The international and interdisciplinary Late Bronze Age conference focusses on the ceramical material of the early Late Bronze Age in the Levant. The SCIEM 2000 interdisciplinary project is a major research programme of the Austrian Academy, partly funded by the Austrian Science Fund, which was launched in March 1999 for a maximum of ten years. The aim of this project is to create a definite chronological framework for the history of the second Millennium B. C. in the Eastern Mediterranean.