News

The second EXARC Journal of this year is as thick as the first one. The 12 reviewed articles cover subjects like ancient beer, firing pottery with camel dung, antler working and bead making, or reconstructing ornamentation on Russian pottery.

A hot issue is skills shortage in experimental archaeology, and... what do we actually mean by experimental archaeology? Can we take archaeological concepts outside class? We go from Jordan to Canada, from India to Poland, going underground in Ireland or making Iron Age jewelry in Italy. Finally, we also discuss the use of volunteers in Living History. Several articles are from EXARC meeting in Kernave in September 2018.

In Trento (IT), EXARC held its Annual General Meeting. Over 40 members were present. Following the report over last year (see Reports and Prospects) both Martin Schmidt, EXARC founder, and Bill Schindler, EXARC Chair left the EXARC Board, with many thanks for the work they did for EXARC. We expect to see them again in the future.

EXARC has a new Chair, Pascale Barnes from the UK. She already acted as our Vice Chair over the past years. Our new Vice Chair is Javier Baena from Spain and we have extra Board members coming in, Julia Heeb from Germany and Peter Inker from the United States.

EXARC, together with University Trento, organized a large conference on experimental archaeology in Italy, May 2019. This was already the 11th conference in these series. It was attended by 191 people from 28 countries and included topics like stone working, ship building, metal working and experimental archaeological methods & techniques. We had 65 students, that is 34% of all participants. 77 EXARC Members joined us (versus 114 non members), several people became members during the conference. In total EXARC got over 20 new members due to this conference. We welcome them all!