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First of all, happy new year! We wish you a happy and productive 2016 full of epigraphic achievements and discoveries!  2015 was not bad at all: findings and publications happened and it seems that our field is enjoying good health. Proof of this is the creation of our project AELAW and its promising future results.

The first post of 2016 is devoted to the last conference of 2015 that could be of interest for the AELAW members: Epigraphy on Ceramics. It took place last 17^th and 18^th December 2015 in Ghent, and was organized by Universiteit Gent (Wim Broekaert) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Alain Delattre, Emmanuel Dupraz). Epigraphy on Ceramics brought together a wide group of multidisciplinar experts in order to share their knowledge on texts written on ceramics coming from very diverse epigraphic cultures. A meeting on this topic was somehow necessary, since texts on ceramics are being more and more important in the recent research. In fact, nowadays nobody can deny the relevance of the inscriptions written on this humble support. Because of this and, as could not have been otherwise, the participation of AELAW members has been very significant.

The meeting was structured in three sessions. The first one, devoted to Economy, was focused on amphoric stamps (Mark Lawall, Wim Broekaert, Piero Berni y Charo Rovira), although there was also space for Egyptian ostraka attesting Roman trade with the Far East (Dario Nappo). The second session was devoted to religious epigraphy, basically from Greece (Giovanni Boffa, Nikos Litinas - Panagiota Vlachaki, Marieta Forster - Oliver Pilz) and also Albania (Eduard Shehi).

Last, the third session was dedicated to Sociolinguistics and almost ‘“monopolised” by our COST Action members. Apart from Andreas Gavrielatos, who devoted his communication to the sociolinguistic interpretation of onomastics on Gaulish pottery; from Nicolle Hirschfeld, who showed interesting examples of graffiti and dipinti from the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and Alexandra Bourguignon, who talked about Linear B texts, the rest of speakers belonged to AELAW.

First, Javier de Hoz, in charge of the Sociolinguistics keynote, was absent but was substituted by Emmanuel Dupraz, who was also co-organizer of the conference. The Professor of Latin at the ULB also contributed to the meeting with a communication on the earliest texts written in Lepontic on ceramics. Sociolinguistics session was opened by a communication by Francisco Beltrán, Borja Díaz, Carlos Jordán e Ignacio Simón dealing with the inscriptions on pottery from Hispania Citerior during the Republican period, paying special attention to spindle whorls. María José Estarán participated in the conference as well with a communication that showed the texts on ceramics (on stamps and graffiti) as witnesses of the development of Latin in Italy, Gaul and Spain.

We are looking forward to the publication of the proceedings of this conference, foreseen for the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018. In the meantime, 2016 seems a blank sheet of paper (or an ostrakon, or a bronze tabula, or a stone slab) that we will write, for sure, with lots of epigraphic novelties.