We are joining two leading congresses - TAPHOS and the Taphonomy Working Group (TWG) of the ICAZ - in the same 2022 meeting to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Efremov’s Taphonomy proposal as a scientific discipline.
The congress will take place in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, Spain), between 5th - 11thJune 2022 ,in the Aula Magna, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas (Universidad de Alcalá)
TAPHOS counts with significant participation of specialists in vertebrate and invertebrate taphonomy, while ICAZ and the Taphonomy Working Group are devoted to Quaternary taphonomic research with a particular focus on sites with human involvement. Thus, we join the 6th TWG-ICAZ and the 9th TAPHOS to bring together palaeontologists, archaeologists, biologists and, very significantly, zooarchaeologists that have not been assiduously attending TAPHOS in the last years. We want other researchers interested in all aspects of taphonomy i.e. forensic scholars, palaeocology/palaeoclimate/histology expertise, and geologists involved in the site formation, to celebrate this event.
TAPHOS-TWG/ICAZ celebrates the 30th anniversary of Taphonomy and Fossilization (TaFos). In 1990, the first edition was devised by Sixto Fernández López at the CSIC (Madrid). During the first Taphos, the masterpiece “Owls, Caves and Fossils” by P. Andrews was presented, and since then, this book has been a reference bibliography for small mammal taphonomy.
This congress will pay a special tribute to Sixto Fernández López, founder of these congresses, for his invaluable contribution to the Taphonomy theory and to Peter Andrews for his innovative work on small mammal taphonomic methodology and palaeoenvironmental interpretations.
Previous Taphonomy and Fossilization meetings were held in Madrid 1990, Zaragoza 1995, Valencia 2002, Barcelona 2005, Granada 2008, Tübingen 2011, Ferrara 2014 Viena 2017. Therefore, the return of TAPHOS to Madrid is an especially relevant event to the Spanish Taphonomists.
The Taphonomy Working Group (https://taphonomyworkinggroup.wordpress.com/twg/) is one of the recognized ICAZ Working Groups and this year will be held its 6th meeting, after those celebrated in Paris (2010), Santander (2012), San Lorenzo (2014), Paris (2016) and Ankara (2018). All of them have been regularly published in international journals.
The sessions will be 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 will facilitate connecting experts from different backgrounds working in similar environments.
- Karstic Taphosystem
- Lacustrine Taphosystem
- Fluvial Taphosystem
- Marine Taphosystem
- Open air Taphosystem
- Taphonomy in Palaeoecology and Palaeoclimate interpretations
- Experimental Taphonomy and other Environments
These sessions will also include the aspects that caused the origin of Taphonomy for Efremov being one of the primary research topics of Peter Andrews.
We are honoured to have the participation of A.K.Behrensmeyer as keynote speaker of the inaugural session and Christiane Denys will give the Good-Bye keynote speech at this special celebration.
