the Netherlands

1999 Wilhelminaoord Workshop
***The hoard of Farébersviller (Moselle, France) was discovered in 1991 during rescue excavations (See Image above). This set contains 130 "bronze" artifacts, which date to the Late Bronze Age (8th century BC)...

1999 Wilhelminaoord Workshop
***An historal technique of goldplating, described in 18th century literature, was reproduced. This cold-plating technique uses salts of gold, produced by dissolving gold in aqua regia. these salts are then rubbed onto a silver surfaces...

1999 Wilhelminaoord Workshop
***The limits of precision casting were explored experimentally at the Bronze Casting Workshop at Wilhelminaoord, the Netherlands, by making wax models, moulds and lost wax castings using essentially early metalworking conditions. Geometrically patterned models of Dark Age type dies were used to...

1999 Wilhelminaoord Workshop
***Considerations about a lost ancient fabrication technique of bronze attachements from a merowingian treasure box pointed out that practical experiments had to be done to reconstruct the cast and coldwork. A self made oven and mould sould help to...

1999 Wilhelminaoord Workshop
***The question studied within the framework of the Wilhelminaoord Workshop was: In which way the mould material does influence the cast structure of a bronze object? For this, casts in two different mould materials...

Experiment

When the subject of techniques of reproduction was raised these questions came back to me. Casting a slab of silver and subsequently hammering it might be a way to answer some of these questions. This would involve following the suggestions of certain treatises in combination with scientific research.

Part of my job as museum teacher at the Drents Museum in Assen is attending to the all the groups that visit our museum. This includes the great number of children, both elementary school and high school students, that visit our museum. A lot of children think of a museum as a boring place where there is nothing to do but look at old paintings...

This article is a result of my interest in, and experience with, archaeological open-air museums. With the start of HOME Eindhoven in 1982, I became actively involved in these museums and I was one of the people involved from the first moment in EXARC. From 2005 onward, I have been conducting postgraduate research at the University of Exeter into archaeological open-air museums...