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.

Or... wait... maybe they don't. After all, it's not really weird to do a reconstruction of a Bronze Age structure and then test if it's possible to use it for making beer, right?

And completely unrelated but pretty (and both pretty cool that this is possible and pretty intimidating that we produce so much light-smog): A picture of the earth at night, with all the lights on.

Also? I now have a twitter account which I intend to use (occasionally, as in when I feel like it) provided I get some people that are interested in that (which means followers). You find me under the handle @katrinkania (yes, not very creative, I know). And if I manage to find out how, I will try to get a last tweets thingie onto this blog.

And finally, I found a new search portal searching a group of libraries, archives and museums, called BAM (only in German). I have not tested it thoroughly yet, but portals like this are usually a good thing - at least knowing about them does not hurt!

Well... at least in the Wall Street Journal.

Janet Stephens, a professional hairdresser, has researched and tried to re-model Roman hairstyles (the ones often said to have been wigs). I have personally never really bought into that theory, so I'm very happy to see that someone has managed to do it on non-wig hair (and is also quite sure it can be done normally).

Go read the lovely little article about the Roman hairdressing (also because it involves needles and thread).

Meanwhile, I will be here and very happy about the bit where a journal editor says that this was something that needed a craftsperson, and that no normal scholar would have written such a piece as the article published in 2008, "Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles."(Published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, in case you now really want that.)

The weather outside cannot decide whether it is still winter (a bit of snow is covering the ground) or not winter anymore (it's not very cold, and the snow does not stay for long). It has been like this for a while now. The cat has stopped caring and just upped her morning walks again to their longer version, the snow seems to have lost some of its cat-repellancy.

In other news: A good while ago I posted about the boat building project in England, where some folks (quite a lot of them, actually) are building a bronze age sewn-plank boat. Well, looks like it's finished! And here is a time-lapse video summing it all up.



A while ago, I chatted to one of the people from the project, and she said that the project has generated a lot of response, and upped the visitor count of the museum. I was very glad to hear that, and now I'm looking forward to their launch, planned for March!