Fall Events Sneak Preview; the "Book of the Blog" is Back!

It is hard to believe that it is almost October! Never fear, as the Fall program of the Institute is about to begin. Here is the first of two sneak previews of coming events. For our Athens Friends Association we have on Wednesday, October 19^th another book presentation and reading by the Vancouver-based travel journalist and author W. Ruth Kozak. Last fall Ruth was in Athens and gave us a dramatic reading of the first book in her trilogy, Shadow of the Lion, about the aftermath of the death of Alexander the Great. Her next volume, The Fields of Hades, which is just published picks up where the story left off.

And then, oh yes, we do love our Canadian film nights at the Institute! Well the next instalment of this “revered institution” will be on Wednesday, November 30^th. A film that I wanted us to see last year (but was outvoted, alas!), Gunless, is now on slate for this evening. This is a Canadian western spoof (2010) with talented actors and an amusing take on ”the code” of proper behavior in the Old Wild West for a professional gunslinger.

So save the dates and be on the alert for future blogs with more information about each event.

The world-renowned “Book of the Blog” is back!

In the early years of this running commentary on what is happening here in Athens there was a regular feature called the “Book of the Blog”. These were succinct mini-reviews of selected new acquisitions and donations in the Library of the Institute. For a variety of reasons this much-awaited component of the blog gradually disappeared. I did write, however, that any donations of books, monographs and conference proceedings written or edited by Canadian scholars to our Library would be reviewed. I’m pleased to announce that at our 40^th Anniversary Colloquium in June two edited books were given to our Library.

The first volume is edited by Jane Francis (Concordia University) and Anna Kouremenos entitled Roman Crete. New Perspectives (Oxbow Books, 2016). Not only is Jane the lead editor, she also wrote the “Introduction” and a contribution on “Apiculture in Roman Crete”. The latter research originated in her study of the evidence for beekeeping from the Sphakia Survey Project. Further, among the 12 contributors are two other Canadian researchers. Scott Gallimore (Wilfrid Laurier University) re-assesses Crete’s economic role in the Roman Imperial system using primarily the distribution of Cretan transport amphorae over time and space. After a close relationship with the Italian peninsula up through the 3^rd century CE the distribution patterns changed towards Cyrenaica, the Black Sea coast and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean. Administrative re-organization and the logistical needs of the Imperial army on the northeastern frontier appears to behind this. A better understanding of the Cretan amphora types also indicates that the island weathered the 3^rd-century CE economic crisis well. Despite this crisis the major Cretan cities embraced the typical Roman imperial entertainment and cultural activities package according to George W.M. Harrison (Carleton University). His wide ranging analysis brings together many desperate threads to illuminate his thesis.

The contributions, which originated in a conference, examine aspects of the island’s material culture, iconography, ceramics and lamps, sculpture and architecture within the context of the Roman Empire. The “Introduction” and the “Afterward: putting Crete on the Roman map” (Kouremenos) provide a pithy yet broad overview of the island of Crete under the long-lasting Roman rule. This has been long needed as most scholarship dealing with the island focuses on the Minoan period and on the Iron Age polities. The references that are cited in the contributions are excellent guides to more in-depth examinations of both Roman Crete and its integration into the Empire. The ample images, drawings, plans, charts, maps are of high quality and resolution. There are even polychrome images to supplement the standard B/W ones. This one is a keeper, indeed!

Next week I will share my thoughts on the other donation. These volumes and our Library await you from Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 13:00.

Cordially,
David Rupp
Director

The CIG crew for the Fall is now complete!

Last Friday the final member of our brave band at the Institute this fall arrived safely from Canada. She is Ailidh Hathway. Ailidh is an engaging fourth-year undergraduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) majoring in Archaeology and Heritage studies. She is particularly interested in osteology and paleopathology, as well as the material culture of Bronze Age Crete. Her dedication to archaeology expands beyond the classroom, beginning with her participation in the excavations of the Town of Nebo Archaeological Project, located in Jordan, during the summer of 2014. This field school, under the direction of Professor Debra Foran, taught her basic excavation techniques, artifact analysis, pottery drawing and rudimentary zooarchaeological cataloguing, among many other fundamental skills. During the summer of 2015 Ailidh worked as an archaeological field technician for the CRM firm AECOM to enhance her knowledge and excavation skills at various locations across Ontario.

So when you come to our first event in mid-October you will have a chance to meet her and to welcome her warmly to our archaeological community. In the meantime you may see her on occasion on Tuesday evenings at that world-renowned center of advance learning and cutting-edge scholarship, the “Red Lion”.

Kalo Fthinoporo,
David Rupp
Director

The Kastro Kallithea Archaeological Project: the 2016 study season - Schliemann at Knossos

The Kastro Kallithea Archaeological Project (KKAP) is a synergasia of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Canadian Institute in Greece. It is co-directed by Sophia Karapanou (Ephorate of Antiquities of Larissa) and Margriet Haagsma (University of Alberta (UofA)) and has been running since 2004. After an extensive architectural and intensive archaeological survey of this Classical/Hellenistic urban site, the research focus was moved to a more detailed study of the public and private buildings at the site. The 2016 season was, once again, dedicated to cataloguing the numerous finds from our so-called ‘Building 10,’ a domestic structure dating to the late 3^rd and 2^nd centuries BCE. Laura Surtees worked on the survey material from the site, collected in 2004-2006 and in 2009, in preparation for the final publication.

Our team this year numbered 31 people, including staff, volunteers and field school students and thus things were busy in Narthaki, the village which we call home for the five weeks in May and June.

Colette Beestman-Kruijshaar, a specialist in Hellenistic pottery from Thessaly, oversees all work done on the ceramics from the site. She does this in close consultation with Sophia Karapanou, herself a specialist in Hellenistic ceramics, who spent considerable time in Narthaki.

One of the goals this year was to finalize the quantification of all pottery found in Building 10. All sherds (including roof tile fragments) found in Building 10 have now been checked to see whether any fits could be found with other vessels. In addition, all ceramics have been sorted, counted and weighed according to ware, pot form and fragment type. This laborious process has helped us to obtain better insight into the formation of stratigraphies in Building 10 and into establishing the character and extent of the different habitation phases. We concluded that the distribution of the ceramics clearly supports our earlier hypothesis, which we initially based on the distribution of coins and household tool kits and the character and quantity of rooftiles. In its second phase, Building 10 was only partially reused. The second occupation and building was thus built within the ruins of the first whereby a large part of the debris and contents was discarded in the southern part of the building, most notably in the original storage area (units K and L).

The artifact assemblage was divided into categories, which were studied in detail by members of the KKAP team. PhD candidates Gino Canlas,Tristan Ellenberger and Amber Latimer made great progress with their studies of the pithoi, stone finds and mould-made wares respectively. MA students Karey Thomson, Adam Wiznura and Edward Middleton all finalized their individual studies of the cooking pottery, unguentaria, and lamps found at Kallithea.

Alex Garcia and Emily Heaton (undergraduate students at the UofA) worked tirelessly on the metal finds discovered in Building 10. Of the 701 metal objects (excluding coins) 458 were drawn and described.

Katherine Bishop (PhD student in Anthropology at the UofA) took up the pastoralism project reported on last year. She was able to transport some samples taken last year back to Edmonton for an analysis of various Stable Isotopes, including Carbon, Oxygen and Strontium. The goal of this project, which has now become her fully-fledged PhD project for which she received a SSHRC grant, is to examine whether these methods can give us some insight into seasonal mobility and of animals and people at the Hellenistic sites of Kastro Kallithea and ancient Pharsalos.

The 17 field school students, who came from Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, were trained in sorting, counting, drawing and describing Hellenistic ceramics in addition to being introduced to the history of the site and its surroundings. This was done under the guidance of Colette Beestman-Kruijshaar and Margriet Haagsma. Laura Surtees educated the students in photographing archaeological objects and Gino Canlas in drawing them. In addition, the students were taught techniques in pottery restoration and 3D modelling using photogrammetry, the latter by John Manderscheid. Katherine Bishop taught the students the merits of faunal analysis at archaeological sites.

Excursions were made to Almiros, Halos, Volos, Dimini, Paleoskala, Tserli and Velika (Meliboia). Dr. Roula Sdrolia, Head of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Larissa, and Dr. Georgos Toufexis, archaeologist at the same Ephorate, graciously guided us around the last three sites.

The team gave a successful presentation in the cultural centre at Pharsala. All of those mentioned above gave a brief report on their progress to about 150 Pharsalians, who were very appreciative that the presentation was completely given in modern Greek! Mayor Aris Karachalios was a graceful host at the dinner that followed.

Prior to the field season Margriet Haagsma, Sophia Karapanou and Laura Surtees gave successful presentations on the merits of the micro-historical approach we use in Kastro Kallithea at the University of Oxford, at the annual meeting of the Canadian Institute in Greece (CIG), and at the conference celebrating the 40^th anniversary of CIG.

KKAP’s project website has been renewed! View the new website at: www.greekarchaeology.org

KKAP would like to thank the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Canadian Institute in Greece, the Municipality of Pharsala and the Department of History and Classics of the University of Alberta for their unwavering support. We are especially grateful to Pharsala’s mayor Aris Karachalios and to municipal archaeologist Vasso Noula for letting us use the old school in Narthaki as our work space on a more permanent basis, and for their friendship and interest. A special thank you goes to Elias Papadopoulos who always makes our stay in Narthaki unforgettable.

Margriet Haagsma, Sophia Karapanou and Laura Surtees

 

Why Evans and Not Schliemann as the excavator of Knossos?

The hill called Kephala tou Tselevi on the western bank of the Krateros river to the south of the city of Candia (modern Herakleio) on the island of Crete has come to be known world-wide as Knossos. Here at the beginning of the 20^th century Arthur Evans began the excavations of a massive structure and portions of the surrounding settlement that we know today as the Palace of Minos. Evans was not the first to excavate here, however. Minos Kalokairinos (1843-1907), an olive merchant and antiquities collector from Candia, initiated the first test trenches on the hill for three weeks in December, 1878. He uncovered a portion of the West Magazines with their storage jars (pithoi) in situ and reached as far as the Throne Room. Given the political sensitivities of the time, as Crete was still under Ottoman rule, the Christian General Administrator of Crete, Fotiades Pashas, decided in 1879 that the excavations should stop. In 1880 he also refused the request of the French School in Athens to continue the excavations for the same reasons. Heinrich Schliemann of Troy and Mycenae fame entered the picture in 1886 seeking to dig at Knossos as well. Evans did not arrive on the scene until 1894. What happened to deny Schliemann access to Knossos?

Aimee Michelle Genova (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History - Ancient Mediterranean World, University of Chicago; Associate Member, American School of Classical Studies at Athens) is investigating this aspect of the history of archaeology on the island of Crete for her doctoral dissertation. Her lecture for the Syllogos Filon tou Istorikou Archeiou tis Archaiologikis Yperesias on Monday, September 19^th entitled “Knossos Before Arthur Evans: Archival Remnants of Heinrich Schliemann’s Bid for Kephala Hill” will reveal the results of her research.

Knossos is synonymous with the accomplishments of Sir Arthur Evans in 1900, but the site’s history and reputation was a crucial part of the Cretan social fabric much earlier. Heinrich Schliemann is primarily regarded for his excavations at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns in the late 19^th century, but his failed attempt to secure the site of Crete’s Knossos is perhaps a lesser known aspect to his archaeological narrative. The archaeological process for excavating Knossos extends beyond Schliemann’s firsthand commentary, and this presentation discusses the context of unpublished documents from Iosif Hatzidakis to Heinrich Schliemann between June 1886 and May 1889 that were collected from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens through the Gennadius Library Archives.

This lecture is the first in the 2016/2017 Lecture Program of the Syllogos Filon tou Istorikou Archeiou tis Archaiologikis Yperesias.  It should be noted carefully that it will be held at the Library of the Canadian Institute in Greece (Dionysiou Aiginitou 7, Ilisia) at 19:00. Both the venue location and the time are new for this lecture series. The Megaron Mousikis metro station is at the end of Dionysiou Aiginitou street. The public, as always, is most welcome.

Cordially,
David Rupp
Director

The Fred Winter Collection

Ephesos, view down Kuretes Street to Celsus Library (Professor Fred Winter, 1977)

Mission archéologique gréco-canadienne d'Argilos, saison 2016 - Two New Fellows at CIG

La saison 2015 avait permis le dégagement de 12 pièces d’un bâtiment commercial (L) dont la limite Est, une rue Nord-Sud, semblait indiquer l’existence d’autres pièces/magasins. Avec l’aide de la municipalité d’Amphipolis, le déplacement de la conduite d’eau qui recouvrait partiellement certaines pièces a permis la poursuite de la fouille de ce secteur.

C’est donc avec impatience et curiosité que s’est ouverte la saison 2016,  dirigée par le Dr Zisis Bonias (ministère de la culture grec) et le professeur Jacques Perreault (université de Montréal).  L’équipe internationale d’une quarantaine d’étudiants, assistés par des ouvriers chevronnés s’est donc appliquée avec enthousiasme et énergie, malgré la chaleur redoutable, à creuser et dégager la suite de cette imposante structure avec l’aide du charmant et compétent personnel de la fouille.

La fouille des pièces du bâtiment (H) situé à l’arrière de la structure commerciale laisse penser de prime abord qu’il pourrait s’agir d’ateliers et non d’habitations. Par contre, dans la première pièce du bâtiment Q, les fouilleurs ont dégagé une baignoire avec sortie d’eau vers la rue ainsi que les possibles vestiges d’un escalier menant à l’étage, ce qui nous orienterait plutôt vers un habitat.

Quant au bâtiment P, nous en saurons plus lors de la prochaine campagne, le sol récent de la seule pièce fouillée n’ayant fourni que peu de matériel.

Les fouilleurs, toujours par équipes, s’occupaient l’après-midi du matériel trouvé le matin : lavage, tri, répertoire des objets, et surtout repérage des formes, sous la supervision du personnel de la fouille.

Cette année la découverte de monnaies a été plus modeste, nous avons par contre été submergés par les amphores !

Au musée d’Amphipolis, les spécialistes se sont succédés pour notre plus grand plaisir et profit : Joanne Cutler a poursuivi son étude des pesons, Kees Neeft celle de la céramique corinthienne et Stefanos Gimatzidis la céramique thrace,  Angelos Gkotsinas s’est occupé des nombreux os d’animaux. Quatre restaurateurs,  Wendy Reade, Vasileia Liakatou, Yannis Kartkatis et Anne-Marie Cannatella se sont occupés à remonter certains vases, nettoyer les monnaies etc., et enfin Eugenia Gkatzogia, archéo-botaniste, s’est jointe quelques jours à l’équipe.

En dehors de l’apprentissage technique de la fouille (stratigraphie, dessin, instruments de topographie, introduction à certaines formes de céramique etc.), les étudiants participent aux sorties et visites guidées de sites et musées de la région (dont Stagira, Vergina, Thessalonique, Philippes… ) et ont l’occasion de relaxer un brin lors du grand week-end à Thasos !

Je termine cette note par une petite anecdote. Nous savions que nos découvertes récentes à Argilos, notamment celle de ce grand bâtiment commercial, avait eu un large écho dans la région, rendant la fouille désormais célèbre ( !). En voici d’ailleurs la preuve :

Jacques Perreault
Université de Montréal

 

Keven bienvenu! Welcome Mark!

The 2016/17 academic year has begun at the Institute. This year the Institute’s Elisabeth Alföldi-Rosenbaum Fellowship will be held by two individuals, not one. Keven Ouellet, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal will be with us for the entire year. A native of Quebec City, Quebec he holds a B.A. degree from the Université Laval and a M.A. in Classical Archaeology from the Université de Montréal.  Keven is well known at the Institute having dug for many seasons at ancient Argilos with Prof. Jacques Perreault and having participated in the Colloquium we held in the memory of Frederick E. Winter in 2012 with a paper on the defensive fortifications of Argilos. While in Athens he will continue research on his doctoral dissertation which focuses on the defensive fortifications of ancient Greek city-states in northern Greece using a multidisciplinary approach including the historical, geographical and architectural studies of these fortified settlements and their surrounding regions. Keven will also try to demonstrate the presence of local and regional phenomena in the architectural styles which are most likely linked with the movement of populations coming from the Cycladic Islands and the West coast of Anatolia. An outgoing individual with many fieldwork experiences, he will share the results of his research in the spring with an Institute lecture.

This fall Dr. Mark D. Hammond will be with us as well. In May, 2015 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri after having earned an M.A. there too. I know Mark well as he was one of my top undergraduate students at Brock University. His previous research focused on the 4^th – 7^th centuries CE ceramic finds from the Panayia Field excavations at ancient Corinth in their local and regional contexts.  Mark shared this study with us in an Institute lecture in the winter 2015. Mark returns to Greece to research a small body of ceramic material recovered by the ASCSA during the 1933 excavations of the so-called Hill of Zeus cemetery in Corinth. These 43 intact funerary vessels are not only informative of the burial practices and rituals performed in Late Roman Greece, but the fabrics of the majority of these vessels also appear to correspond with some of the local and regional wares that Mark characterized during his dissertation. Thus, it is possible to comment not only on the distribution patterns of funerary vessels, but also on the similarities and differences of vessels manufactured at different regional centres that were ultimately put to the same use. In December Mark will update us on this research in an Institute lecture.

So come to the Institute’s lectures and events this fall to meet Keven and Mark and to welcome them warmly to our archaeological community.

Cordially,
David Rupp
Director

The Fred Winter Collection

Rome, temple of Vesta, restored section colonnade and wall (Professor Fred Winter, 1977)

The Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project 2016 Season

Early June witnessed the start of the second excavation season for the Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project [SNAP] on the eponymous hill and chert source located on what today is the island’s north-west coast, a couple of kilometres south of the harbour town Chora. SNAP has been running for the past three summers, initially as an independent CIG survey (2013-14), then an official collaboration with the Cycladic Ephorate of Antiquities when we turned to excavation mode. Today the project’s co-directors are myself, Dr. Tristan Carter of McMaster University, and Dr. Demetris Athanasoulis, the head of the Cycladic Ephorate, while the team – the largest yet – comprised some 25-35 students and scholars from Canada, Greece, the UK, France, Serbia and the US.

Last year we commenced work on the hill’s western flanks, both up close to the natural chert outcrops where the raw material was being extracted and initially worked, and lower down on what today is a narrow flatter coastal strip. In 2016 we revisited these areas – as none of the previous year’s sondages had been excavated to natural – as well as expanding our work to neighbouring plots, whereby our summer’s work involved the stratigraphic excavation of some 10 trenches. These are relatively limited areas being exposed, nothing larger than a 2×2m sondage, as our focus tends to be deposit-oriented, rather than the architectural foci of most excavations. Indeed we expect to find no built features for Stélida is an early prehistoric quarry and stone tool workshop, that we estimate to have been exploited – likely intermittently – from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic, i.e. an estimated ≥250,000 – 9,000 years ago.

The archaeology of Stélida is dominated by the by-products of stone tool manufacture, together with a small quantity of hammerstones, a number of which are made of emery, a raw material native to Naxos, albeit from the north-eastern part of the island, the best known outcrops being around Apeiranthos and Koronos, some 15km linear distance from the site. These artefacts can be found in overwhelming quantities - a large bag-full from every zembil sieved! – and represents one the major challenges facing our work, both methodologically in terms of how one studies so many thousands of items, and pragmatically in terms of having to carry such a weight of material off-site each day, and the space required to store it all. Most of the artefacts recovered can be conceptualised as production debris, with true end-products under-represented if not completely absent from our stratigraphic units, the logic being that having tested the raw material quality, the knappes would have then roughed out cores and/or tool-blanks which would then be transported off-site to their seasonal camps at which point the finished implement would be fashioned. As such it has been a struggle at times to date our deposits using a classic tool-typology approach, with our assemblages quite distinct from other excavated earlier prehistoric sites of the region – as for example the Franchthi and Klisoura caves of the Argolid.

While tool-types and knapping traditions can provide us with a broad-stroke chronology for our material, i.e. ‘Mesolithic’, or ‘Upper Palaeolithic’, the fine-tuned dating system we require to answer many of our research questions can only be achieved through the generation of absolute dates via scientific techniques. To this end we had Dr. Christelle Lahaye (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) visit to take a series of samples for optically stimulated luminescence [OSL] dating, a chronometric technique that is well established for earlier Palaeolithic archaeology; indeed Dr. Lahaye has recently been applying it to some of the classic Neanderthal sites of SW France, while elsewhere in Greece it has produced dates of over 400,000 years old. The sampling itself took place by moonlight… as exposure to the sun would ruin the process, having initially studied in detail the stratigraphy of our main sondages alongside our geo-archaeologists Dr. Dan Contreras (CNRS Aix-en-Marseille) and Justin Holcomb (Boston University).
 

Having top-notch scientists and methods at hand is alas not the end of the problem however, as Stélida provides us with yet further challenges due to the dynamic nature of its landscape. During the period within which Stélida was being exploited by early modern humans, Neanderthals and earlier hominins (a claim we make based on the types of tools we find at the site), i.e. the Middle Pleistocene – Early Holocene in geological terms, the landscape and environment would have changed radically due to the fluctuating periods of glaciation and warmer inter-glacial eras. During the cold periods the environment was probably quite stable, with steppe-like low scrubby brush covering the hill; however, as temperatures rose and precipitation increased, the shallow roots of those bushes would have provided a poor anchor to the soil, which in the context of heavier rainfalls would have begun to wash downslope, only stabilising once again when warmer climes facilitated the growth of more deep-rooted larger plants and trees. The net result is that we are excavating the remains of a highly dynamic landscape, a steep-sided hillslope that has undergone various periods of major erosion, followed by epochs of stability. Most of what we have dug over the past two years can be interpreted as colluvial (hill-wash) deposits, where everything we find is in secondary context, having originated from upslope knapping floors. That said, the assemblages within many of these strata are quite homogenous, i.e. we get great swathes of Upper Palaeolithic material moving quite rapidly en masse, rather than everything being completely mixed and undateable. In between these colluvial fills we also believe that we can recognise periods of stability, palaeosol development and even surfaces. These claimed different kinds of deposits are being analysed by Dr. Panagiotis (‘Takis’) Karkanas, a world-renowned micromorphologist and Director of the American School’s Weiner Laboratory, who sampled some of our excavation sections in late June.

It does remain however that in certain trenches these erosional episodes provide us with stratigraphic inversion. For instance, our 3m deep Trench 1 provides us with a series of deposits that almost always contain small quantities of Upper Palaeolithic material in association with far larger amounts of what appear to be much earlier Lower Palaeolithic tools. Our working interpretation is that we have a series of stable periods dating to the later Pleistocene, during which Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers worked at the site leaving knapping debris on the surface of the hill. These stable periods were then bookended by periods of climatic and environmental instability leading to major periods of erosion that led to large quantities of soil – containing the remains of much earlier Lower Palaeolithic activity – washing down from the upper parts of the hill and covering the Upper Palaeolithic knapping surfaces, and so-on. As such, we are quite prepared for a series of OSL dates from this trench that do not increase in age as we descend the stratigraphic sequence; this will be yet another challenge to explain to the scientific community in detail as to how such dates are still highly meaningful, and can attest to different periods of deep-time activity at Stélida.

The major discovery of the season was a hearth that we believe to be of Upper Palaeolithic date, a feature that is in situ and located in front of one of the major chert outcrops at the top of the hill, sealed by some 75cm of artefact-packed colluvial deposit. Here finally we have something which is both easily dateable (via OSL, thermoluminescence, and/or carbon-14), and will provide us with a date of an actual series of activities, rather than our usual terminus ante quem results (‘material from deposit X is at least date Y’). We also took a great many soil samples for water sieving with the hope that we will recover charred plant materials, indices of both Upper Palaeolithic cuisine and the local environment, as Stélida’s acidic soils have otherwise destroyed all other organic finds from the other trenches.

For those of you attending the annual meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in Toronto this January, you can find out more about our 2016 discoveries when we present a paper in a session dedicated to the fieldwork carried out under the aegis of the Canadian Institute in Greece; see you there!

Tristan Carter
SNAP co-director

We're Back!

Kalo Mina!

As of today the Institute is open again for business with its normal hours of Monday through Friday from 09:00 to 13:00. This academic year we will be hosting two Fellows: Keven Ouellet is a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, and Dr Mark Hammond is conducting postdoctoral research. In addition, in two weeks we will be joined by Ailidh Hathway, an undergraduate student from Wilfrid Laurier University, for a three month internship.

Upcoming blog posts will introduce you to Keven, Mark and Ailidh, as well as inform you of our autumn-winter programme of events, currently being planned. We look forward to welcoming you to the Institute this autumn to use our facilities, attend our events, and meet our personnel.

Best wishes,
Jonathan Tomlinson
Assistant Director