Of these, three covered different regions of Europe, and the European sessions took two and a half days - almost half the time allotted to all lectures. Organisation by geographical grouping was unfortunate because it discouraged people from attending a wide range of papers. This reviewer admits to missing a substantial number of European reports. In turn, I noticed a large proportion of the European contingent were absent from sessions covering non-European topics. Perhaps strangely for a major conference on archaeobotany, there were no papers on identification presented in the methodology theme.
Identification is of course of fundamental importance and agreement on criteria is vital.
Indeed, one of the most important functions of the IWGP is to bring archaeobotanists together to observe and discuss material in order to reach such agreement. Speakers chose not to present identification-based papers as methodology, because they aimed to use identification decisions to address other questions. The taxon of the meeting was grape. Clearly, such novel approaches are required to move forward and may well be applicable to other difficult taxa. Often, nothing was explored beyond presence of plants and basic local farming practices.