The CASA committee is delighted to announce the accepted sessions for CASA 5 - Crisis and Resilience:

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Health, Disease, and Population Demographics – Methodology for Exploring Resilience in Populations of the Past

Chairs: Bronwyn Wyatt (The Australian National University) and Bonnie Taylor (The Australian National University)

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The proposed session will focus on the application of demographic and epidemiological methodology to past populations, with a view of better understanding population dynamics in the face of complex challenges. 
This session will demonstrate that through better understanding of population-level health and demographic changes during, and following, events such as famine, warfare, and environmental disasters we may gain an insight into the human capacity for resilience (and its limits). 
Specific themes to be explored include the population-level relationships between skeletal lesions and mortality, associations between mortality patterns and fertility, and comparative assessments of morbidity, mortality, and fertility between populations and/or over time. 
Further, this session’s exploration of changes to population health and demographics also aims to interrogate the influence of non-biological factors such as political structure, social customs, and inequity or egalitarianism on population resilience. A better understanding of these factors and their influence on a population’s ability to withstand diverse challenges remains acutely relevant for human societies in the current era. 

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Crisis and Opportunity: Probes into the Crisis-induced “New Normal(s)” of Subsistence Economies during Times of Change

Chairs: Yufeng Sun (Washington University in St. Louis) and Melissa M. Ritchey (Washington University in St. Louis)

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Every crisis presents challenges and breeds opportunities. Prehistoric crises threatened or even devastated pre-existing social orders and economic systems, but also spawned opportunities that facilitated more adaptive and resilient “new normal(s)”. As the bedrock of human society, subsistence economies are more susceptible to climate calamities, political turbulence, plagues, ecological degradation, etc. Actively or passively, different communities worldwide created “new normal(s)” in their subsistence economies to cope with crises. The long-standing impact of these crises would even become deeply ingrained in the collective memory of people, long after the crisis was gone.
Archaeology provides a diachronic lens into human responses to crises. As such, this session calls for research that explores the crisis-induced “new normal(s)” in subsistence economies prehistorically. This can include investigations into human responses throughout ancient crises and thereby how novel systems of subsistence economies manifested. How the transition from pre-existing to “new normal(s)” took place, abruptly or gradually? Can the ripple effects of these upheavals be traced through time, when the original crisis has been long forgotten?

We call for papers addressing prehistoric “new normal(s)”, with, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Paleodiets, foodways, and associated subsistence systems

• Hunter-gathering-foraging, agricultural, and pastoralist strategies (and the blurring of these categories)

• Mobility, sedentism, and subsistence

• Food and food-related activities in economic politics and rituals

• Non-native domesticated species and novel management regimes

• Land use strategies and modifications

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Resilient Traditions: What to Learn and How to Share

Chairs: Jiayao Jiang (Sapienza University of Rome) and Pedro Marroquim Senna (Sapienza University of Rome)

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The purpose of this session is to trigger discussions on how traditional knowledge can build up resilience in moments of crisis, considering its transmission to future generations and sharing of experiences beyond their specific cultural contexts.

Understanding traditional knowledge as an essential resource for communities across the globe to manage and mitigate a variety of local crises, this session invites papers to explore:

• The diversity of practices for the conservation of Cultural Heritage (both tangible and intangible) in specific contexts, and how such practices deal with local crises in different ways;

• The transmission of community-based experiences to future generations locally, as well as the sharing of strategies beyond cultural boundaries globally, considering how mutual learning among communities can enable the adaptation of local traditions and sow the seeds of resilience in a current globalized scenario;

• The different stakeholders and their role of building a collaborative system of knowledge sharing, taking into account conflicts of interest between international institutions, local authorities and communities. That imposes the questions: How can a broader participatory resilience-building process flourish? Who should be prioritized in a moment of crisis?

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Inequality and Dynamism in Social Relations in the Times of Crisis: Archaeology of Other Voices

Chairs: Tanoy Sengupta (Deccan College Post-Graduate & Research Institute), Debajit Ghosh (Visva-Bharati University) and Ahana Ghosh (Indian Institute of Technology)

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This session emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches and case studies of the human courage of viability and perseverance based on the archaeological and environmental records under adverse circumstances when material conditions and ways of life are radically altered. It explores the subaltern paradigm and looks into those unseen or marginalized phenomena that are generally overlooked in mainstream archaeological discourses.

Since archaeology deals with long-term perspectives on human history, this session seeks to highlight the key aspects related to this area of research, which includes the facets of social resilience covering the effects of urban encroachment, ritualistic dominance and ideological hegemony; followed by memory and trauma, which considers textual and material perspectives; as well as impacts on archaeological sites due to climate change and environmental hazards. The session anticipates how human societies have coped with climate change, pandemics, natural disasters, as well as an economic and political collapse.

A critical examination of the above-mentioned areas of research will lead to a holistic understanding of the cultural material remains and illustrate the importance of other voices in the archaeological understanding of human culture. Therefore, the proposed session invites contributions that analyse the above praxis and dynamics of human behaviour during a time when the way of conventional life and material conditions were disrupted.

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Rethinking Crisis: Archaeological Perspectives on Humans, Non-humans and Environments from the Late Pleistocene Onwards?

Chairs: Tom Dwyer (University College London), Ayelen Delgado Orellana (University College London), Yu-Chun Kan, (University College London) and Anna Den Hollander (University College London)

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The relationships between human societies and environments are both diverse, dynamic and have been occurring for thousands of years. Traditional conservationist thought has popularised the idea that human presence is usually harmful to the natural ecological balance. However, recent decades of archaeological and environmental research have indicated that what we think of as pristine environments have likely already undergone some degree of transformation due to human action. Some of the longer term changes are more easily recognisable in the archaeological record but for more subtle or shorter-term processes, we need to look at environmental evidence. Humans, as well as other animals and organisms, can contribute to both the enrichment and the complete detoriation of the biodiversity in certain regions.
The aim of the session is to explore the dynamics between people, landscapes, the wider environment, regional climates and ecosystems from the Late Pleistocene onwards. This is in order to discuss what we can learn from the past to help inform on current-day global environmental concerns including susceptibility or resilience to extinctions, dispersal of plants and animals in relation to human migrations, the synergy between social and environmental change, the adaptation of non-domesticated species to anthropogenic environments, water management and soil health and resilience. We would like to receive papers from those working in the field of environmental archaeology including archaeobotany, zooarchaeology/palaeozoology and geoarchaeology.

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Postcolonialism, Coloniality and Decolonisation: Crisis in the Discipline of Heritage Studies in Post-colonial Contexts

Chairs: Geonyoung Kim (University of Cambridge), Hyunjae Kim (University of Cambridge) and Saltanat Amir (University of Cambridge)

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This session aims to explore issues in different practices of the concept of coloniality, postcolonialism and decolonisation in the discipline of heritage studies and archaeology. While discussions over coloniality and postcolonialism have been developed mainly in a Eurocentric framework, there is a limited comprehension in the understanding of colonial remnants based on specific locales. For instance, what does ‘coloniality’ or ‘post-coloniality’ mean in China or Korea where each had a distinct relationship with colonial power of different origins? What does ‘decolonisation’ exercises against in the context of, for example, the Philippines or Central Asia? In this session, we frame the paucity of clear, context-based definitions or implications of these widely used terms in a post-colonial age as a crisis in our academic community. 
To address this, we would like to invite papers to share practices and perspectives to raise awareness of the current understanding of coloniality, postcolonialism and decolonisation in various locales that either were formerly under the colonial influence or had other indirect colonial impacts. Are there discussions over coloniality, postcolonialism, and decolonisation in your context? What do these terms imply? Is there any gap between the widely accepted understanding? What are the different ways to elaborate on post-colonial contexts of heritage studies and archaeology? In what ways, does the postcolonialism led by current academia potentially lead to other types of disjunctions? What is the current understanding of colonialism and decolonisation in different areas beyond dominant western academic canons? One step further, we would like to open up the discussion to potential issues in the current practice of promoting ‘decolonisation’. 
This session invites those interested to share and discuss specific case studies on, but not limited in: 

• Challenges or limitations in using the pre-existing academic frames to discuss the coloniality or decolonisation in various locales 

• Issues of using lexicons regarding decolonisation from Western academic traditions  

• Alternative ways of looking at the identity of the former colonies after liberation

• Postcolonialism, decolonisation and heritage studies in academic discourse beyond western-language speaking research traditions

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Open Session: Crisis and Resilience

Chairs: TBA

Subject: TBA

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The Committee is furthermore thrilled to announce that a panel discussion will close the conference:

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Panel: Crisis and Resilience

Panelists: TBA

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The days and order of the sessions will be announced soon, together with additional information on the open session and panel discussion. Stay tuned!