About
The Workshop on Actualistic Taphonomy in South America
A meeting of researchers and students working on the processes that shape and preserve the palaeontological and archaeological records, from a South American perspective.
What is actualistic taphonomy?
Taphonomy studies what happens to organisms between death and discovery: how they decay, are transported, fragmented, dissolved, buried, and preserved. Actualistic taphonomy investigates these processes in present-day environments, using them as a key to read the fossil and archaeological records.
Because South America combines an exceptional diversity of environments — coastal plains, lagoons, sambaquis, Pampean lakes, Patagonian rivers, Andean settings — it offers natural laboratories for this kind of research. The continent is not only a source of fossil data; it is a place where the processes that generate that data can be observed as they happen.
Scope of the workshop
The workshop welcomes contributions on, but not limited to:
- Preservation of molluscan, diatom, and other microfossil assemblages
- Vertebrate taphonomy and bone accumulations
- Plant remains and their fossilisation pathways
- Bioerosion, encrustation, and ichnology
- Time-averaging and stratigraphic resolution
- Experimental and field taphonomy
- Applications to archaeological and forensic interpretation
- Conservation palaeobiology and compositional fidelity
- Open data and reproducible practices in taphonomy
Format
TAAS is a workshop in the strict sense: a small, discussion-oriented meeting. Oral presentations last up to 15 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions; the exact time of each slot depends on the number of registered participants and will be confirmed in the programme. The programme reserves substantial time for exchange, and the meeting also includes invited lectures and training activities.
Working languages are English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Abstracts may be written in any of the three languages, while complete manuscripts for the Revista Brasileira de Paleontologia special issue are accepted only in English. This deliberate multilingualism is part of the workshop's purpose: it keeps the meeting accessible to researchers across the continent.
Who attends
TAAS is designed for graduate students, early-career researchers, and established scientists working in palaeontology, biology, geology, archaeology, and forensic sciences. The workshop deliberately keeps a small scale to preserve discussion quality — previous editions gathered between 60 and 100 participants.
Scientific outcomes
Each edition has generated peer-reviewed products: the book Actualistic Taphonomy in South America (Springer, Topics in Geobiology), a thematic issue of PALAIOS (2023), and a thematic collection in the Publicación Electrónica de la Asociación Paleontológica Argentina (2025). Abstract volumes are deposited in Zenodo with a DOI.
The 4th edition
Porto Alegre, May 2027
The fourth edition returns to Brazil, hosted at the Centro Cultural of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. It is the first in-person edition on Brazilian soil.
Rio Grande do Sul offers a remarkable setting for the themes of the meeting: coastal plains and lagoons, sambaquis, the Patos Lagoon estuary, and the environments studied by CECLIMAR — the institutional base of the second edition.
