The date for the 7th Experimental Archaeology Conference has now been set - it will take place on Friday 11th-Saturday 12th January 2013.
The 7th Conference will be hosted jointly by Cardiff University and St Fagans National History Museum, Wales. This year’s conference is also supported by EXARC.
The first day of this conference will be held at Cardiff University and will focus on papers and discussion. The second day will be hosted by St Fagans, and will offer more papers as well as the chance to explore one of Britain’s oldest open-air museums.


This sounds lovely - Cardiff! St Fagan's! (Cardiff, especially - I've been hooked to Dr Who for quite some time now, and Torchwood. Though the conference also sounds really nice.)


The call for papers will probably come out in July, and the conference especially welcomes papers regarding the connection between experiential and experimental archaeology. Hmmm... now I should maybe do some scheming...

If you are interested in learning more about the linen bras and underwear from Schloß Lengberg in Austria, you might consider to attend the Autumn MeDaTS meeting in London on October 27, where Beatrix Nutz will be speaking.

In this conference we want to explore ways in which we can approach craftspeople behind objects and find complexes in the archaeological record. How have craftspeople left marks on things, places, and times? What roles did they play within their communities, and can we trace their social status through the archaeological record? What methodologies are available to identify people behind material remains? How are craftspeople linked across geographical and temporal planes, how is knowledge and skill reproduced and transformed?
To this end, we aim to bring together a diverse group of scholars to discuss the nexus craft – people – archaeology across a range of materials (such as lithics, ceramics, metal, textiles, etc.), periods, and regions, incorporating evidence from prehistoric and early historic societies across Europe and the Mediterranean.

You can read more about the conference on their blog; CfP is also still open with a deadline of June 15. 

And finally, don't forget about our own Textile Forum in September - we still have some places left. A conference programme will come out shortly, but I can already promise interesting things like a sprang workshop.

First of all, if you are interested in hearing about textiles and economy, don't forget that the conference in Copenhagen starts tomorrow at 9 in the morning (GMT +1). All the links to participate via remote connection are up, and I think folks in Copenhagen are looking forward to having a remote audience too! This is certainly something that makes me feel all futuristic.

In other news, the flowery newness is not yet finished; there's still some (but considerably less) work to do - mostly the last embellishments plus the edges of the thing.

And finally, I have been looking for an alternative to amazon again (why? they are too mighty, and they know it), since they gobbled up the bookdepository online shop in 2011, prompting quite a few concerned reactions. I have now heard that at least for Germany, buch.de seems to be a good alternative - free shipping for books (in the country, at least), a decent selection of English books, and their prices are only slightly higher than those of bookdepository or amazon. I can live with slightly higher prices if the rest is fine - plus they even offer several different payment methods with no added costs, like paying after getting an invoice.

The university of Copenhagen hosts a conference about Textiles and Economy in the Middle Ages (in northern and central Europe) that will take place on the 19th and 20th of April. While this will be too short a notice for most of us to secure a spot in the conference and rush to Copenhagen, it's still possible to attend through remote participation via the conference homepage:

Production and trade of textiles in medieval Europe - The central and northern Europe as example.

The link for the online participation seems not to be live yet, but I suspect (and hope!) this will change in the next few days. The conference is open to a global internet audience and you will be able to participate from your own computer where ever you are, using the on-line meeting system Adobe Connect.


I am certainly planning to catch a few of those lectures!

It took most of yesterday to catch up with emails and get my brain back onto something resembling a track, and it feels like I should already start packing and preparing again - for the IRM on the weekend. This mostly means planning what I want to show and what I want to emphasise in my assortment of goods and services, making a list of things to take so nothing important will stay here by accident, and taking care of the urgent things to do around here.

(Now... is clearing the desk considered urgent if I still have enough space to type? Probably not. Though it feels like I should set aside a whole day one of these days to do some clearing, and sorting, and probably filing or discarding of lots of the paper around me.)

Plus I'm struggling with my youtube account which seems to have forgotten that I exist. Or that it exists. Or both. The channel is still there, but I cannot log on to it, and I don't even get a new password sent when I try. Should I be able to get it to run, I can decide how to edit the video of my talk in Vienna and how best to upload it. (It needs editing because, as a good soul just told me, I have made a horrendous mistake in a calculation that I put into the presentation. Uh. Oops. So no uploading it un-edited, and I will still have to decide how to fix the problem, which is present on two slides...)

I'm back - and it's nice to be home again, even if both my ventures were absolutely fantastic. The weather was fabulous, the people were incredibly nice, there was delicious food both in South Tyrol and in Vienna, and the conference in Vienna went very well.

It was, to my great delight, a different crowd from "the usual" - since I often go to archaeological or experimental archaeological conferences, or to textile archaeology conferences, you sort of start knowing a lot of the people who turn up there. Which is very nice and enables one to re-connect and catch up with each other, but on the other hand limits new input you can get. This was quite different this time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. As well as the lovely reception we got given in Vienna town hall and the Grand View tour on the rooftop of the Natural History museum (with the most splendid weather imaginable) - and of course meeting some of my friends again.

And then I came back from the conference in Vienna to a garden that is slowly filling up with blooming spring flowers and fantastic weather. Now I only have to get through the gazillion emails in my in-box and get back on track for the things that need to be done urgently... which includes the fine-tuning of plans for the IRM the coming weekend. Which I might just do sitting in the garden this afternoon, since it is pretty warm and sunny! These are the joys of being a freelancer...

I'm off to meet friends, celebrate the anniversary of the ArcheoParc in Val Senales, my mum's birthday, the successful reconstruction of three Hallstatt bands in Vienna and speak at the 3000 years of colour conference. All during the next ten days or so.

Which means, of course, that I will spend most of the time somewhere else - with just a short pit stop here inbetween travels. And this means no blogging for this time.

I will be back on March 26, after having had fun and adventures and good times, and I hope you will have those too!