The Society for Arabian Studies is pleased to announce the next in its series of biennial conferences, Death, Burial and the Transition to the Afterlife in Arabia and Adjacent Regions, to take place in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, the British Museum, from November 27-29, 2008.

The conference will review, synthesise, and contextualise the evidence for burial practices and associated beliefs in Arabia and neighbouring regions from earliest prehistory to the present day. Contributions will be presented from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, physical anthropology, epigraphy, cultural anthropology, and theology.

A provisional conference programme and abstracts of presentations can be downloaded as pdf documents here:
 •  Programme
 •  Abstracts

Conference themes include:
 •  specific geographically- and chronologically-defined burial traditions of Arabia and neighbouring regions
 •  beliefs surrounding death and the transition to the afterlife
 •  implications of burial data for society (e.g. religion, kinship, social complexity, daily productive activities, etc.)
 •  burial traditions and inter-cultural contacts
 •  landscapes of death and burial
 •  burial and pilgrimage
 •  health and disease
 •  the recording and preservation of burial sites
 •  recent and contemporary ideas and practices relating to death and burial

Geographically, the conference is focused upon the Arabian Peninsula, although numerous contributions contextualise Arabian data on a broad geographical scale and discuss traditions of death and burial in adjacent regions (including Iran, Iraq, the Levant, Egypt and regions further afield).

In addition to the main lecture series and poster presentations, the conference incorporates two workshops; one on Bronze Age burial traditions in Arabia (chair: Lloyd Weeks, Lloyd.Weeks@nottingham.ac.uk) and the other on death and burial in the Islamic world (chair: Janet Starkey, j.c.m.starkey@durham.ac.uk). Further details on workshop attendance and participation are to be found in the conference programme.

Registration
A booking and pre-registration form for the conference can be downloaded as a pdf file here.
We strongly urge those attending the conference to pre-register and pre-pay using the booking form, as this will greatly streamline your arrival and registration process at the conference itself.

Publication of the Conference Proceedings
The conference proceedings will be published in the Society for Arabian Studies' monograph series (the latest flyer giving details of our publications can be downloaded here). As presenters may wish to prepare their manuscript before the conference, detailed guidelines for authors submitting papers to the proceedings are included here. In brief, the provisional deadline for submission of papers to the proceedings will be three months after the conference, i.e. 28th February 2009. Papers should be a maximum of 5000 words long (not including references) and can include up to 10 illustrations. All papers submitted for publication in the proceedings will be refereed.

Travel and accommodation in London
Attendees are expected to organise their own travel to the conference venue and accommodation for the duration of their stay. The Visit London website (http://www.visitlondon.com/) has lots of information on travel to and around London, and a designated accommodation page that allows you to search and book hotels online. The British Museum website has information on travel to the museum itself (http://www.britishmuseum.org/visiting/getting_here.aspx).

There are many other options to search for London hotel accommodation online, including hoteldirect (http://www.hoteldirect.co.uk/london/) and Londontown.com (http://www.londontown.com/hotels/). In addition, a useful list of hotels in the vicinity of the British Museum has been compiled by the Seminar for Arabian Studies (http://www.arabianseminar.org.uk/hotels.html). This list includes hotel addresses and telephone contact details.

We look forward to seeing you at the British Museum on November 2008, for what should be a stimulating and enjoyable event!

Inquiries
Additional inquiries can be directed to:

Dr. Lloyd Weeks
Dept. of Archaeology
University of Nottingham
University Park NG7 2RD
Nottingham, UK