University of Southampton
About Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2023
The UTP conference was inaugurated on the 28-29th of January 2011, to celebrate ten years of Centre for the Archaeology of Human Archaeology (CAHO) research here at Southampton. After the success of its first year, it was proposed to make the conference an annual event, hosted in turn by Southampton and five other universities (Liverpool, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford and York). After a brief hiatus due to COVID the relaunch of the UTP conference series took place at Southampton in Spring 2023. The relaunch was a huge success with delegates presenting from across the world, both in-person and online and the list of host institutions was expanded.
Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2023 occurred on the 31st of March and the 1st of April 2023 and was hosted by the Centre for Human Origins within the Archaeology Department based at the University of Southampton’s Avenue Campus.
There were sixty-one in-person attendees with roughly forty-five to fifty attending each session, in addition we had a further forty-five online attendees making the total delegate count one hundred and six. Presentations covered a wide variety of topics from the predictive modelling of Neanderthal clothing to brain development in early hominins. Roughly 70% of the presenters and 60% of the delegates were early careers researchers demonstrating that UTP 2023 achieved its primary aim of being an effective platform for up-and-coming human origins researchers to present their research to their academic community. The conference was a great success and has restarted the UTP conference circuit post-covid to great enthusiasm.
Keynote
We were delighted to welcome Dr Eleanor Scerri as our Keynote Speaker for UTP 2023. Dr. Scerri's keynote was entitled 'Our first 300 thousand years: the emerging continental story of human origins'
Dr Scerri is a Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (University of Southampton) alum and was recently made the ‘Lise Meitner’ Associate Professor at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology where she heads up the Pan-African evolution and ERC IslandLab groups. Dr Scerri is also an affiliated Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta and Reader in the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Cologne.
Our Sponsors
UTP 2023 was proudly sponsored by the Society for Archaeological Sciences, Dr Coco’s Academic Proofreading Service, Archaeopress, The Prehistoric Society, the Council for British Archaeology and Brewhouse and Kitchen.
UTP2023_Conference_Programme_Final-2.pdfUTP2023_Poster_Abstract_Booklet-1.pdfThe Programme and Abstract Booklet
The UTP 2023 conference programme and and poster abstracts can be found to the left. We had a wonderful range of papers, from speakers both in person and online, on a whole host of topics covering both the Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic periods. We would like to express our sincere thanks to all of our speakers and poster presenters, without whom this conference would have not been possible and certainly would not have been the dynamic and varied event which took place.
Paper and Poster Prize Winners
In recognition of the hard work that goes into preparing conference papers and posters, two of our sponsors generously awarded prizes for the best paper and poster presented during UTP 2023. The winners of each category were decided by a CAHO judging panel.
A Paper Prize of £150 was awarded to Emma Brooks from the University of York by the Society for Archaeological Sciences for her paper on 'Prefrontal cortex development in the small-brained hominins'.
A Poster Prize of £50 was awarded to Athena Tang by Dr Coco’s Academic Proofreading Service for her poster on 'Flavours of the Mesolithic'.
The prize winners were also gifted a copy of 'Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History' by Professor Clive Gamble.
This immersive experience was specially created for the Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2023 conference by PhD students Alexandra Barroso and Olivia Britter, exploring local Southampton archaeology and its wider contexts.
The conference hosted a virtual exhibition which will be ran alongside a physical version of the same material showcasing some of the archaeological environments we have the privilege of being in the proximity of here in Southampton. The virtual exhibition was run in the University’s Digital Humanities Hub and was built as an immersive experience to explore how we can present Palaeolithic and Mesolithic landscapes in new, interactive ways. The objects and landscapes that can be explored in the virtual environment were also displayed in a more traditional exhibition. We were able to generate data from these two experiences for students in the Department of Archaeology here at Southampton to use in undergraduate and master’s dissertations exploring visitor experience and the benefits and limitations of both virtual reality and in-person exhibitions.
The virtual exhibition is still available to access here. We hope you enjoy (and don't forget to turn up the volume)!
The Committee
UTP 2023 would not be possible without the hard work of our conference committee:
Kate Anderson (she/her) - Co-chair of organising committee (facilities and volunteers coordinator)
Olivia Britter (she/her) - Co-chair of organising committee (finance and exhibition coordinator)
Rebecca Ferreira (she/her) – Co-chair of organising committee (sessions and events coordinator)
Alexandra Barroso (she/her) – Exhibition coordinator
Olivia Keegan Carr (they/them) – Social media and marketing coordinator
India McDermott (he/they) – Graphics and media coordinator
Emily Watt (she/her) – Technical coordinator
Acknowledgements
The UTP 2023 conference committee would like to thank our CAHO Director, Dr Rachel Bynoe who was also our staff liaison for this conference, and our CAHO colleagues Professor John McNabb (Mac) and Professor William Davies for all their assistance in helping to organise the conference. We would also like to extend a big thank you to our sponsors and volunteers, without which we would not be able to run the conference. Finally, for all their help with the virtual and physical museum, we would like to thank Richard Henry (Curator, Southampton Museums), Yannick Ebner (University of Southampton), Benjamin Colvin (University of Southampton) and Dr Jaco Weinstock (University of Southampton).