Mixed Matters

The one-day conference was held on Saturday 26th October 2019 in Edinburgh at the National Museum of Scotland. The focus was on the importance of understanding craft processes as a means of interpreting the expression of identity in prehistory. This was explored in papers that focussed on crafts and craftworkers who worked in metals, wood, glass, and ceramic materials...

Visitors to the museum should get an impression of Viking life in Haithabu as vivid as possible – that is why from time to time we heat the clay ovens for baking or cooking (See Figure 1). We noticed that quite high temperatures are reached, but these will decrease again quickly if there is no more fire inside the oven, although it tangibly keeps the warmth for a very long time...

The ICAII International Conference on Archaeometallurgy was held 25 September to 1 October 2019 at the Sorbonne University, Paris-Saclay University, and at Melle dans le Poitou where experiments were conducted. Papers were delivered in French and English and primarily focused on the metallurgy of the Bronze Age and New Kingdom periods in Egypt and the Middle East, using evidence from...

This publication was created on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the eminent Czech archaeologist and experimenter Bohumír Dragoun. In its 168 pages the book looks at his life, and also at the increasingly popular interactive museums and experimental activities in archaeology...

Considering actual studies about the analysis of ancient DNA is an important question, if only the lifestyle or the population, too, changed when hunter-gatherers became farmers and stockbreeders. The results point so far towards the latter possibility. However, the foragers of the Northern European Ertebølle culture preserved their lifestyle for one millennium, even though they lived in neighboring areas...

The Scottish Crannog Centre is a small archaeological open-air museum on Loch Tay in Perthshire. It originally operated as a visitor attraction, giving people a glimpse into life in the Early Iron Age through demonstrations of ancient skills and guided tours of a reconstructed crannog – loch dwelling – based on discoveries and excavations made by the Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology...

Slow Tech by Peter Ginn is a guide for step-by-step experimental archaeology. It is more a manual than a text or reference book, clearly showing the chaîne opératoire for potential experiments to try at home. Each of the five chapters includes a brief introduction to the relevant topics, followed by a series of experiments with clear procedure instructions and lists of required equipment...

Annual Proceedings of the EXAR Tagung
***It is the 18th issue of the periodical and includes 27 essays on experimental archaeology as well as an annual report (Jahresbericht, p. 321), an obituary for Sylvia Crumbach (p.325) and instructions for authors (Autorenrichtlinien, p. 326) of Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa on 328 pages...

REARC Conferences
***The 9th annual Reconstructive and Experimental Archaeology Conference, hosted by the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington and George Washington’s Ferry Farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, took place between October 25th and 26th...