After four years of dedicated effort, we have successfully completed NEOMATRIX! Our final meeting was held in Heraklion from the 5th to the 7th of December. The three-day event was hosted by FORTH, and organized by Dr Argyro Nafplioti.
As part of the event, a symposium was held in Auditorium Georgios Lianis, with the below program. The conference was advertised to the archaeological community of Heraklion as well as the academic community.
Thursday, December 5
09:00 A. Nafplioti, M. Somel: Welcome address
09:20 M. Somel: “Striving to democratize archaeogenomics research in an unequal world: dilemmas, constraints, and future prospects”
10:00 E.-M. Geigl and T. Grange: “NEOMATRIX, a European Twinning project aimed at distributing skills to democratize ancient DNA research”
– Coffee break
11:00 C. Martin: “A needle in the haystack: detecting genuine selection in ancient timeseries data”
11:25 E.-M. Geigl and T. Grange: “Cost-effective high-throughput analysis of the Neolithic expansion”
12:00 A. Götherström: “Tales and microbes from Neolithic Scandinavia”
– Lunch break
14:30 N. Galanidou: “On farmer – hunter/gatherer dichotomy: insights from the Aegean Mesolithic”
15:10 C. Atakuman: “An Emergent Picture of West Anatolian Neolithisation Process during the Early Holocene”
15:50 General discussion
– Coffee break
16:30 A. Nafplioti and I. Serpetsidaki: “The Early Neolithic Site of Katsambas on Crete: The People”
17:10 Y. S. Erdal: “Burial Custom in the Early Neolithic: A Study on Extensive Incisions and Delayed Burials for Understanding of Regional Differences and Similarity of the Upper Mesopotamia”
17:50 E. Yüncü: “Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük’
18:30 General discussion
Friday, December 6
09:00 A. Kassian: “Nuclear Altaic phylogeny (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic): pre-neolithic heritage vs. neolithic contacts”
09:40 P. Pavlidis: “Using computational methods to study the evolution of languages and other cultural characteristics”
10:20 General discussion
– Coffee break
10:50 D. Koptekin: “Disentangling Cultural and Genetic Interactions in Aegean Neolithisation”
11:30 F. Özer: “Voyage of the Neolithic lambs from Anatolia to Europe”
12:10 M. Özkan: “Archaeogenomics of Equid Remains from Anatolia”
– Lunch break
14:30 O. Parasayan: “The Neolithic of Northern France from an archaeogenetic perspective”
15:10 A. Papadopoulou: “Uncovering the Aegean: Population dynamics from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age”
15:35 S. Papadantonakis: “Assessing the performance of qpAdm inference under various demographic models”
16:00 General discussion
– Coffee break
16:45 R. Rodriguez Varela: “Early Insights into the Population Landscape of Islamic Iberia”
17:10 A. Muriel: “Cracking the shell: genetic analysis of a calcified cyst”
17:35 E. Johnson: “Out of Place and Out of Time: A High-Coverage Ancient Brown Bear Mitochondrial Genome from a Lacustrine Sediment Layer”
18:00 General discussion
18:15 T. Carter: “Obsidian circulation and consumption studies as an insight to processes of Aegean Neolithisation”
18:45 General discussion
On the final day of the event, the participants were given a guided tour to the Palace of Knossos by the British School at Athens curator at Knossos, Dr Kostis Christakis.
Throughout the event we had chance to discuss how to elevate our fruitful collaboration through future projects. Our main focus was the follow-up activities relating to the scientific careers of our ESRs, plans of which we will soon report to the European Commision.
