To participate on the program, all presenters, chairs, moderators, and discussants are required to pay the registration fee for the Annual Meeting before the submissions deadline and additionally, hold an SAA membership over the course of the meeting year (memberships run from January 1 to December 31). SAA begins accepting membership dues for the following membership year on August 1. Individuals who are not current SAA members would need to join the Society by November 15 and current members, have until January 30 to renew their membership. For further details about the registration and membership requirements, as well as other policies, please visit the Submissions Guidelines page.

The SAA Board has established a new meeting registration policy beginning with the SAA 87th Annual Meeting in 2022. In the event an SAA annual meeting is canceled, meeting registrations will automatically be applied to the next year’s annual meeting unless a full refund is specifically requested.

Current refund policies will continue to apply for all SAA annual meetings that go forward. These are:

• The SAA has always refunded (in full) anyone unable to attend the Annual Meeting (we require documentation).
• Registration fees for presenters who elect to withdraw from the program will be refunded by the SAA office—minus a $25 processing fee—upon receipt of e-mailed or written request (no verbal requests, please) postmarked by December 1, 2022.
• Advance registration fees for those not on the program who elect to not attend will be refunded by the SAA office—minus a $25 processing fee—upon receipt of e-mailed or written request (no verbal requests, please) postmarked by the advance registration date deadline.  The advance registration date deadline for the 2023 Annual Meeting is March 1, 2023. 
• No refunds are available after the advance registration date deadline except in the case of registrants who provide documentation that shows they cannot attend, such as a visa denial, governmental travel advisory or prohibition, employer travel prohibition, or medical reason.
• Hotel: Members must notify the headquarter hotel of a cancellation no later than three (3) working days before date of arrival to receive a refund from the hotel.
• Travel: We strongly encourage meeting participants to familiarize themselves in advance with refund and cancellation policies for airlines, car rentals, trains, or other travel providers, as there is likely to be a great deal of variation in what is allowed.

In order to celebrate the wealth of archaeological research taking place around New Orleans and the greater US Southeast, the SAA Board is pleased to announce the Southeast Session Series, a programmatic initiative to create sessions focusing on the region that are minimally or ideally entirely nonoverlapping. The program committee encourages anyone interested in organizing a session for the series to submit a session title with an asterisk (*) before the title in the online submission system. Organized entrants in the Southeast Session Series will be specially marked in the SAA 2024 meeting program so that conference attendees can easily identify them.

As of May 2023, the SAA Board highly encourages attendees of the 2024 annual meeting to be vaccinated against COVID-19, but vaccinations will not be required. If CDC guidelines change before December 2023, the board will revisit this decision with due consideration of the difficulties in being vaccinated and boosted or getting a PCR test.

Abstracts cannot exceed 200 words. Also, please do not use more than one (1) space after a period. 

The Program Committee selects chairs for general sessions from those individuals that have indicated a willingness to serve in such a capacity. Please be sure to select the appropriate box on the individual abstract submission form if you are interested.

A general session chair accepts the responsibility of providing the laptop computer for the session and ensures that all presentations are loaded prior to the session. To facilitate that process, SAA Staff will provide the general session chair with contact information for all the session participants

Posters After Hours is held on Thursday evening. The Program Committee selects poster sessions and poster abstracts to participate in this session. To be considered, submit your poster session or poster abstract and then email meetings@saa.org. Your name will be added to a list and passed on to the committee after the submissions deadline.

Unsure if you want to submit an abstract for an oral or a poster presentation? Check the “Permission to Convert my Paper to a Poster” box to give yourself the option to be part of Posters After Hours.

Please note that we can’t guarantee your poster or session will be placed in the Posters After Hours session.

The session chair is responsible for organizing the session submission and making sure their participants have completed their submissions. Onsite, session chairs are responsible for providing a laptop for their session (or delegating this to a session participant) and loading all presentations onto the laptop prior to the session.

After you select your session format and complete the session abstract, you may invite participants to your session. In order to invite participants, you will need to enter each person’s first and last name, and e-mail address. Participants are invited to your session via an automated e-mail.

Sometimes a participant’s mail provider may reject the automated email. If this occurs, you can send the participant your session ID number and what role you would like them to have in your session. The participant will then need to login into the submission system, click the “I want to accept an invitation to an organized session” button, enter in your session ID number, and then select their role.

Participants will not appear in your session until they have accepted your invitation to participate.

Once the maximum number of participants has been reached, invitees will no longer be able to accept the invitation to the session. Similarly, if a specific role is maximized, the participant will not be able to join the session in that role.

You can now connect with possible session participants and organizers through the "Session Organizers Looking for Participants" discussion thread in the Collaboration e-Community. In this e-Community, organizers can post about their session and the type of presenters they are looking for. This gives others the opportunity to reach out directly to the organizer if they feel they would be a good fit for the proposed session. This thread can be found under "Annual Meeting" in the Discussions section.

Detailed instructions on how to navigate to this thread can be found here.

The Collaboration e-Community is open to anyone with an SAA account (whether they are a current member or not) during the submissions period (May 1 - September 5, 2019).

When logged in to the submissions portal, click on the “I want to accept an invitation to an organized session”, enter your Session ID, and follow the prompts to complete your submission as a participant or discussant.

Chairs have the ability to pay for a participant’s registration fee via the submissions system. In order for the chair select this option, the participant must log in to the submissions portal, complete their abstract (if relevant to their role), and select the “Pay by Mail/Fax” checkbox under Payment Options (on the Step 2 Registration tab). Once the participant has completed these steps, they will be listed on your Step 3 Participants tab. Under their “status” column they will be marked as unpaid. On the Step 3 Participants page, click the “Pay for Invitees” button at the bottom of the page, select which participants you’d like to pay for, and then follow the prompts to complete the payment.

Registration fees for all participants must be received by the submissions deadline.

The designation “sponsored” indicates the support of an SAA internal entity (i.e. committee, Task Force, interest group) or an outside organization that has received explicit approval from the SAA Executive Director. Outside organizations will need to contact Oona Schmid (oona_schmid@saa.org) to discuss session sponsorship approval.

To indicate that your session is sponsored, go to edit your session submission, on step 1 “submission info” check yes on question #6, then enter the name of the sponsoring group. 

Because numerous groups wish to sponsor sessions, the Program Committee must balance such requests with other program goals; as a result, in some circumstances, requests for sponsored sessions may be rejected. Typically, a group may sponsor one session. Additional sponsored sessions by the same group are solely at the discretion of the Program Committee.

Posters After Hours is held on Thursday evening. The Program Committee selects poster sessions and poster abstracts to participate in this session. To be considered, submit your poster session and then email meetings@saa.org. Your name will be added to a list and passed on to the committee after the submissions deadline. Please note that we can’t guarantee your session will be placed in the Posters After Hours session.

Sessions are auto-submitted for review once the submission deadline hits on September 5, 2019, 3pm Eastern Time. Chairs of sessions have the ability to make changes to the session at any time before the deadline. Prior to the deadline, please be sure to organize presentations within the submissions portal as you would like them to appear on the Preliminary and Final Program. No changes may be made after the deadline.

If the primary chair has not completed his/her submission or registration, the session will NOT be submitted for review.

If any session participants have not completed their submission or registration, they will not be included in the final session submission. Chairs are able to review and print the “Summary” page which shows exactly how their session will appear when it is submitted.

In order to submit to an organized session the session’s chair will have needed to send you an invite through the submissions portal or given you the session ID number. To accept an invitation, sign in to the submissions portal, click on the “I want to accept an invitation to an organized session”, enter the Session ID, and follow the prompts to complete your submission as a participant.

If you have not been invited by a chair to participate in an organized session, you can find chairs looking for participants by logging in to the Collaboration e-Community. The “Session Organizers Looking for Participants” discussion thread is where chairs can post about their session and the type of presenters they are looking for. This gives others the opportunity to reach out directly to the chair if they feel they would be a good fit for the proposed session. This thread can be found under "Annual Meeting" in the Discussions section.
Detailed instructions on how to navigate to this thread can be found here.

The Collaboration e-Community is open to anyone with an SAA account (whether they are a current member or not) during the submissions period (May 1 - September 5, 2019).

While any individual participating in the meeting may hold 3 roles, participants are limited to holding 1 “presenter” role. Presenter roles include 1^st authorship (primary author) on both paper and poster submissions. If you are already listed as a presenter elsewhere, you can’t submit a second abstract.

Abstracts cannot exceed 200 words. Also, please do not use more than one (1) space after a period. 

Since the submission system will only allow each individual to submit one paper or poster abstract, the participant will need to delete the initial abstract submissions and resubmit the abstract to the organized session. In order to submit to an organized session the chair can either send you an invite through the submissions portal or you can use the session ID. When logged in to the submissions portal, click on the “I want to accept an invitation to an organized session”, enter the Session ID, and follow the prompts to complete your submission as a participant.

If you have issues with this process, contact meetings@saa.org for assistance.

Once the maximum number of participants has been reached in a session, invitees will no longer be able to accept the invitation to the session. Similarly, if a specific role is maximized, the participant will not be able to join the session in that role. Please contact your session chair if you are unable to join their session.

Alternatively, an individual participating in the meeting may only hold 3 roles and participants are limited to holding 1 “presenter” role. Presenter roles include 1st authorship (primary author) on both paper and poster submissions. If you have already reached your 3 role or presenter role maximums, you will not be able to join the session.

The display area is 4 feet (height) × 8 feet (wide); your poster should be slightly smaller to be able to fit on the display area.

Mounting supplies are not provided by SAA; presenters need to have their own pushpins or double-sided tape for their displays.

Please be sure to pick up your poster when your session has concluded in order to provide a clean space for the incoming poster presenter. Electricity is not available in the poster area; please do not bring equipment that requires electricity.

Poster sessions run for 2 hours. You can set up your poster 15 minutes prior to the start of your poster session in the designated poster area. Please remove your poster when your session concludes and clean the area to allow for quick turnover for the incoming poster session.

The location of your poster will be determined by the poster number that is designated on the final program, which will be marked by a number and letter (ex. “8-a”). These poster numbers will be posted at the top right corner of the poster display area.

How much time presenters spend with their posters is up to them. Since one of the clear advantages of poster presentations is sustained interaction with the "audience," SAA urges presenters to spend as much of the two hours as possible with their material. If you are not able to be present for the entire session, please be sure to be on time to set up and to clean up your materials.

Please email your session chair with copies of any electronic presentation files in advance of your session. Check the final program and the onsite update to check what time you are scheduled to present.

Please remember that oral presentations in regular symposia are limited to fifteen minutes in length. Prepare your paper with this time limit in mind so that all sessions can run on time.

There is a Speaker Ready Room available to test connecting you laptop to the AV set up. You can also use this room to run through your presentation.

• Provide laptop (or delegate this task to another participant) to connect to projector in session room
• Bring dongle to connect your laptop to the projector
• Gather presenter presentations and load them to your laptop in advance of the session
• Introduce each participant
• Ensure papers run according to schedule (15 minutes per paper presentation)

Volunteer session attendants will periodically check in on your session to ensure everything is running smoothly. If you need assistance, please ask your volunteer and they will get in contact with SAA Staff as needed.

• One LCD Projector and standard cable
• One screen
• One session timer
• One wireless slide advancer (includes pointer)

If you wish to order and pay for additional AV equipment, please contact meetings@saa.org and we will send you the AV company’s contact information.

Traditional laser pointers are available at the SAA Staff Office but must be signed out. Any special connector needed for an Apple computer to connect to the LCD projector will need to be provided by the chair. Our audio visual company does not provide dongles. There are a limited number of Apple-compatible dongles available for sign out in the SAA Staff Office.

If you would like to practice how to connect your laptop to the projector you can do so in the Speaker Ready Room. Details on the location and hours of the Speaker Ready Room can be found in the final program.

In order for your presenters’ papers to be posted to the web, you must email them to Emma Sunseri (Emma_sunseri@saa.org) and Matt Cipriani (Matt_Cipriani@saa.org) as soon as possible. Once we receive the papers we will post them on the SAA website. 

Please only send the papers when they are complete. Do not send abstracts that will need to be replaced with papers. Paper Abstracts will be posted to the web about a month before the Annual Meeting. To view paper abstracts please visit: https://www.saa.org/annual-meeting/programs/abstract

If you are posting your papers on your own website, please let me know and I will post a link to your papers on the SAA E-Symposium website so attendees can find them.