An Ever-Growing Community of Computing Archaeologists
The CAA conference began at the University of Birmingham in 1973 as a small UK-based annual conference, but attendance and membership has grown over the years, and the conference added an international component in 1992, with the first conference abroad being held at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The first CAA outside of Europe ran in Fargo (USA) in 2006.
This year the CAA is back in the UK, being hosted by the Archaeological Computing Research Group at the University of Southampton.
Bigger Than Ever
We think that this is the biggest CAA yet, with the timetabling database having over 800 individuals listed in it as being involved with the conference. We are expecting over 450 delegates to attend from all over the world, from speakers to workshop hosts, from delegates to exhibitors; we’re expecting a big crowd!
Wordle graphic showing the countries that delegates are attending from. The larger the word, the more delegates we're expecting from that country!
Some Fun CAA Facts
There are more than 400 events happening across the four days, and an exciting social event planned for every night.
The Personal Histories session will welcome back to the CAA founding and key members of the conferences, and an artist and film crew have been contracted to record this important event.
We have booked up and filled every single spare room that the University accommodation office has been able to offer us: that’s over 230 rooms that the CAA has filled!
The University’s catering services are expecting to serve approximately 2000 lunches over the next few days (so give them a smile if they look tired!).
If we add together all of the comfort breaks, we’re estimating that we will drink between us 5400 coffees! That’s at least 5400 biscuits too! They’d reach all the way around the Stonehenge monument 5 times!
On Friday, we will be taking multiple coaches out to various historical venues across the UK, filling over 100 seats, and seeing between all the excursions, 11 important sites.
This year, we’re dedicated to trying to minimise the paper used for the conference. We worked out that providing every delegate with a printed timetable would require 38,560 sheets of paper! If we put all of those sheets of paper end to end they would stretch from Southampton all the way to London (that’s over 64 miles!).
So instead we’ve worked really hard to make all of the timetabling information available online through our website, and will be providing all delegates with smaller printed information.
And now for my favourite fact: We’ve estimated that we are going to pop open over 801 bottles of wine, and we’re also providing over 400 pints of locally produced beer on one of the social evenings! If we put all of that liquid together, we’d fill to the brim just over 29 Mini Coopers (the BMW version)!
