VCWAP  8^th- 9^th March 2021

Programme - short version

Abstract Book

Conference replay

The first edition of our event was held online, on the  8th - 9th March 2021, organised by four early career women, coming from  paleontology and archaeology fields : Julie Bachellerie, Ana Belén Galán López, Emilie Berlioz and Margot Louail. 

The idea of this congress came from a few simple assessments:

Although there are much more women graduated in higher education, they are under-represented in the research community in France and also in different European countries. In addition, the Covid-19 crisis seems to have particularly affected women in several areas, including research (Minello 2020; Viglione 2020), their academic production has been lower than that of their male colleagues (Viglione 2020).The main goal of this first edition was then to promote the place of women in our scientific disciplines and make visible the scientific contributions of young and/or early career women researchers from Archaeology and Paleontology by presenting their recent scientific developments.

We also aimed to create a dialogue between paleontologists and archaeologists, as both  disciplines share many common interests and would greatly benefit from more interactions between them.

Thus, this first congress counted on the recent contributions of young and/or early career women researchers to the study of human and non-human populations as well as to the study of past environments. We proposed to organise the congress around several axes:

• new methods and methodologies

• revision of old assemblages and data

• experimentation, referential frameworks and actualistic approaches

• occupation of territories and population mobility

• access to natural resources and exploitation/subsistence strategies

• environmental changes and biological adaptations

We ended the first day with a round table between the speakers and the attendees to talk about the place of women in our disciplines and the current problems we confront (access to scientific careers, practices within laboratories, in the field, at conferences, etc ...).

The success of this first edition was reflected in the international dimension achieved and in turn confirmed the need for an online format for this type of events : the congress brought together more than 200 people from 19 countries around the world for two really interesting days with 39 talks and 7 posters.