Palaeolithic

Baskets are among the most ancient of human artefacts. Everyone is familiar with their most common functions as containers for transport and storage. When told that baskets have also served as cooking vessels, most people will be unable to conceive of how this is possible, yet this was a primary function of baskets for many cultures of the past, and some until the present...

MAMUZ is the new name that combines the Lower Austrian museum of prehistory Niederösterreich Asparn/Zaya and the museum centre Museumszentrum Mistelbach to create a centre of experiences and knowledge covering 40,000 years of the history of the human race. Using the example of its archaeological open-air site, the museum of prehistory MAMUZ aims to...

The book “Archaeology and Crafts” is a transcript of the proceedings of the VI OpenArch-Conference held in Albersdorf, Germany, on the 23-27 September 2013. The conference was an activity of the OpenArch project –a cooperation of Archaeological Open-Air Museums across Europe of which the AOZA...

At the age of thirty Edoardo started to study Archaeology for pleasure at the University of Genoa (Italy) while working as a computer programmer. Since then has taken part in archaeological excavations of prehistoric sites. Here he met many enthusiastic students, who dreamed of a future as prehistoric archaeologists in Italy, a country much more structured for classical archaeology...

National Geographic offers some of the most beautiful film material, of nature and culture, one can imagine. When I heard that Dr Bill Schindler would co-star together with Cat Bigney in a series recreating humankind’s ancestral journey, I was thrilled...

In the last quarter of the 1900s, John Coles (1979) and Peter Reynolds (1999) introduced the subject of experimental archaeology, which has gained significant momentumin the past few years. The discipline has become essential for reconstructing past technologies, in addition to supporting archaeological theory.

These experiments cover the making and testing of several possible glue types that might have been used in the hunter and gatherer period of the European Stone Age. Glue types produced in these experiments are: 1. Birch bark tar and pitch, 2. Pine wood tar and pitch, 3. Pine resin / wax glue, 4. Pine resin / wax / charcoal glue, 5. Hide glue and 6. Blue Bell glue...

OpenArch Special Digest 2015 Issue 2
***Over the years my personal research interests have focussed on the less tangible elements of the past, such as gender issues, perishable material culture, and the sensory worlds of the past, but all of these have been underpinned by a longstanding appreciation of the role experimental archaeology can play as...

I meet Harm Paulsen (70), the best known and longest working experimental archaeologist in Germany, in his apartment in Schleswig. Although the rooms aren't small, it is only possible to move around by holding in your belly and not breathing, as everywhere, standing, hanging or lying around, is evidence of Harm's professional and private life – a clear line between the two is not visible...

Annual Proceedings of the EXAR Tagung
***Volume number 13 of the periodical Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa. Bilanz contains 215 pages with 18 different articles on a wide variety of subjects. The contributions are presented in four sections: Experiment and Test, Reconstruction Archaeology, Theory and Emanation’, and Short reports...