International Council
for Archaeozoology

PZAF is an annual conference organised by and for postgraduate/graduate students and early-career professionals in the field of zooarchaeology. It was originally founded by Richard Madgwick (University of Cardiff) in 2009. PZAF provides the opportunity for young researchers to present their new projects in an informal environment. For many students and early career researchers, PZAF represents their first experience of interaction, exchange of information and mutual learning with their counterparts from different countries. It therefore provides the opportunity for students to be exposed to different research traditions and approaches and to foster academic networking among the wider community of upcoming zooarchaeologists. In October 2017, PZAF became an ICAZ Affiliated Group.

Next meeting and contacts

Next meeting will be held in Croatia, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, between the 24th and 26th of May 2023. It will be organized by Goran Tomac, a PhD student and an assistant at the Department of Archaeology of the same Faculty, and Antonela Barbir, a PhD student working at the Institute of Archaeology in Zagreb, with the help of postgraduate archaeozoology students from Croatia.

Previous meetings

The first PZAF meeting took place at Cardiff University (UK) in November 2009. The second meeting was held in August 2010 in Paris (France) during the 11th ICAZ International Conference, in the form of a speed-networking event. In November 2012 the Zooarchaeology Lab of the University of Sheffield (UK) organised the third PZAF meeting, while the fourth was held in June 2014 at the UCL Institute of Archaeology (London, UK), and the fifth in Tarragona (Spain) in September 2015, and the sixth in Toruń (Poland) in March 2017. The seventh PZAF took place in Palermo (Sicily, Italy) in June 2018, and the eighth was held in Yerevan (Armenia). The ninth rendition was supposed to take place in Serbia, but was held online due to the Covid19 pandemic. Like the previous conferences, it was a very successful event, with over 50 delegates with oral presentations covering a wide range of topics and geographical contexts.

Publications

The contributions presented at the 4th PZAF (London 2014) were published in the Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11), an open access and peer-reviewed journal. The proceedings of the 6th PZAF (Toruń 2017) will soon be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology (IJSRA), also an open access and peer-reviewed journal. The proceedings from PZAF held in Palermo (2018), Yerevan (2019), and the last one held online are currently in different stages of the publishing process. Updates and information are regularly posted in the PZAF Facebook page.

This information has been contributed by Goran Tomac and Antonela Barbir, current PZAF liaisons (contact: pzaf2023@gmail.com) (last update: July 2022).