 But this is a thing that I thought of about a couple of years ago, having sat through one of two fairly disastrous sessions. I'd better introduce myself. I assume you have all read the instructions that's being produced by the EAA on how to give lectures. The answer is usually no, and which upsets me, because I was the main author of that, though a lot of other people contributed to it. But it's really after problems that we had early on in our conferences where people were standing up giving lectures in any language and half the audience walking out because they couldn't understand. We had to do something to decide quite how to start communicating with one another. And this session is really to look at where we've got now and how we can move on and start providing more help and ideas to increase the quality. So I have got two extremely experienced lecturers who I'm sure are going to give absolutely wonderful lectures, which will be, well, we'll see what happens. But anyway, that is the background to this session. And I thought I'd start off with a sort of nice quote, really, to be thinking about famous first lines of English novels. And the most famous one for archaeologists is, from the go-between, the past is a foreign country, I mean, just everybody says it. But I want to introduce a new one, a romantic novel from the 19th century, which sadly has not been turned into a television series or anything, but by R.D. Blackmore. And he simply starts off, if anyone would hear a simple tale, simply told. Then he goes on, I John Reid of the Parish of War. And he goes and starts going a bit into dialect. But anyway, I think that is really the message I want to get across. Keep it simple, keep it bold, and you'll understand it better yourself and hopefully your audience will as well. So our problem, we literally, as I said, started with Tower of Babel and there are really a lot of mutual incomprehension going on and different ideas of seniority and things like that. I think a lot of people were allowed to lecture, depended on their status rather than what they had to say. Great question then, what language should we use for a while if it was any language? And when people were suggesting it should only be English. And then my own particular idea, having heard an Italian lecture to a very mixed audience and to give a lecture which everybody understood even though he was doing Italian, it can be done, it doesn't have to be in English. It just has to be comprehensible to the audience and that is really the message one needs to get across. So we have a varied audience. We have people who speak and understand English fluently, people who understand some English but want to check that they really did understand and people who perhaps speak little or know English and we don't want to discourage people like that from coming to the EEAA. So what we're all doing is really a combination of the spoken, written word, although somebody reminded me yesterday that there's also the hands which are another form of lecturing. But the people we forget, when I did my original thing, somebody came in and said, what about dyslexics? There are certain forms of lecturing in which they can't read and I appreciate this more at the moment because poor vision though, I just look at this, it's a blur. I'm waiting for a cataract operation which hopefully I'll be able to start seeing again. But I'm also getting old and losing my hearing as well. So I'm one of the people who's beginning to suffer from people who are not really following rules and of course we are many nations, at least we hope we are many nations and we all have different backgrounds into the sort of English we are speaking. So we've got varied speakers. I think there are probably very few people who speak proper BBC or Oxford or Queens English or standard English. And mostly many native English speakers speak with a regional accent. I don't know how many people recognize but I have a regional accent. The English pick it up very quickly but a lot of the non-English speakers don't understand that I have this slight accent simply because I'm lucky my accent is fairly close to standard English. So on the whole people can understand me well but it's sometimes a little bit difficult to gently say to Scottish colleagues perhaps they don't understand Glaswegian particularly well and so we have to accept that we have problems whoever we are of communicating. We have a habit of using colloquial expressions and speaking too fast and too elaborately. Non-English speakers, most people have an accent of some sort and sometimes a very strong accent. No problem in that. We English are lucky that everybody comes and speaks our language and so thank you very much to anyone who is not a native English speaker but even with native English speakers one of the problems is that most, especially the younger generation perhaps haven't even learned a foreign language let alone stand up and give a lecture in another language. I belong to the generation where I had to go I can speak other languages and I remember my first attempt in German and at the end of it came to question time and virtually every question started if I understood you properly. And so one learns, one learns and so it's good to be lecturing in and listening to other languages it gives you an idea of the problems but as I said too many people who are not familiar with that. What we try to do is to write out the advice to presenters, the people who are chairing sessions, the people who are the speakers, the people who are producing posters. We're not too prescriptive what in fact variety is the spice of life. We don't say this is the way you have to do it. There are many good ways but there are also many bad ways but there are also many ways, very simple problems that can be sorted out very easily. And so things like proper names and names of people, the names of sites. This is not something that's always particularly easy to understand. I always let them shed a chair of it so nobody understands what it is until they see the picture of the head of a man with big moustache and so on and realize it comes from Bohemia. But my first big excavation was at a place called Russellbury. Can you spell it? You're one of my former students. They're two of them. I think I can. You can, but even the English people, either they can spell it and can't pronounce it or they can pronounce it but they can't spell it. So even within English we have these problems. And large numbers as well. When trying to write down a telephone number in French I write down all the numbers and then to try and work out what it means. So something like, you know, 1999 comes out with Milne de Sault. Oh, I forgot. But suddenly my friend, Catalan Deset, would be 1997. It's a good example of how just if you're writing on the screen and everybody can immediately understand what it is. But the session organizers should send out the advice to all presenters, all the participants, but many don't. I didn't, did I? But anyway, I knew you two knew. Stop anyway. But it's interesting going to the lecturers here and it's very obvious those who haven't read the instructions, you see the same old mistakes just turning up. And, well, very often the worst people are the professors and so on. We've been doing these things for years. They know how to do it. They don't need advice from people like me. Oh, yes they do. They usually do the worst. But anyway, the basic thing is there is no point in attending the session if you don't understand what the speaker is saying or if the speaker is simply failing to communicate with the audience. And it was in Istanbul where I attended the session where just everything went wrong. Some of it was not the speaker's thoughts or some coming through the blinds so that you couldn't actually see some of the slides on the screen and things like that. But I was sitting next to a German lady and one of the organizers got up and started giving his lecture. And she switched off in about two minutes and she said afterwards, what did he say? Didn't understand his accent, spoke too fast, nothing on the screen to help me. And so even the organizer was making a mess of it. And I found out afterwards that nobody had seen or circulated the advice. The best lectures, the best presented ones were actually done by the youngest people. So anyway, what we're looking at now is how can we improve things? How can we try and dissuade everybody that they want to do? So the end of this session is trying to decide what we need to do. One thing one has to think about is how different presenting at an international conference is from what we normally do in lectures when we're speaking to people who speak our own language. Some of the things we've thought about provide feedback on sessions and presentations. I know I originally brought this up with Mark many years ago and said, well, there's some people who don't like being criticized in terms of experience and politics of the past. When you're coming from a country where there are problems about what you say, must perhaps find different ways to circulate the information. Try and send it out to every single member of the EAA and tell them to read it where we will get through to at least some people. And also perhaps you need to find out what training is actually available for people in work, in universities, etc. Can we find out what's going on through our teaching and training committee? And can we give advice to the trainers about what sort of things we need to see it? And I was just thinking of some of the organizations in Britain who might be able to take some of this on. I'm sure they're basis in other countries. But the Chartered Institute of the Old Archaeologists, I don't know what you're doing at the moment. Yeah, certain point taken there. Yeah, I'm telling you, if it helps, I mean, we have run courses on presentation, but they happen once. Yeah, twice. Yeah, it's not a permanent thing. Yeah, and we haven't used archaeologists. Yes, we use people who do presentation skills. So we hope after this session there will be something which you as archaeologists will be able to present. And well, our Higher Education Academy, our universities, again, they tend to be taught by people who are not archaeologists, and we have specific ways and specific problems. And we also just hope that everybody, anyone who's organizing a conference anywhere, will just steal our ideas. They're there, they're on the web, copy them, use them, adapt them. They're there for everybody to use. And so, as I said, we're looking at the possibility of doing preparing training videos, and hopefully this will turn into a session which we will be able to use. Well, that's me finished, probably not on time, but anyway. So, yes, Mark, come and give us a brilliant lecture, as you always do.