USA

One of the most misrepresented hunting tools of the Southeastern United States is the blowgun. Most people do not realize that virtually every tribe in the Southeast used the blowgun for hunting small game. No on really knows the origin of the blowgun in the Southeast...

It was during a field trip to the National Archives with a group of college students that I first became aware of the problem. We had traveled to Washington D.C. to view the exhibit titled, What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet. It was on our way home when I posed this simple question to the students, “What are your reactions to the exhibit?”...

For a BBC program in 1954, Sir Mortimer Wheeler tasted a reconstruction of the Tollund Man’s last supper, which turned out to be a tasteless mush. This led him to announce: "I believe that the poor chap of Tollund committed suicide because he could stand his...

How do we know something is real? We say something exists when it is tangible and we can touch it; it is factual when we can compare it to other known variables, and historic when it fulfils our expectation of the past. There are objects and activities that blur these categories and cause people to accept alternative histories...

Roman women’s hairstyles of the late first century AD are notable for their voluminous frontal hair. Described by Juvenal as “tiers upon tiers” of curls (Sat. 6. 502-3), and by Martial as a “circle of hair” (Ep. 2.66.1) the development of this style is epitomized by the portrait of an anonymous woman known as the Fonseca bust...

REARC Conferences
***The third annual Reconstructive & Experimental Archaeology (Re-Arc) Conference was hosted by the Schiele Museum of Natural History at Gastonia North Carolina, USA, 19-21 October 2012. Although the cost of the conference itself was minimal ($35 pre-registered, $20 for students) the large travel distances within North America always...

This interview with Dr. Errett Callahan began in the fall of 2010 during an 8-hour car ride from his home, Cliffside, in Lynchburg, Virginia to Gastonia, North Carolina where we both attended the first annual Reconstructive and Experimental Archaeology Conference (REARC)...

Is interpreting a site’s past only possible at that site itself? Is a site better off without reconstruction and interpretation because it only damages the original material, if any is still left? Or is this the only way to salvage the story of the site for the generations to come? Ten authors were asked to give their views on the quote: “archaeological reconstruction in situ is the best way to tell the site's own story - on site. Otherwise the site is destroyed or the story lost" – and it is not that straightforward a yes or no.

REARC Conferences
***The second annual Reconstructive and Experimental Archaeology Conference was held at the Schiele Museum of Natural History, Gastonia, NC, 16-17 October, 2011 and was attended by over 50 participants representing at least 10 states, two countries and an unknown number of general museum visitors...