woodworking

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...

This paper outlines The Pallasboy Project, which set out to craft a replica of the eponymous Irish Iron Age wooden vessel. We consider the process and progress of the project, as it developed in a number of slightly unusual directions. The paper includes a description of the experimental work, alongside personal reflections and comments by...

In July 2018 the Mesolithic Resource Group attended the Kierikki Stone Age Centre, Pahkalantie, Finland. The visit provided us with the opportunity to practice experimental archaeology in a ‘Stone Age’ landscape at Kierikki. One project was the reconstruction of a section of the Neolithic wooden fish weir from the site of Purkajasuo, which is on display in the museum...

10th EAC Leiden 2017
***Scientific attempts to understand early prosthesis manufacturing techniques are rare. The academic research of artificial limbs has been limited to the historical analysis of documentary sources. This area still remains a fairly under-researched topic even under the more recent developments of disability studies (Childress, 1985)...

The trebuchet, in all its forms, was very much in vogue in the reenactment and research community in the 1980s and 1990s. Several museums around the world have also built their own, with Middelaldercenteret in Nykøbing Falster in Denmark as one of the first modern examples of counterweight trebuchet (Hansen, 1989). Despite the multitude of builds, very little has been published about...

A new longhouse model in Hitzacker

The town of Hitzacker is situated adjacent to the river Elbe in the district Lüchow-Dannenberg, east of Lower Saxony. The discovery of wide Bronze Age settlement structures in Hitzacker in the 1980s led to the founding of a Bronze Age open air museum called AZH - Archaeological Center Hitzacker. Along with other archaeological models of Bronze Age architecture, three Longhouses were the main attractions of the institution and were also focal points of the educational programs. The destruction of one Longhouse by arson in 2008 was a great loss.

10th EAC Leiden 2017
***During fifteen days of June 2015, the team of l’Esquerda worked in a research project to build a Carolingian wooden watchtower on the River Ter, in Roda de Ter, Catalonia, Spain. The idea was to test our hypotheses experimentally, (a) if the wooden watchtower could...

10th EAC Leiden 2017
***This article presents a practical approach to a Graeco-Roman woodworking tool called “ascia-Hobel” in the archaeological literature, respectively “adze-plane” as the corresponding English term. The tool in question consists of an often semi-circular adze-blade attached to a two-handled shaft and seems to be suited both for chopping and...

Because of the anisotropy of wood, trunks and branches can be vulnerable to splitting along the grain, especially radially. This fact was widely exploited in pre-industrial times, when wood was mostly cut and shaped by splitting it along the grain while still green, rather than by sawing...

The exceptional preservation of organic material in the early Neolithic site of La Draga (Banyoles, north-east Iberian Peninsula) has allowed lines of research that had rarely been undertaken in the region. The research project carried out at the site of La Draga involves experimental archaeology as a...