Report of the SGA/SSA Annual Meeting 2025 in Vaduz

Report of the SGA/ SSA Annual Meeting and Workshop 2025 in Vaduz

The 2025 Annual Meeting and Workshop of the Swiss Society for Anthropology took place on November 28-29 in Vaduz at the Liechtenstein National Museum and it was kindly organized by Christine Cooper and the Liechtenstein National Museum.

The main topic of this meeting was trauma in the human skeletal remains.

Friday 28th of November

The first day of the conference was held in a room at the Liechtenstein National Museum. After an initial welcome, the Skeletal Trauma Session began. During this session, Dr. Viera Trancik Petitpierre presented the results of the analysis of two series of medieval skeletons from the canton of Grisons. This was followed by a presentation of research by Laura Maréchal, Mariam Abdoulkader, Jocelyne Desideri, Amélie Diaz, Stéphane Hérouin, Yasmine Mechadi, Carlo Mologni, and Jessie Cauliez on the Antakari 3 archaeological site in Africa (Interpersonal violence among early production societies in the Horn of Africa: new evidence from Antakari 3).

Laura Rindlisbacher then presented the results of her research on Trauma as a pathway to intersecting identities and health inequality in an Early Modern skeletal sample from Basel.

The session concluded with a keynote talk by Dr. Thomas Böni on Pathological Fractures and how to distinguish them from traumatic fractures.

During the Varia Session, Nikolai Goritschnig presented the results of applying a new method for estimating the age of death on skeletal remains and compared the results obtained with this method with those obtained with another method on skeletal remains from the Early Iron Age Cemetery Hallstatt in Austria.

Jocelyne Desideri presented the current excavation organized by the University of Geneva in Lully, where burials were found.

Cédric Cordey then presented the preliminary results of a study on pelvic depth (Pelvic Depth, not Width, predicts Locomotor Energetics: Preliminary Findings from Athletes).

Charlie Le Moyne presented his research on microbotanical remains in dental impressions, and Joe Heinrich presented his bachelor thesis, in which he analysed human and animal remains in some burials from Zizers (Grisons). Finally, Chiara Huwiler spoke about her study on Skeletal Pathology in a 19th-Century UK Soldier, in which she combined macroscopic, radiographic, and micro-CT analysis.

To conclude the series of presentations, posters from the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine in Zurich and the University of Lausanne were presented. The posters showed master theses and current research projects in progress.

Saturday 29th of November

On Saturday morning the meeting continued at the Liechtenstein National Museum with the general assembly of the Swiss Society of Anthropology. During the general assembly Sandra Lösch reviewed the activities of the past year, the budget and accounts were approved and the current status of the bulletin was presented. Timea Remsey was declared as the new webmaster and Lara Indra was warmly thanked for her previous work as webmaster. New members of the Swiss Society of Anthropology were welcomed and it was emphasized that this year's meeting had more participants than it had in a long time. During the assembly a group of members presented the newly formed working group for field anthropology. They wish to connect excavating anthropologists in Switzerland and address the lack of standardised field documentation in the German speaking parts.
Christine Cooper and the Liechtenstein National Museum were warmly thanked for the organisation of this year’s assembly, for providing the location and the very appreciated catering.

Lunch was served at the restaurant New Castle in a nice rustical atmosphere.

In the afternoon the second part of the Skeletal Trauma Session took place where Lukas Gomez presented one skeleton of his bachelor thesis, where he talked about the presumed method of execution used on this individual. Afterwards Marco Milella, new Professor at the University of Pisa, held his enlightening Keynote Talk about “Bodies of communication: reading violence as a social language”. After the Trauma Session Giada Steiger, PhD student at the Liverpool John Moores University, held a workshop about “Identifying Trauma in Forensic and Archaeological Human Remains”. The participants learned which tools and weapons lead to what kind of trauma. The main focus was put on different kind of knives/blades and how to distinguish which cutmarks on bone are caused by which kind of blade. Later participants could test their learned knowledge with pictures of cutmarks and compare it to the results a trained AI concluded.

The meeting closed after the workshop.

Joe Heinrich, Aimée Nixon, Federico Fibbioli