Mixed Matters

What should an archaeologist do if one of the reconstructions of an experimental village is accidentally burning during the night? Simple: pick up a camera and start taking pictures. And then, of course, plan the excavation to record as much information as possible followed by an analytical and detailed publication on the results...

Guédelon: How to Build a Castle by Darques is by no means a DIY book or a guided tour on paper of the Guédelon site. Guédelon: a Castle in the Making by Martin & Renucci is subtitled The Guédelon Adventure and although it carries a lot of information about the construction site and its sources, this book still reads much like an adventure book...

About 90 concave, clay-lined hearths were identified during excavations of Aurignacian layers (ca. 35000BC in Klissoura Cave 1, Greece). Only two similar combustion features, identified at the Czech site Dolni Věstonice and defined as kilns, were known from Palaeolithic contexts before the excavations at Klissoura...

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?”...

This three-day conference (23-25 April 2013) was part of the OpenArch project, a project that spans five years and aims to raise the standard of scientific research and public presentation in the open-air museums throughout Europe, with a focus on the interaction with the visitor...

The 1987 conference in Århus, Denmark on ESF Workshop on the reconstruction of wooden buildings from the prehistoric and early historic period has been important to EXARC as we have acquired, and are gradually publishing, the manuscripts of the unpublished proceedings....

Judging from the extensive bibliography in this book, little to no literature exists on fish leather tanning in English. A quick Google and Amazon search reveals that a good general book on leather tanning includes at least one chapter on fish, reptile and other "alternative" skins...

As an EXARC Board member, I attended the Times and Epochs Festival in Moscow from June 21-23, 2013 in the open-air museum Kolomenskoye Park. This year, an estimated 200,000 people attended the medieval themed festival where they were able to witness and interact with 2,000 re-enactors from 40 different countries...

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...

Although Marcus Gavius Apicius was a brilliant observer and author, he was no cook, this is possible to recognise even after 2000 years... Only people truly knowledgeable in cooking, and also those who love to experiment, can cook according to the literary translation of Apicius...