Dear WAC Members,
I, on behalf of the Council, herewith call for expressions of interest in holding the Tenth World Archaeological Congress in the year 2024.
This extraordinary call is made because of the decision unanimously taken by the WAC Council in its urgent extraordinary meeting that took place on Monday 13 December (Japan Standard Time) 2021. The Council discussed how to organize the Ninth World Archaeological Congress in Prague in July 2022 in the ongoing COVID pandemic situation and decided that the Ninth World Archaeological Congress will be held as a hybrid Congress and the Assembly will not be held in the Congress, and the Tenth World Archaeological Congress will be held in 2024, hopefully as an in-person congress, and the Assembly will be held at it. You will find a detailed explanation of the reasons for the decision in the statement attached. This decision was taken by the Council as the supreme governing body of the World Archaeological Congress between the meetings of the Assembly (see Article 9.1 of the Statutes).
Considering the extraordinary circumstance in which the Tenth World Archaeological Congress shall be prepared and held, the Council unanimously decided to add the following conditions to what are described in the Bid Guideline.
1) Those who head the bid must be an experienced member of WAC. Their WAC membership should date back to 2016, when WAC-8 was held, or earlier.
2) The bid must be supported by either a local university or universities as well as local, national or regional archaeological organizations or both.
3) The bid should have a budget that can subsidise the travel costs of more than three hundred participants from economically challenged backgrounds.
4) The bid has been itself fully insured for any unforeseeable contingencies.
Please submit the bid as a PDF file, with a cover letter bearing the signature of the head of the bid, to Dr Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu, Secretary of the World Archaeological Congress (E-mail: wacexecutive@lists.flinders.edu.au) by no later than Friday 21 January 2022.
Submitted Expressions of Interest will be assessed by the WAC Council, with the final decision on the venue and organization of the Tenth World Archaeological Congress announced at WAC-9 Prague 2022.
Koji Mizoguchi, on behalf of the WAC Council
President of the World Archaeological Congress