(Chair: Willem BEEX / Benno RIDDERHOF, The Netherlands)
Many sessions of the Vienna conference have a very practical theme. So this time we also wanted to focus a bit on the critical issues of research itself. These can span a wide range of subjects, and suggestions for papers are for instance the use of new geophysical techniques for non-destructive analysis of archaeological sites. Pattern recognition is also a good candidate. Or the use of new techniques for the analysis of artefacts and ecofacts. This session is not intended to show the implementation of 3d-scanning of objects or the use of databases for storage and retrieval. Of course these are powerful and very useful applications, but their use is mainly to enhance and speed up documentation, not for analytical purposes.
As can be seen above we are aiming for a wide variety of subjects, as long as they cover new techniques used for actual fundamental research. We also do realize that several methods may already have been presented in the past, in one way or the other, but it is our hope that these have matured over the years.