Mixed Matters

Experience instead of Event: Changes in Open-Air Museums Post-Coronavirus

Author(s)
Roeland Paardekooper 1
Annemarie Pothaar 2
Publication Date
The year 2020 started out for museums as usual, with plans for new exhibitions, new buildings even, and above all many events and visitors. Soon we saw how wrong we were. Open-air museums who had prepared to open up for the season found out that COVID-19 meant they were sitting ducks: no visitors, no income, no life in the museum area. The situation will not return to 'normal'...

Conference Review: Documentation Strategies in (Archaeological) Open-air Museums

Author(s)
Matilda Siebrecht 1
Publication Date
The conference in Documentation Strategies in (Archaeological) Open-air Museums, organised through the Experimental Archaeology Society (EXARC), was due to be held in Berlin on March 26th and 27th 2020. Unfortunately, the first half of March 2020 saw the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic throughout Europe which caused the implementation of government restrictions on travel and...

Book Review: Bronze Age Combat: An Experimental Approach by Raphael Hermann et al

Author(s)
Rena Maguire 1
Publication Date

Cometh the hour, cometh the book? There was a considerable anticipatory kerfuffle on archaeological social media about the release of Bronze Age Combat: an experimental approach, and rightly so. It is much more than just an experimental archaeology book with rather gorgeous photographs of swords, spears and shields (although it is that too!). It is a rare publication which manages to...

Conference Review: 2nd Experimental Archaeology Student Symposium

Author(s)
Yvette A. Marks 1
Publication Date
The Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield hosted the 2nd Experimental Archaeology Student Symposium (EAStS) between the 28th February and 1st March 2020, following on from the first successful meeting held in Newcastle in October 2018. The Symposium hosted nine papers on a variety of different experimental reconstructions of material production and processes...

Book Review: Iron Age Experience, Iron Age Kids and Kaptol - Hallstatt Food Workshop & Cookbook

Author(s)
Caroline Nicolay 1 ✉,
Lucian Petre Vulpe 2
Publication Date
Iron-Age-Danube was a cross-border project, part of the Interreg Danube Transnational Programme of the European Union. It lasted from 2017 until 2019. It counted 12 partners and seven associated organisations from in Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. The major goal of the project is to communicate a lively image of archaeological research and the Iron Age landscapes to the visitors...

Conference Review: The Later Prehistoric Finds Group Conference Crafting Identities: Making and Using Objects in the Bronze and Iron Ages

Author(s)
E. Giovanna Fregni 1
Publication Date
The one-day conference was held on Saturday 26th October 2019 in Edinburgh at the National Museum of Scotland. The focus was on the importance of understanding craft processes as a means of interpreting the expression of identity in prehistory. This was explored in papers that focussed on crafts and craftworkers who worked in metals, wood, glass, and ceramic materials...

Fire Beneath the Dome: Project to Evaluate the Efficiency of Clay Ovens in the Viking Museum Haithabu

Author(s)
Volker Karl Lindenberg 1
Publication Date
Visitors to the museum should get an impression of Viking life in Haithabu as vivid as possible – that is why from time to time we heat the clay ovens for baking or cooking (See Figure 1). We noticed that quite high temperatures are reached, but these will decrease again quickly if there is no more fire inside the oven, although it tangibly keeps the warmth for a very long time...

Conference Review: ICA II Conference Paris, France

Author(s)
E. Giovanna Fregni 1
Publication Date
The ICAII International Conference on Archaeometallurgy was held 25 September to 1 October 2019 at the Sorbonne University, Paris-Saclay University, and at Melle dans le Poitou where experiments were conducted. Papers were delivered in French and English and primarily focused on the metallurgy of the Bronze Age and New Kingdom periods in Egypt and the Middle East, using evidence from...

Book Review: Zivot experimentem. Sbornik praci k zivotnimu jubileu Bohumira Dragouna

Author(s)
Veronika Trubačová 1
Publication Date
This publication was created on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the eminent Czech archaeologist and experimenter Bohumír Dragoun. In its 168 pages the book looks at his life, and also at the increasingly popular interactive museums and experimental activities in archaeology...

Book Review: Mittelsteinzeit, ein Leben im Paradies? by Werner Pfeifer

Author(s)
Michael Müller 1
Publication Date
Considering actual studies about the analysis of ancient DNA is an important question, if only the lifestyle or the population, too, changed when hunter-gatherers became farmers and stockbreeders. The results point so far towards the latter possibility. However, the foragers of the Northern European Ertebølle culture preserved their lifestyle for one millennium, even though they lived in neighboring areas...