interpretation

To celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of the historical interpretation program at L’Anse aux Meadows, NHSC, Parks Canada invested to extend their regular staff with a 10 day special program. Darrell Markewitz, the designer of the original program, and the Dark Ages Recreation Company (DARC) returned once again to...

The Games of the XXXI Olympiad – the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (5 August to 21 August, 2016) – continued the long tradition of Olympic sports, which began in ancient Greece (circa 776 BCE), and were heavily modified in their re-creation by the International Olympic Committee...

“I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in”. Bill Gates

It is the year 1350 in Gravendam (the medieval town of the archaeological open-air museum, (AOAM) Archeon, in the Netherlands). Master Roelof, a wood-and-bone processor, lies unconscious on the stone floor. Shortly before this, he had been climbing the ladder to the attic to grab a log of wood, but it slipped from under him and he ended on the floor...

2012 OpenArch meeting at Foteviken (SE)
***In his 2007 book, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance, Scott Magelssen describes the various reactions to his main line of enquiry: is historical interpretation theatre? The majority of the people he interviewed were museum curators and historical interpreters...

2012 OpenArch meeting at Foteviken (SE)
***Living history is used as part of a range of interpretive techniques to help young people experience and learn about the past at museums and historic sites (Samuel 1994). Although the benefits of bringing the past to life have been enthusiastically supported by costumed interpreters, museum and...

How do we know something is real? We say something exists when it is tangible and we can touch it; it is factual when we can compare it to other known variables, and historic when it fulfils our expectation of the past. There are objects and activities that blur these categories and cause people to accept alternative histories...

Many archaeological open-air museums and museums with indoor reconstructions choose to interpret history using the method of ‘living history’, or re-enactments. If one only counts the German references, there is wide variety of terms used by museums when they talk of ‘living history’...