Mixed Matters

For the annual Tagung (conference), about 120 people convened in the southernmost point of Germany, at Lake Constance, near the borders of Switzerland and Austria. This conference is the perfect networking event for experimental archaeology in the German spoken part of Europe. Out of the 27 lectures, 25 were presented in German. The strength, but also its weakness, of the conference is that anything goes...

The ‘West Coast Cumbria’ hoard, discovered in 2014, is a late ninth/ early tenth-century Viking silver hoard, housed at the Beacon Museum, Whitehaven, UK. It is composed of 20 Viking silver objects: bar-shaped ingots and ornaments, in various stages of fragmentation (PAS ‘Find-ID’ LANCUM-FA14C8). One, complete ingot (museum no. 2016.162.5) bears coarse cloth-impressions on its upper surface...

The Archäologisches Landesmuseum in Brandenburg hosted the annual Archäotechnika living history event, during the weekend of 11 to the 13 August 2018. Participants were attired in clothing appropriate to the period and worked in a variety of crafts including metalwork, stone tool production, textiles, salt production, fishnets and traps, textiles and dying, and demonstrations in horsemanship...

The Paleofestival took place on 26-27th of May 2018 in the Castle of San Giorgio in La Spezia (Italy), which today serves as a Museum of Archaeology. Reconstructors from different parts of the world introduced visitors to issues related to everyday life in ancient times. There were attractions for adults and children. There were reenactors mainly from Italy, but also from other countries...

The annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) took place from the 11th to the 15th of April 2018 alongside the biannual Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC) at the University of Edinburgh. As the title suggests, the underlying objective of this workshop was to re-examine the role of experimental archaeology in Roman studies...

The Society for American Archaeology is, perhaps with the exception of the World Archaeology Congress, the largest meeting of archaeologists in the world. The 2018 annual meeting was held in Washington DC and was attended by approximately 5000 archaeologists. Delegates were primarily from the States, but there was also a good international showing with attendees coming from around the world...

The CRAFTER project aims at reviving modern-day artisanship by drawing inspiration from pottery traditions of four of the most remarkable Bronze Age societies of Europe: El Argar (south-eastern Spain), Únětice (Central Europe), Füzesabony (eastern Hungary) and Vatin (south Serbia)...

The International Council of Museums or ICOM has 41,000 members worldwide, all of which are museum professionals. In a span of six years, ICOM grew from 31,000 to 41,000 members; Europe makes up 84% of members, whilst individual members total to 93%. As a member you are entitled to an ICOM Membership Card, which gives you free entrance to thousands of museums worldwide...

2018 EXARC in Kernave
***Kernavė is one of the most picturesque places in Lithuania. Five hill-forts surround the wide valley of Pajauta. This place has always been visited by people not only for its sights but also for its aura of the distant past. Ever since people in Lithuania became more interested in history, Kernavė has been a symbol of...

The first Experimental Archaeology conference on African soil (ACE 2018) brought people from near and afar. Without knowing it I found myself among the Local Organising Committee of the conference. Each day was a learning curve as I sat in on those meetings and was also assigned to do certain tasks as we were preparing for the conference...