As you might know, the Textile Forum is a very experiment-friendly place. Last year, we had a little dyeing experiment looking at the influences of different metal kettles (simulated by metal plates in neutral pots) on dyeing, inspired by the question why the Romans in Pompeii had lead dye vats. (You can see pictures of the experiment, the dyed samples, and a poster of the preliminary results on the Forum's archive page, here.)

The experiment is now getting an add-on - a second test run, only with birch leaves as dye (due to time restrictions), but with the metal additions split between the mordanting only and the dyeing only. If all goes according to plan, it will be possible to see if there is more influence from the metal in the mordanting process or the dyeing process.

I have been preparing for this quite a bit already - the alum is ordered, the 80 m skeins are wound and tied off so they won't go knotty, and today will see my finishing off the outline and experiment plan. It takes a while to go through all this and type out, bit by bit and step for step, what is to do. But yay for a detailed plan like that - it's so helpful to have a sheet with the single steps all written out, and tables to put the measured values. Also helps a lot in making sure you don't forget to take a measurement, or a photograph.

And week after next will see the actual run of the experiment. I'm really looking forward to this!

Remember that I said food is a tricky thing for archaeologists? It has gotten even tricker very recently, since a group of archaeologists discovered, per experiment, that cooking fish can screw up radiocarbon dating. (They write about dating pots in the article; technically it's dating the organic residue trapped in the pot that is dated.) The article has links for more info in Danish.

Speaking of cooking: Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg are working on publishing their collaborate research about Viking food and cooking in a book, called "An early meal". There is an info page on facebook (you do not need to have an account for that) if you want to read more.

And now... coffee.

The maiden voyage of the Bronze Age boat has taken place, and you can watch a video of very happy people paddling right here:



Apparently, they named her Morgawr. There's also a summary video including a few scenes from the launch and maiden voyage, called "We Made a Boat", on their playlist.


And now we will hop to the far future (to be precise, to post-medievalism) because Palgrave is offering one issue of Postmedieval, the journal, for free. They sound... interesting. Go have a look.

Well, not a launch in the Bronze Ages, nor the launch of an actual old boat, but that of the replica made in the NMMC in Cornwall during the last eleven months.

A friend of mine was very much involved in this project, and I heard about it when they were preparing to get it started, more than a year ago. I'm really happy to see how nice the boat turned out. It's large, it's impressive, it's on Facebook (with lots of pics), it was sewn together out of planks and yew withies, and it will go out to sea for its first voyage on March 6.

That's the day after tomorrow!

In preparation to this event, you can watch the last stitch being made right here:


and day after tomorrow at 11 o'clock UK time (that's Greenwich time) you can hop over to this page where there will be a live webcam showing the boat launch. The actual launch is scheduled to be at 12 noon. Isn't it nice how modern technology makes it possible to see an old boat type being launched?

Edit note: Of course it's not tomorrow like first posted, but the day after tomorrow, since it's Monday today, not Tuesday. You can have some webcam time tomorrow too, though: 07:30 - 10:00 UK time, the cam will be on as well.

There are things that are fast and easy to do, there are things that aren't, and then there are things that will just gobble up all the available time and then some. Just like most of yesterday was gobbled up by finalising that reviewed (and thoroughly re-worked) paper.

The most interesting thing about it? The three proofreaders (thanks again! you did great work) sometimes totally agreed on which phrasing was totally crappy, and sometimes totally did not agree. I got to pick and choose, somehow.

So today I'll spend a half hour more on the last bit of the thing, finalising it for submission, and then I will get rid of it. Finally. Whew.

It makes me wonder, however. How much time is writing a paper supposed to take? I suspect there will be a huge range of timespans eaten by paper-writing, and probably time spent is not correlating directly to paper length. Or even paper importance.

If you are involved with open-air museums, chances are that you have heard of EXARC. If you are not, EXARC is an organisation for open-air museums (or individual archaeologists) with an emphasis on experimental archaeology.

They have published a journal, EuroREA, since 2004, and recently made the transition to an online-only journal. Now that the hardcopies have sold out (or almost), the archives have been made open and public in form of .pdfs. You can delve into it from here.

And this, I believe, is also the place to express my total appreciation of and joy over that choice - it can be really (nastily) hard to get hold of an article that is behind a high, well-defended paywall or not on the 'net at all, and only available in some very few copies in some select libraries.

So: Thank you so much, EXARC! I hope that many other journals will follow suit.