EXARC Journal - Latest Articles

The Baltic Experimental Archaeology Summer School (BEASS) took place from July 17th to 23rd 2017 in Lucavsala, Riga, Latvia. For the first time it was organised outside Āraiši Archaeological museum park, because of the change of its status from a branch of the National History Museum back to the department of Amata local municipality near Cēsis...

The book “Flinthandwerk” is a co-production of two known German experts in experimental archaeology. Both authors have been studying prehistoric techniques for years; Lund has spent his whole lifetime practicing flint-knapping skills during his free time, whilst Hein is the founder of a company that specializes in the reproduction of Stone Age artifacts for museums...

Increasingly, there is an appreciation of using experimental work to reconstruct how people squared up to the challenges of what life was like in the past. It is a field of archaeology which has caught the public imagination, so this collection of conference papers, Playing with the Time, edited by Alonso, Canale and Baena, has considerable potential to reach a wider market than just academics...

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...

It is accepted knowledge that when re-melting alloys, some of the metal with a lower melting temperature is lost through oxidation, and more metal must be added in order to maintain the desired alloy proportions. In order to understand the changes in alloy content when recycling using Bronze Age technology, experiments were undertaken by the author and others...

Experiment Background

Unfortunately, no intact furnaces survive. Only the base plates for these potential furnaces and an additional scattering of sherds exist in the archaeological record. Thus, the shape of the body, lid, and chimneys must be inferred and then tested through experimental bead production.