open-air museum

Archaeological site museums may not be that well defined worldwide, yet, they are found almost everywhere. Archaeological sites with reconstructed buildings based on archaeology however seem to be a younger phenomenon and are mainly concentrated in Europe, Japan and North America. Both types of museums however have old roots. Important is not so much the site per se, but the message...

The year 2020 started out for museums as usual, with plans for new exhibitions, new buildings even, and above all many events and visitors. Soon we saw how wrong we were. Open-air museums who had prepared to open up for the season found out that COVID-19 meant they were sitting ducks: no visitors, no income, no life in the museum area. The situation will not return to 'normal'...

This year’s Association of European Open Air Museums (AEOM) Biannual Conference 2019 took place at multiple sites in Poland, over four days in late August. Its two key themes were ‘How Open Air Museums represent different cultural identities’, and ‘Representing the past - technical solutions for reconstruction and archaeological interpretation’. I was invited to participate in order to...

Many open-air museums in the United States are members of the Association of Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM). Only a small portion of the ALHFAM members are agricultural museums, however living history in a museum context is what unites the members...

2018 EXARC in Kernave
***When I began investigating this conference I was unclear as to how well EXARC’s focus on experimental archaeology would blend with International Museum Theatre Alliance (Imtal)’s approach of museum theatre and interpretation. They seem after all, two very different disciplines...

Every two years, Danish archaeological open-air museums meet up at a significant conference. They prefer the designation ‘historical workshops’, a concept which originated in the 1960s (see Bay 2004). The Danish Association of Historical Workshops (De Historiske Værksteder i Danmark, 2019) totals to over one hundred members. With their conferences, they ensure continuity...

Annemarie Pothaar was selected to attend the one day NEMO training course on 29th June 2018 in Östersund Sweden. This was facilitated by the Jamtli Foundation and the Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity (NCK). The meeting was attended by six colleagues coming from different countries, including the Netherlands and Azerbaijan...

Boundaries are always an interesting topic. In the framework of the current heritage buzz word decolonization, boundaries might also represent what is “colonised” in every cultural enterprise, or to be more specific, how and why some form of power obtruded its authority, and to what extent. Like almost all other museums, Colonial Williamsburg deals with the past. The past has its own boundaries that...

OpenArch Special Digest 2015 Issue 2
***Over 25 years I have actively worked with knowledge dissemination and bringing history alive. From this experience I have concluded that it has been among the most fantastic developments since museums first started...