Just this weekend, I found myself in the middle of a discussion about changes the pandemic has made to our working life, and the pros and cons of home office and company office. The verdict (at least for me) was - a lot of things very, very much depend on individual circumstances. There's people who find it much easier to stick their head in a colleague's office and ask a question, or ask around at the coffee machine and water cooler, and others find it easier to quickly type a question into a group chat or send an email around.

There's people who can work comfortably from home, having enough space and enough of an internet connection, and there's others who can't. There's those who are on the phone with faraway colleagues most of the time anyways and those who need to handle things that can only be handled in person on site. So - it very much depends.

One thing that the pandemic has changed, though, is the openness towards online-only and hybrid events - and I, for one, am still utterly delighted that a lot of conferences now offer online participation or online streaming. I'm especially delighted if said online participation is free (or has a very low fee) because it's often been the case that a conference had two or three presentations that sounded very interesting to me, but for those it would not have been sensible, or affordable, to travel to a medium to very distant place and do the whole conference. With the hybrid events, I can now tune in to what I would like to see in those cases - and that's just utterly, gloriously wonderful.

And all that is a very wordy lead-in to tell you that the Experimental Archaeology Conference in Torún, Poland, will also be a hybrid event. Online participation is free; the list of sessions and presentations is now online, and you can register for it to keep updated and get info material:

The conference website is https://exarc.net/meetings/eac13 and session 3.B is a textile session - plus there's a lot of other interesting papers about all kinds of experimental archaeology topics. 

I'm back home, back at the desk, and back trying to keep up with... well, everything. There's my tablet weaving workshop coming up next weekend that has to be prepared, plus the website needed some updating of software and some maintenance, and there go the hours faster than you can say "I think I need more coffee."

My little excursion up north, to Syke, was wonderful - and I had a lot of fun presenting the Bronze Age garments that were made for the Forum Gesseler Goldhort. Which, by the way, is not only a lovely museum with prize-winning modern architecture presenting the spectacular gold finds made just a few kilometers away - the rest of the museum is a treasure trove of early modern work and farming tools. (It's actually just the kind of museum that I love to spend time in when on holidays, where I have a rather strict "no medieval stuff" policy. Because it's holidays.) 

On the way back home, I made a stop in Bremen and visited the St-Peter-Cathedral and the Cathedral Museum. Both are free entry, and very much worth a visit - if you're interested in textiles, the museum especially, as they have garments from medieval (13th century) bishop's graves on display.

Like always when I'm looking at medieval textiles in a museum display and it's properly done, I'm at the same time delighted about the low light levels and annoyed by them. That was the case there, too. It would be wonderful to have even better eyes or to get closer to the pieces, but I can tell you that even with murky lighting, murky colours (due to a few centuries in burial) and through the glass of the cases, they are very spectacular. There's lots of gold thread, silk embroideries, tablet weaves with brocades and very nice fabrics - among them a diamond twill in silk (in form of a cushion).

I took some really, really crappy phone pictures as a form of digital note-taking, but it was so dark that it was even hard to take a good picture of the little plaques explaining what each piece was... so, well, you can imagine that it's really not much more than a memory aid. Still a very nice thing to be able to do...

It has finally happened - I have had to replace my trusty old Powerpoint for a new programme version.

Sometimes I jokingly say that as an archaeologist, I have a deep love for old stuff, and that includes running old (and very old) programmes on my computer. Part of the reason for this is a "never change a running system" approach, part is that I know the old ones so well that I am wary of getting used to a new one, part of it is the lack of desire to spend money on something new if the old thing still does its job, and part is just plain laziness. Probably.

However... I'm now on a computer with Windows 10. My oldest still-sort-of-working programme is CorelDraw, version number 7. That came out in 1996. That was back on Windows 95 - and it's a medium-sized miracle that the programme has been ported from computer to computer and OS version to OS version and still sort of works.

Sort of, I say, because these days (after the last port) it sometimes jumbles up text bits, and some other weird effects happen. I've worked on transitioning to Inkscape for a while now, and I'm almost there. Fortunately the photo editing programme, from the same suite as CorelDraw, still works flawlessly, because there are some processes that just go so smoothly and easily there as opposed to trying to find a replacement.

My PP issues were something else though - my Office Suite is not quite as old (about 3 years younger, actually), and at some point during the last ports it seems to have lost its ability to play video clips. Which is no issue in my usual presentations, but for the Bronze Age garment one on Thursday, the plan was to show a number of short videos, as the work stages are so much easier to explain that way.

So. New Powerpoint. Fortunately (as I don't want to lose my old trusty Word 2000, which also plays along with a very old citation programme, which the newer versions don't) the old Office suite is so outdated that the new one does not recognise it as kin, and I can still run the old one. Hopefully without glitches - I will find out in the next week or so, when I use it properly.

For now, though... placing those video clips where they are supposed to go, and finishing the presentation. Yay!

I'm still working (of course) on the presentation for Syke, and it's really nice to revisit all the things that went on in that project. As usual, I'll have to cut some (or what feels like a lot, actually) of the things I'm putting into the draft of the presentation. There's so much that I could probably speak about it for half a day...

One nice thing about looking back on a project like this is that it's easy to remember all the fun bits and sort-of-forget about the annoying ones. At some stages, things just felt like they would never ever end... it was a lot of cords, and a lot of rings for the ends of the cords, and a lot of loops to sew onto the cloak. But it did end, eventually.

And because I've been revisiting pictures, here's one for you from the selection going into the presentation.

This is the end of the belt reproduction from the Egtved find. It has a tassel at the end, formed by cords finished in (you guessed it) rings. These rings are then gathered together so the whole thing forms a cone shape - surprisingly stiff, and quite stunning. The puny number of just 20 warp threads would, of course, not be enough for a nicely sized tassel like that, so the weaver solved the problem by adding in some more cords at the end of the belt weave. That's exactly what can be seen in this photo: The extra threads inserted, and there's already a few more wefts done to keep them in place.

After finishing the belt weaving, they were then corded, and then the belt provided me with the opportunity to get into ring-wrapping... but that's another story.

Things going on here today? The usual day-to-day boring stuff. Trying to figure out some dates for conferences, travel, holidays, and online courses for the next months. Packing up stuff ordered in the shop to get it sent out. Writing for the presentation in Syke about the Bronze Age garments reconstruction.

It's a lot of fun to re-visit all the stages of production, and the images taken. I'm also slowly getting to the point where I have something like a plan on how to present the various individual pieces, and where and how to give the basic information for those in the audience who are not textile specialists. That is one of the challenges when doing a presentation for a completely unknown audience - you want to give enough basic explanations on what you are talking about so that everybody can follow, but it can't be too long or too elaborate, and you don't want to bore the part of the audience who already knows about it. For instance, I can't assume that everybody will know how weaving works in general, or on a warp-weighted loom specifically - so I have to explain this, because some understanding of the loom and the process are necessary to understand one of the characteristics of the large textile pieces: the weft crossings where several weavers worked together. Fortunately I also made the belt, and I have a video and pictures of that, so I can explain the basics here and then go on to the larger fabric, and the loom. 

Getting these presentations done takes quite a bit of time, especially as the ideas need to get sorted out, the sequence has to be found, and everything needs a day or two inbetween to settle in my head and organise itself. Good thing there's still a few days left before I have to finish!

I'm also trying to figure out if now is a good time to treat the peach tree against its curly leaf syndrome, or if it would be better to wait another one or two days. I find this always hard to tell. Last year I didn't catch the correct point in time, and there were lots of very, very curly leaves. There were still some peaches, but I can't say if the number of them had something to do with the tree not doing well, or the weather, or something else.

All this, of course, fueled by tea. Because everything is better with tea. Except when it's better with coffee... which is also being consumed. Why stick to one source of motivational caffeinated hot drink, after all, if you can have two?

You remember the Bronze Age garment reconstructions that I made, based on the finds from Egtved and Trindhøj? Well, I'm utterly delighted that they are very well received by the public at the museum in Syke - so well that there's a demand to hear more about it, and thus I will be travelling up North to give a little presentation on how they were made.

That is taking place on February 23, starting at 18:30, in the Forum Gesseler Goldhort in Syke... 

If you're interested and in the area, you can reserve your place here!

I've recently gotten a heads-up about a funding possibility for citizen science. Well, funding in the sense of you have to win the competition, but still, it's a possibility! 

Here's the description, with links: 

€100,000 prize fund for new EU citizen science competition

The EU is holding the competition for citizen science researchers annually from this year on. The closing date for submissions is 13 March.

As part of a bid to get the public involved in science research, the EU launched a competition 10 January with a grand prize of €60,000 and an overall prize fund of €100,000. The European Union Prize for Citizen Science competition is being overseen by Ars Electronica, an Austria-based scientific and education institute. There is no entry fee.

This is the first time the EU has held a citizen science-focused contest on such a large scale. The EU's aim is to celebrate and reward ordinary people doing extraordinary things in science. Lay people who dedicate themselves to scientific research outside of their regular professional lives are often referred to as citizen scientists.

Many of the world's most famous discoveries and breakthroughs have been made by citizen scientists. Professional scientists often rely on and collaborate with lay scientists, particularly when it comes to solving problems. Over the past few months in Ireland, citizen scientists have been called on to help with projects ranging from red squirrel revivals to air quality monitoring . In May 2022, the European Space Agency called on the public to help astronomers spot changes on the surface of a comet they had studied for some years.

As well as the grand prize of €60,000, the new EU competition will grant two other awards. The Diversity & Collaboration Award is worth €20,000, as is the Digital Communities Award. There will also be 27 honorary mentions made as part of the competition. The awards will be made by a jury, who will meet in April to review the submissions. Those interested in entering this year's competition can do so until the final closing date of 13 March 2023. The awards ceremony will take place in September, following the winners announcement in June.

From now on, the competition will be held annually by Ars Electronica, with funding provided via Horizon Europe, the EU's research and innovation fund.

More information about entering the European Union Prize for Citizen Science is available on Ars Electronica's website.