construction of building

Introduction

Creating reconstructions of the past has occupied a central position within the archaeological discipline from its early days (Clark, 2010, p.64). Reconstructions are often considered essential for visualizing the past and for translating abstract archaeological remains into more comprehensible narratives for the larger audience. Such visualisations, in the broad range of the word, can be more easily and readily understood than a complicated textual description.

During the summer of 2018 I completed a master’s degree in experimental archaeology and material culture at University College Dublin, this research was carried out for the final dissertation. The project was to build and test a 1:1 model of an early medieval Irish souterrain. The subterranean structure is based on one of over 3,500 examples of this feature identified in Ireland...

When you are planning your experiment how many of you think of the climate and whether it matches the period that your experiment is based in? Depending on the type of experiment there are many factors that may influence the results. You need to consider parameters such as; humidity, ambient temperature...

A new longhouse model in Hitzacker

The town of Hitzacker is situated adjacent to the river Elbe in the district Lüchow-Dannenberg, east of Lower Saxony. The discovery of wide Bronze Age settlement structures in Hitzacker in the 1980s led to the founding of a Bronze Age open air museum called AZH - Archaeological Center Hitzacker. Along with other archaeological models of Bronze Age architecture, three Longhouses were the main attractions of the institution and were also focal points of the educational programs. The destruction of one Longhouse by arson in 2008 was a great loss.

10th EAC Leiden 2017
***During fifteen days of June 2015, the team of l’Esquerda worked in a research project to build a Carolingian wooden watchtower on the River Ter, in Roda de Ter, Catalonia, Spain. The idea was to test our hypotheses experimentally, (a) if the wooden watchtower could...

On the 17th – 20th June 2015 40 participants of the 25th Archaeological working group East Bavaria/ West and south Bohemia/ Upper Austria, were hosted by the Upper Palatinate town Bärnau which lies on the border with the Czech Republic. The meeting took place in the conference hall of the Historic Park Bärnau-Tachov, a remarkable archaeological open-air museum which demonstrates...

Barrack blocks were a central feature in any Roman fort and functioned as the living spaces for a Century and its officers. While Roman forts varied in size from just over an acre for a simple ‘numerius’ fort, to over 55 acers for some large ‘legionary’ forts such as Deva (Chester), the layout of a barrack block...

The Society of Experimental Prehistoric Archaeology (SEPA, www.keap.umk.pl) is an organisation affiliated with the Nicolaus Copernicus University’s Institute of Archaeology since 1998. The first academic supervisor of SEPA was Jolanta Małecka-Kukawka, now led by Grzegorz Osipowicz...

In 1970, the Archaeological State Museum of Lower Austria, founded by F. Hampl in the town of Asparn an der Zaya, Austria, some 60 km north from Vienna, was officially declared open. The finds excavated from the region were put on display in the castle of Asparn, whilst the living conditions of prehistoric people were...

Prototypes, situation, general description

Especially impressive are the often massive ruins of dwelling foundations referred to as 'oncolithic' in my typology (for details see Beckmann 2012a).These foundations neutralize the often steep slope incline they are built upon, so that the original houses would have stood in a horizontal position. The settlement pattern and surface findings indicate that these installations were vernacular in character and probably housed mixed agricultural farms (ibid.).