Our team is currently in Athens, taking part in the 32nd Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA). This year’s meeting is held on 26–29 August 2026 and hosted by the Department of History and Archaeology at the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

The Athenian sun is certainly not making things easy, but EAA is, as always, an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss ongoing research and meet archaeologists working on similar questions across Europe and beyond. With hundreds of sessions covering virtually every aspect of contemporary archaeological research, the Annual Meeting is also a particularly good place to confront our own results with different methodological and theoretical perspectives.

This year, we are bringing Brodno in Lower Silesia to Athens. On 27 August, from 8:30 to 10:30, Joanna Markiewicz will present the paper:

“Who would want to live on a floodplain? A pre-Roman Iron Age settlement in Brodno, Lower Silesia (SW Poland)”

The paper forms part of the session “Living on the Edge: investigating subsistence strategies in remote regions”. The session focuses on communities living in environmentally challenging areas – including floodplains, mountain zones, islands and other marginal landscapes – and asks how people adapted their subsistence strategies to such conditions. Its broader aim is to discuss human resilience, vulnerability and long-term relationships between communities and their environments.

Brodno is particularly well suited to this discussion. Site 3 is one of the key settlements examined within our project and has yielded an exceptionally important assemblage for understanding the non-La Tène communities of the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Lower Silesia, including finds pointing to contacts with the La Tène cultural zone. The project also makes use of the surviving archaeozoological and other environmental evidence from the site to investigate how its inhabitants organised their economy and adapted to the landscape in which they lived.

So, while Athens is currently testing our own ability to adapt to rather extreme temperatures, tomorrow morning we will be discussing a rather different environmental challenge: why did people choose to settle on a floodplain more than two thousand years ago, and how did they make such a landscape work for them?