Mixed Matters

Investigating Domestic Craft and Subsistence Activities through Experiments and Material Analysis Leiden University currently coordinates the project “Putting Life in Neolithic Houses”. This will take until 2025 and is funded by the Dutch Research Council NWO. Besides EXARC, there are other nine partners in this project.

“Cooperating to create a greater impact" was a session during the ICOM General Conference in Kyoto, Japan. It was organized by ICOM NL, ICOM JP, DEMHIST, EXARC and the Japan Museum Sieboldhuis. The session took place on September 4, 2019. The session focused on themes of collaboration, cooperation, joint ownership and the possibilities in continued contacts...

The motivation and purpose of the RETOLD project is to capture and preserve the wealth of data from evidence informing building reconstructions and craft processes of open-air museums. Additionally, the project seeks to develop and use alternative formats of oral histories as a way of share intangible cultural heritage with a wide audience. From an artistic point of view, immersive media are to...

As part of the EU project RETOLD, the Stadtmuseum Berlin in Germany is responsible for creating standardised documentation strategies for archaeological house models and evaluating them by engaging with the open-air museums of Astra in Romania and the Steinzeitpark Dithmarschen in Germany. In order to start creating these workflows, as a first step, other open-air museum were approached ...

The origins of the European RETOLD project, led by the international association EXARC, lie in a concern to preserve the heritage generated by archaeological open-air museums through the creation of a standardised system for collecting, digitising and disseminating knowledge (memories) of the processes of building reconstruction and handcrafted objects. The project has a duration of four years ...

Experimental archaeologists often seek similar ethnographic studies when designing and preparing experiments. Observing how contemporary traditional artisans work, along with the materials and tools they use, provides invaluable insights to those who want to understand crafts and tools used in the ancient past. While contemporary artisans’ tools may have been modernised...

This volume on prehistoric tanning technology is the revised and expanded version of the dissertation submitted to Exeter University in 2015. It is noteworthy in that it places experiment at the heart of the entire research programme, thereby radically changing the perspective from which archaeological and ethnographic artefacts might be approached...

After several years of archaeological excavations at Borg in Lofoten in the 1980s, Lofotr Viking Museum was established in 1995. The excavations uncovered an 83-meter longhouse dated to the Viking age. A copy of this longhouse, together with a copy of the Gokstad Viking ship, were built to make the core of the new museum above the arctic circle. Lofotr Viking Museum grew bigger as the years went by...

This edited volume by Dupré et al. explores the rising prominence of performative methodologies known as Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Replication, and Reworking (RRR). Resulting from a meeting of the NIAS-Lorentz Program in Leiden, Netherlands in 2015, this collection of papers by academics and practitioners ranges across chronological time (Bronze Age to 19th century) and disciplines...