archaeological open-air museum

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.

In the early days of the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, from September 1970, there was a Saxon building on the site, which was one of only two archaeological reconstructions at the museum. This original sunken-floor Saxon building is no longer standing but, after several years in the planning, a new project saw the construction in 2015 of another Saxon building, the Saxon Hall from Steyning...

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 ...

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...

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...

Butser Ancient Farm has been at the forefront of experimental archaeology in Britain1. for more than 45 years. The pioneering work of its first director Dr Peter Reynolds in the evaluation of Iron Age structures and agriculture demonstrated beyond doubt the importance of experiment in archaeology in the UK and international experimental archaeology work...

This book is particularly welcomed within the scarce Italian literature on the topic of archaeological open-air museums. The lack of debate and accurate information on this type of museums in Italy, drove the author to put together this volume, seven years after the publication of Dr Paardekooper’s magistral “The Value of an Archaeological Open-Air Museum in its use” in 2012, often referred in this book...