The 80th anniversary of Efremov’s Taphonomy as a scientific discipline was held at the Aula Magna of the Alcalá de Henares University (Madrid, Spain) from the 5th to the 11th of June, 2022. This special celebration was organized by the 9th TAPHOS congress and the 6th Taphonomy Working Group (TWG) of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ). We also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the first meeting on Taphonomy and Fossilization (known now as TAPHOS) and the special contribution to the theory of Taphonomy by Sixto Fernández-López, and the 30th anniversary from the publication of the masterpiece: Owls, Caves and Fossils by Peter Andrews (basis of the small mammal taphonomy methodology). We were specially honoured to have the participation of A.K.Behrensmeyer as keynote speaker of the inaugural session and Christiane Denys who gave the Good-Bye keynote speech at this special celebration.
Despite the pandemic alert by COVID-19 forced us to postpone the congress for two years, the special relevance which has the date 2020 for the celebration of these anniversaries kept the congress name without year mention (www.TAPHOSTWG.es). COVID caused the absence of a tenth of delegates that could not come in person, but they could send a video-presentation record to be displayed at their congress sessions. Unfortunately, one of the scientists at the tribute, Peter Andrews, was not feeling well enough to travel to the conference, and did not come, but followed the conference online.
The COVID warning did not significantly reduce delegate participation with a total of 123 participants with a significant attendance of 25% of students deeply involved in the congress. Congress attendance brought together palaeontologists, archaeologists, geologists, biologists, histologists, zooarchaeologists, and other vertebrate and invertebrate researchers interested in all aspects of taphonomy, i.e. forensic scholars, palaeocologists, palaeoclimatologists. The participants to celebrate this significant event came from different countries of the world: great participation from Spain (73), Argentina (3), Austria (3), Australia (1), Belgium (1), Brazil (3), Canada (1), Chile (1), Czech Republic (1), France (5), Germany (2), Greece (3), Israel (3), Italy (8), Mexico (1), Poland (1), Portugal (3), Sweden (1), UK (3) and USA (4). The congress began with a field trip to the World Heritage sites of Atapuerca (Burgos) on June the 5th, led by Isabel Cáceres, Paula Mateo-Lomba and Héctor del Valle from the Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES). The next day, June the 6th, another field trip took us to the Valle de los Neandertales site in Pinilla (Madrid), explained by Enrique Baquedano, Belén Márquez, Bárbara Rodríguez and Cesar Laplana from the Regional Museum of Archaeology and Palaeontology. Other excursions to Tamajón (Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic site with continental and estuarine-marine deposits in Guadalajara) planned for the congress program on Monday, as well as post-congress excursions planned for June the 12th to the Cretaceous Fossil Lagerstätte site in Las Hoyas (Cuenca) or the 500 Ma giant ichnites deposits in the Cabañeros National Park (Ciudad Real) had to be cancelled due to the very low participation (less than 6 people) so the end of the congress ended one day earlier than expected, scheduled for June the 11th. On Thursday, June 9, a half-day trip was made to the open-air site of Batallones (in Torrejón de Velasco, Madrid), led by Soledad Domingo. The sessions continued in the afternoon.
All summaries, both podium and poster presentations, as well as key note speeches were published at the special issue of Journal of Taphonomy (ISSN 1696-0815, volume 16 issue 1-4, 2022), which had a full colour front cover of Peter Andrews and Sixto Fernández-López (https://journaltaphonomy.com/wp-content/uploads/downloadable_area/2022/Journal_of_Taphonomy_2022_v3.pdf). The Journal also granted Open Access to the TAHOS-TWG/ICAZ congress participants until the end of 2022, thanks to the collaboration and involvement of Luis Alcalá.
The opening of the congress took place on the 7th of June welcomed by the Vice-Rector of the University of Alcalá (Margarita Vallejo Girvés), the Dean of the Faculty of Economics, Luis Rivera Galicia, and the director of the Regional Museum of Archaeology and Palaeontology (Enrique Baquedano) co-organizer of the congress. Thanks to these institutions, as well as to the Vice-Dean Purificación Granero and Jose Raul Fernández del Castillo of the Foundation, the congress venue had a magnificent setting to celebrate this congress, the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Alcalá. This conference hall is especially appropriate and had all the facilities to make this meeting a brilliant event as it deserves. Thanks to the staff of the Faculty, the delegates had all the facilities to enjoy the congress. This brief act with authorities of the University of Alcala was followed by the Opening Conference given by A.K.Behrensmeyer entitled “What is Taphonomy in 2022?” the State of Art of Taphonomic research methodologies and research subjects. This updating also displayed the new conception and perception of taphonomy amongst different research subjects, topics and professionals, as A.K. Behrensmeyer mentioned, “some researchers even today ignore that what they are doing is actually taphonomy”
The sessions were organized by “TaphoSystems”, a term proposed by Sixto Fernández López that refers to fossil associations + the external environment in which they were preserved. These sessions aimed to facilitate connecting experts from different backgrounds working in similar environments.
Open air Taphosystem: 27 presentations, 12 podiums and 15 posters
Marine Taphosystem: 21 presentations, 7 were podiums and 14 posters
Karstic Taphosystem: 31 presentations, 18 podiums and 13 posters
Experimental Taphonomy and other Environments: 25 participants, 13 podium and 12 posters.
Each session alternated both podium and poster presentations. At the end of each session, the congress could enjoy video presentations of delegates who could not come in person. Podiums lasted 15 minutes plus 5 minutes of questions, and poster presentations were exposed for 5 minutes each and questions were responded by the corresponding author during coffee breaks and post-session pauses in front of the poster. All podiums were actively commented by the audience, opening interesting discussions on different preservation types from both open air, marine and karstic environments. Photographs of each presentation was twittered to #TaphosTWG2022 as well as published in Facebook.
The congress was hosted in the spectacular city of Alcalá de Henares, UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage, the always active and charming Cervantes’ hometown. The participants of the Congress were also granted by the director of the Regional Museum of Archeology and Paleontology, Enrique Baquedano (co-organizer of the congress) with private visits after the closure of the museum, both the permanent and temporary exhibitions, nicely guided by Elena Carrión in the days that the congress lasted.
The congress has been supported by several Palaeontological and Archaeological institutions, foundations and societies: The Palaeontological Association (PALAAS, PA-GA202003), the French TaphEN a working group supported by the European Community and the French Centre National de Research Scientifique (TaphEN-CNRS, Actions 2022), the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ Congress Support) and the ArchaeologyHub of the CSIC (AII’2022 4_001). The private society of online courses Transmitting Science (https://www.transmittingscience.com/) also provided a grant (a free course) to one of the students that presented a podium and provided good responses to the questions asked by the audience. The student granted by Transmitting Science is Zohar Turgeman-Yaffe from Israel. Other institutions such as the Foundation and the Alcalá de Henares University, The Faculty of Economics, the Regional Museum of Archaeology and Palaeontology, the City Hall of Alcalá, The Spanish Society of Palaeontology, the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and the Society of Friends of MNCN (SAM-MNCN very especially to Josefina Cabarga, who brightly helped us with the congress accounting work and Xiomara to announce the congress in the webpage of the SAM-MNCN). All of them have greatly facilitated the organization and celebration of the 80th Anniversary of Efremov’s Taphonomy congress. Several student grants were given to those that applied for. PALAAS funded Nicolas Farroni (Instituto Patagónico de Geología y Paleontología: CCT CONICET –CENPAT Argentina), ICAZ granted Meir Orbach (the University of Haifa, Israel) and TaphEN also helped the rest of the students: Julia Rubio & Cristián Micó Sanchiz from the IPHES, and Marianthi Tzortzi from the University of Patras (Greece).
The conference addressed various topics and discussed various aspects of taphonomy and new methodologies from other sister disciplines to study specific aspects with common interests, purposes and objectives. This has always been the great interest of taphonomy since there are still many aspects to investigate, and the great strength of this area of research is the transversal collaboration of research areas so different that they complement each other.
The congress was closed with a final session on Saturday, the 11th of June, held at the Regional Museum of Archaeology and Palaeontology with the conference homage to Sixto Fernández-López by Oscar Cambra Moo, who gave a dynamic talk entitled “The Preservation and Conservation Dilemma: A contribution to Sixto Fernández López’s theoretical framework of Taphonomy”. At the end of the talk Cambra proposed a blind test with these two terms. This test opened the congress debate on the difficulty of maintaining the nomenclature and the false friends that also exist in our research fields. This is especially noticeable as we collaborate with specialists from very different fields and carry out transversal research with very different researchers and disciplines. The debate also extended to the difficulty of publishing databases and experimental works and reinforced the need to promote the Journal of Taphonomy or create a new one. The congress made clear the interest and the need to validate taphonomic modifications and processes through experimental work and long-term field monitoring, collecting not only specimens but also data (videos, photographs, maps) to upload and share the information online.
The homage was given to Sixto Fernández-López in person, and Peter Andrews received the tribute from Y.Fernández-Jalvo, who flew to Blandford to present the award. This tribute was extended to A.K.Behrensmeyer and C. Denys. The four received homage for their outstanding contribution to our knowledge of Taphonomy from the congress organiser committee and the congress delegates. A final talk entitled: “Microfaunal taphonomy comes of age: a tribute to Peter Andrews” was given by Christiane Denys.
The congress closed with a farewell party in the main hall of the Regional Museum of Archaeology and Palaeontology, and the participants were reconvened for the following editions of the 10th TAPHOS (Ferrara, Italy) and the 7th TWG-ICAZ in France or Israel, still to be decided.
Text written by Y. Fernandez-Jalvo, A. B. Marín-Arroyo, P. Sevilla, M. Moreno-García.