It has taken a good while, but it's finally all settled - the European Textile Forum 2019 has a venue, and it will take place November 4-10 as planned.

Our venue for this year is the Lauresham Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology, connected to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lorsch Abbey and a spectacular place to be. I have a lot of personal fond memories of Lorsch, having been on archaeological digs there several times, working together with lovely colleagues, and having some memorable moments. Like the one where one of the students found some coins right after the assistant prof promised a money prize for finding a coin. Like the one where I was staring so hard at the greenish-pinkish bands in the sand there, to find the line between an old trench and natural undisturbed soil, that I stopped seeing in colour and had to stare at a white wall for a while. Like assisting the technician in taking site measurements; he was a very, very special character, so working with him was sometimes quite exhausting (but I got treated to an ice cream sundae in the evening, which did make up for that). Best of all is that I was part of the student group that excavated in the so-called "Südosttor" area... and what had been thought to maybe have been the south-east gate turned out to have been the loo.

So I'm very happy to return to Lorsch, especially since I have not been there for years, and the whole Lauresham Laboratory is also new to me.

For the Forum, we are graciously given use of the Visitor Information Centre with several rooms, plus use of the facilities in the open-air laboratory itself. This includes houses and workspaces modelled after archaeological finds and ideal-typical monastery plans and descriptions from Carolingian times. Most important for our purposes, there is a dye house on the grounds, as well as a weaving house with three warp-weighted looms installed there plus one mobile warp-weighted loom. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am at how this all worked out, and I am so much looking forward to our conference!

I have also been promised that our group will get a tour of both the Abbey grounds and the Laboratory, which will surely include a visit to the 8th/9th century Gate Hall, the most famous building in Lorsch, and truly, truly spectacular.

So now, finally, it's time to send out the Call for Papers. As every year, we will have a focus topic, and this time it's "Shared Warps, Shared Wefts". You can find the CfP on our website, or you can download the pdf version here.

Last details regarding the conference still need to be figured out, so registration is not open immediately, but will be possible from May 27 onward.

For now, please save the date if you're planning to come, and spread the word about this conference if you know people who might be interested!

The annual meeting of EXAR, or, with its full name, the European Association for the Advancement of Archaeology by Experiment, will be taking place in Vienna/Austria this year, from September 26 to 29. Presentations will be held on September 27 and 28, with the rest of the conference days reserved for get-together and excursions.

An EXAR conference in Vienna was the first EXAR conference I've attended, and it was utterly wonderful - so I deeply regret that I won't be able to go there this year, as I've already booked my booth spot for the Nadelkunst in Weikersheim, and that is on the very same weekend.

If you have no such date clash, however, this year's conference will be focusing on “Experimental Archaeology in Science and Teaching”, and it will be presented in cooperation with the Natural History Museum Vienna. (Which is, all by itself, a gorgeous place to visit.) The Call for Papers for the conference is now open, and they are looking for presentations or posters, addressing the following topics:

• methods of analysing finds and features which provide the basis for
  
  experiments
• experiments and their results/reconstructions based on or used for
  
  experiments
• science-based demonstrations and related museological teaching methods

Presentations are possible in either German or English, with the request to do the slides in the other language to make your presentation as widely accessible as possible to the audience (so German slides if you are talking in English, and vice versa). Presentation length should not be more than 20 minutes.

The Call for Papers will be open until June 15, 2019, and is possible via the website www.exar.org. Conference registration will be open until August 31, and conference fees for non-speakers are between 12,50 € and 40 €.

If you're interested in attending the Early Textiles Study Group conference "Fibres in Early Textiles" at the Uni Glasgow, 6-7 June 2019, registration is open - and places are limited, so you might want to register as soon as possible.

Just in case you are not into textiles, but more into stones - or know someone who is: The ArchaeoParc Val Senales is having a Flint Knapping Symposium on May 29 to June 1. It's a conference for experts, museum professionals and hobbyists working with flint knapping techniques, intended as an opportunity to gather and share experiences.

I've been to the ArchaeoParc (we had the wonderful opportunity to hold a Textile Forum there), and it is a wonderful place with spectacular scenery, incredibly nice people and utterly delicious food. So if you needed an excuse to go there, this conference might just be it.

You can find more information about it here on the Museum website. Be aware that it is taking place during the main travel season of South Tyrol, so if you want to go, try to arrange registration and booking as soon as possible!

(And if you do go, please say hello to Johanna for me!)

Here are a few things for the German readers among you - with one bonus English article, so I'll start with that one:

A woman from a medieval monastery close to Paderborn has been identified as a scribe through blue residue in the dental calculus between her teeth. The residue comes from lapis lazuli stones, which were used as a pigment in manuscript illumination. Here's the German-language article at Spiegel about this, and here is the full publication of the research in English.

And on to German-only: There is a special exhibition called "Verehrt, verwendet, vergessen" at the Alamannen-Museum Ellwangen, which is running until April 28. It is looking at the Alamannen in the context of politics and (contemporal) history - a very interesting topic. You can find more information about it here.

Also at the same museum: "Lebendige Geschichte", a two-day workshop for Living History people on February 16 and 17. This year, focus topic of the workshop will be immaterial cultural goods - such as music or belief systems. Another focus topic will be how to handle visitors with extreme right political views, and I think it is a very good idea to include this. If you are interested, you can find more information here - registration deadline is February 10.

Yesterday's post reminded me that I have not written about the Forum yet... so here are at least some pictures that I took to hopefully delight you!

There was another instance of the Pompeii Dyeing Experiment, so liquids were boiled up and, in this case, also decanted in sampler jars (also known as "empty jam jars"):



Then there was some tablet weaving:



and there was lots and lots of braiding, much of that with loops:



 

It's time again for some Calls for Papers! First a non-textile, but interesting-sounding one:

Trial By Fire Conference | 17-18 May 2019 | Institute of Archaeology UCL

A free interdisciplinary conference about the transformative power of fire

Whether your interest lies in archaeomaterials, burned bone, pyrotechnology, or accidental burning, fire always leaves its mark and a wealth of information behind.

This conference aims to explore these events by bringing together ideas from across archaeological and anthropological sub-disciplines. Abstracts will cover a range of topics and case studies, however the conference aims to answer the following questions:

Can fire be considered an artefact?
How have people engaged with fire over the course of history?
What can the aesthetics of a thermally altered object tell us about the burning event?
How has the study of fire evolved within the literature? How can fire be harnessed as an experimental tool moving forward?

You are invited to contribute your work towards the development of this interdisciplinary understanding of fire.

Abstracts are due by 31 January 2019. To submit, register, or for more information, visit trialbyfireteam.com

Fire is a fascinating thing, and I'm happy to see that a conference is dedicated to this topic. I hope it will be a flaming success!

The second CfP is for the Fibres in Early Textiles Conference:



There you go - maybe one of these is something for you?