Ancient Technology

The present work is a reconstruction which was made with two objectives in mind. Thee first was to experiment with heat-treating of amber, a technique already hypothesised by Von Eles (1995), in order to verify possible resin alteration due to heating. Although already tried in the past (Fiorentini, 2018b) after having conducted some cold-working experiments (Fiorentini, 2018a)...

The site of Hepojarvi is located on the northern coast of Hepojarvi lake, near Saint Petersburg, Russia. The site is a multi-layer settlement with different types of Neolithic pottery (from Sperrings to late Comb-Pit Ware); the settlement functioned in 5314 cal BC – 2342 cal BC. It was excavated in 1978 by I. V. Vereschagina. The aim of the current paper is to reconstruct some concrete tools and techniques of ornamentation...

Antler working was prevalent throughout prehistory, with a breadth of intricately detailed and technologically complex antler artefacts observed within the archaeological record. In particular, during the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic, antler working with flint tools would have been a time-consuming process. While the chaîne opératoire of producing certain antler artefacts has previously been explored...

In July 2018 a group of students from the UK participating in the Placements in Environmental, Archaeological and Traditional Skills (PEATS) Erasmus + Work Placement, attended the Kierikki Stone Age Centre, Pahkalantie, Finland. During the week previous to this experiment, the same group of students had built a skin-on-frame canoe, so the decision was taken to build an alternative lightweight craft...

In Romania, in recent years, numerous cultural events and projects have been developed to reconstruct some aspects of everyday life from the past, or to promote archaeological sites (Ardeleanu, 2012, pp.72-73). One of these sites is the Porolissum Archaeological Reserve (Sălaj County). It includes an important prehistoric centre (with discoveries from the Neolithic Age, Bronze Age, Hallstat, and...

In July 2018 a group of students from the UK participating in the Placements in Environmental, Archaeological and Traditional Skills (PEATS) Erasmus + Work Placement, attended the Kierikki Stone Age Centre, Pahkalantie, Finland. Part of that training included experimental / experiential projects that were coordinated by Dr. Peter Groom of the Mesolithic Resource Group...

Craftsmanship relies upon the silent knowledge of the skilled experience of the creative workings of the hands, a knowledge that is difficult to convert to written characters without creating a blur of words that make very little sense. Theoretical reasoning lacks the dialogue with, and the resistance from, the raw material. Making up a picture of how wax, clay and metal would behave without practical experience of them is...

There can be various reasons for reconstructing clothing for museum purposes. The most frequent one, as in the case of this paper, is to improve and liven up an exhibition with 3D models (Hendszel et al., 2008), which present the fashion culture of individual periods, nationalities or specific regional features to the general public...

10th EAC Leiden 2017
***Scientific attempts to understand early prosthesis manufacturing techniques are rare. The academic research of artificial limbs has been limited to the historical analysis of documentary sources. This area still remains a fairly under-researched topic even under the more recent developments of disability studies (Childress, 1985)...

10th EAC Leiden 2017
***Of Erasmus, prince of humanists (1466?-1536), no less than eight portraits from life survive – all eight in the exact same bonnet. A recently published investigation of this iconic garment (Kruseman, Sturtewagen and Malcolm-Davies, 2016) involved establishing a 250-year typology of the bonnet from iconographical sources, compiling technological and...