open-air museum

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...

OpenArch Dialogue with Skills Issue
***One aim of the five year EU-funded Culture Project OpenArch is to encourage cooperation between archaeological open-air museums in Europe and ethnological open-air museums who have a long history of presenting and handicraft to the public in practical ways...

The international and European notion of cultural and creative industries has not shown much appreciation of the potential of the cultural sector, especially the heritage sector. This may or may not be fair, but the perspective in the conclusions from KEA studies on cultural economy and creativity has been symptomatic for the European approach (KEA 2006; 2009)...

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...