With my appointment as Professor at the LMU Munich, it was clear that I would no longer be able to invest 100% of my working time in AcrossBorders – teaching and administrative tasks are prime obligations now and require much time. Fortunately, academic teaching was always one of my key interests and in the last 2 months I only had really good experience with the students here in Munich – so this new task is definitely fun :-)! Last week I could also present some aspects of our fieldwork documentation we use on Sai Island – as a case study in a practical class dealing with excavation. I will of course try to continue combining research and teaching as best as possible.

For the project management, it is, however, very unfortunate that the project’s current – hopefully only temporary – offices are far off from the main university, my main office and the Egyptological institutions in the city centre, but quite close to the famous Allianz Arena (the soccer season has ended, so no advantage here…). In order to bring all researchers together, I decided to organize a monthly Jour fixe in Munich Freimann. Yesterday we had our first meeting and discussed logistics, schedules of ongoing and planned analyses, planned publications, conferences and more. One of the key points to discuss was the upcoming workshop on settlement archaeology, organised by AcrossBorders and held in Munich at the end of June. The programme is almost ready and will be soon available on this blog.

In the future, the monthly Jour fixe will also be used for short presentations of team members about their ongoing research. And will hopefully soon not require an excursion through Munich!