EXARC Extracts 2026/1

In this first episode of EXARC Extracts in 2026, Matilda Siebrecht talks you through the content of EXARC Journal 2026/1.

This issue includes four reviewed articles and six mixed matters articles. All the articles are open access to allow for free exchange of information and further development of our knowledge of the past. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this episode of EXARC Extracts with me, Dr. Matilda Siebrecht, as we have a look through the latest articles from the very first edition of the EXARC Journal for 2026. It's a little bit of a shorter issue this time, but don't worry, we're still gonna have a full episode because there's lots of other updates from the EXARC side that I'm going to fill you in on in the end.

So this particular Journal was published February 17th, 2026. And it includes a couple of reviewed articles, peer-reviewed articles, as always, as well as some mixed matters articles. I do want to say, just before we start with this episode, quite a lot of people email us to ask whether we're interested in publishing their particular study or whether a particular research project that they're involved in is appropriate for the EXARC Journal.

So I thought I'd just do a little bit of an introduction to the EXARC Journal again, as it is at the first issue of 2026. The EXARC Journal is an online journal, purely online. All of our articles are completely open access. They're completely free to publish, and free to read. We believe very much that the research that is presented and written should be approachable for both people wanting to publish their work as well as people wanting to read about it. So that's why we've made sure to keep it free. If you ever do want to donate to support us, you are very welcome to. You can do that through the main EXARC website.

So if you are conducting a particular research project it has to be a research project to be published as a peer-reviewed article. But if you're conducting some kind of research project, which involves a research question, some kind of experimentation or analysis, this can also be more theoretical analysis, of course, it doesn't have to be a practical experiment necessarily, but it does have to follow certain guidelines. You can find all of the guidelines, all of the suggestions, as well as the different structures, the formatting, all of that kind of thing on the EXARC Journal website, which is www.exarc.net.

If you go to that website, you'll be able to find information for contributors, guidelines for authors, and all of that kind of thing. So please do check it out. We very much encourage anyone who is interested in publishing with the EXARC Journal to submit. Our team of editors are fantastic. Our reviewers are also wonderful. So if you think maybe it might be appropriate, just feel free to submit it. Our team are very good. We also are very aware that quite a few people who submit might not have much experience with academic publishing. I must say, as someone who, before I became director of EXARC, I published in the EXARC Journal, I found the process very friendly, very welcoming… of course critical. You receive critical feedback, but it was done in a friendly way, shall we say. So we try to provide feedback not only on the article itself, but also if you're struggling with submission, if it's something you are not very experienced in, the EXARC Journal team is there to help as well. So we very strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in submitting something to the Journal, please do! There's my little sales pitch.

So, let's dive into the articles that are in this issue of the EXARC Journal.

The first article that we have is entitled Study on the Globular-Bellied Vessels of the Zhongshan State in the Late Bronze Age of China. As always, I apologize profusely for my terrible pronunciation of anything that is not in my native language of English. I am always in awe of all of our guests on this podcast that chat with my co-hosts who are not native English speakers and are able to speak beautifully on a variety of topics and pronounce everything perfectly.

This particular article is written by Bangcheng Tang and Xin Li, which as you might guess from the title, is about a study based in China which is very exciting. The aim of this particular study is to interpret the manufacturing techniques of these globular-bellied vessels from the Zhongshan state of China's late Bronze Age, and China's late Bronze age is 770 to 221 BCE.

And if you're thinking, what are globular-bellied vessels, well, they have some beautiful images of the vessels in question here in the article. They also have some beautiful images of the replicas. So experimental reconstruction was carried out in order to interpret the different manufacturing techniques.

The article goes through an introduction to the background, the cultural background of the study. Talking about China's late Bronze age, talking about the social structure of the period and what the existing scholarship is on these particular globular-bellied vessels, which it turns out has mainly been basic observation and documentation so far, and there hasn't really been any kind of in-depth investigation into their technological or their functional attributes. So that's the gap that this study hopes to fill.

It also talks a little bit about the vessels themselves. What they are, they're a diagnostic artefact of the Zhongshan state, so very exciting, very interesting objects. They describe the objects. Of course they have the pictures as well, but they also have a little description of the objects, and then they go into the methodology where they're reconstructing, talking about the different styles of reconstructions that they're talking about.

These are pottery vessels, I should say. So they're talking about different kinds of pottery methods, fast wheel throwing, for example, different kinds of clay materials. The process of drying out the clay, doing all kinds of firing, et cetera. So they go into a lot of detail of that in the article. They then describe the results. I don't wanna spoil it for you, so let's not go through that. But, what is interesting is that they got quite a lot of insight into the actual potential utility of these vessels. So one thing that they do suggest is that because of the way that different parts of the vessel fit together, because of the way that it's created, it's therefore potentially not suitable for large scale production. So it's more likely that they were intended as an ornamental piece.

A very important study and just goes to show how important it is to conduct experimental archaeology even in cases of objects which are particularly well known, potentially even diagnostic, because quite often you will get these really extraordinary insights into something that completely changed the way that they are viewed.

Let's go on to the next peer-reviewed article, which is written by Christopher Scott and Karl Lee and is entitled Getting a Handle on Technological Complexity in the Acheulean: Hand-axes Make Excellent High-Energy Hafted Woodworking Tools. Well, I love this title. I also love any title which has a good pun in it, so ‘getting a handle on technological complexity’, love it! Excellent, great work authors. I'm enjoying the images in this one. Some very nice high quality images of the reconstructions of these particular woodworking tools. So let's get into it. They discuss the Acheulean period, which is a spatiotemporally widespread early human techno-culture, which spanned Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia, which emerged around 1.7 million years ago in Africa and was gradually replaced between sort of 0.2 and 0.5 million years ago. So we're talking paleolithic here, we're talking old in this particular case, which just goes to show, again, the range of experimental archaeology and the range of studies that are in this Journal. We are going from the Bronze Age China to paleolithic Eurasia, which is quite incredible.

The article first deals with the Acheulean hand-axe itself. They talk about the archaeological background to it. They then talk about the theoretical background. So how have these tools been studied? How have these tools been investigated in the past, discussing very important topics such as preservation bias, which is particularly important when you're looking at older time periods, of course, because there's a lot less that remains in the ground compared to later areas of prehistory.

They do a very in-depth discussion about that and talking then about how using an experimental archaeological approach can provide a little bit more information on what potentially they were used for. Even if we have very little evidence for them, this is one way to do a further investigation and a deeper investigation of them.

The methods that they use, they're looking at two main tool forms. They're looking at adzes and socket axes. The socket axe is just basically a lithic, so a stone that's been sharpened in some way inserted into a wooden handle, whereas an adze involves the use of raw hide binding. That's the distinction that they're making, in this particular instance.

They discuss the type of lithic hand-axe manufacture, who made them and what kind of shape they were, in the different styles, the different morphology. They discuss the handle construction, so the different kinds of hafts used, the binding construction. And then they talk about tool articulation and tool use. And they discuss that very briefly, talking about what they did with it, basically. There is then a much longer discussion on the results. The key findings that they discuss are that even though the replica hand-axes, so the Acheulean hand-axes, had been thinned quite aggressively, they were still able to withstand very high energy percussive work without failing.

They of course end the article with the experiments here. ‘Much like a lot of experimental archaeology demonstrate a possibility, they allow for a hypothesis to be constructed’. I think that's an excellent sentence, and I think that's something that is also very important to remember with experimental archaeology. Hopefully, further research will be conducted in order to see this project to the end and continue to work on this very fascinating time period. The article includes a very in-depth appendix on all of the details of the experiments, as well as an extensive bibliography. So if you're interested in finding out real details, then definitely I would recommend going to the website and checking that out.

Our next article is also from Bangcheng Tang, who was a co-author on the first article in this one. This is a bit of a broader report, one can say. It's entitled Thoughts on the Concepts and Methods of Experimental Archaeology. As you can probably guess, this one's a little bit more of a theoretical paper, which aims to clarify different definitions of academic terms, so things like simulation experiment, restoration research, restoration experiment, simulation research, experimental reconstruction, experimental reconfiguration, et cetera.

I find this particularly fascinating because anyone involved with archaeological research - or I suppose any kind of academic research - knows how difficult it is to have some kind of standardization, not even between countries, sometimes even within a country. And especially something like experimental archaeology, where quite often you will have a lot of more independent researchers doing different projects, not even necessarily being affiliated with any kind of institution. And that's what makes experimental archaeology so fantastic. But at the same time, it makes it a lot more difficult to have any kind of standardization because the community guidelines almost don't really exist.

This is something, interestingly enough, that a big project is trying to do at the moment, NFDI4Objects, of which EXARC is a part, aiming to create a tool that aims to help with this, so sort of standardizing the experimental workflow. If anyone's interested, by the way, there will be a survey that will be released very soon. Keep an eye on the EXARC and the NFDI4Objects digital platforms such as social media, newsletters, et cetera, to see when that is released because we really, really want to get some insights from people who are conducting experimental archaeology to ascertain what actually kind of information is being recorded and is being shared and is being published. So, yeah, we'll probably talk about that in another podcast episode, but do keep an eye out for that kind of thing.

Anyway, going back to this wonderful article,Thoughts on the Concepts and Methods of Experimental Archaeology. The author discusses this issue. There's different experimental archaeologies across nations and regions and therefore you have very diverse interpretations of the discipline's core concept, which I think is a really fantastic point to start off this article with. The author then goes into details about the Chinese context of this particular topic, which I think is really fascinating and I'm so happy that the author submitted this to the EXARC Journal because I think it's really important to have these insights from different countries and from different nations, to show this variety and show this diversity.

The article starts with a little bit of an overview of the theory of experimental archaeology  within the discipline of archaeology in China and talks about the latest perspectives that are emerging from China in terms of experimental archaeology, how this is going, and therefore discuss various terminologies.

So starts off by talking about experimental reconstruction and experimental reconfiguration, which interestingly enough - I quite like this - so the start of this section, there is a sentence which says, ‘although the terms reconstruction and reconfiguration differ by merely a single character in their Chinese equivalents, they exhibit substantial conceptual disparities when situated within the theoretical and methodological paradigm of experimental archaeology.

I find that really fascinating that in the Chinese characters, it's only one character difference between these two words. I mean, it's quite similar in the English alphabet as well. The author provides some case studies as examples, to show differentiations between reconstruction and reconfiguration, which is very interesting.

The article also then goes into some detail about divisions in experimental archaeological research in China. They differentiate this into two types. Apparently the first type more aligns with scientific archaeology, experiments conducted in labs, et cetera. Whereas type two is archaeological research conducted more in the field, in more outdoor settings, still scientific in their rigour, but perhaps slightly more veering towards authenticity rather than controllable variables.

The next section is entitled The Impact of Modern Equipment Application on Experimental Archaeology Research. So talking about the kind of accelerated urban modernization, social transformation, et cetera, and the fact that actually modern equipment is having quite a big impact on experiments. So a critical factor that bears a direct and significant correlation with the artefacts or phenomena undergoing experimental reconstruction or reconfiguration. So the methods and the technology itself is also having an effect on the different kinds of experiments that we are able to do. And there's a lot of different examples provided here, so iron smelting experiments, air-blowing devices with sort of leather bellows compared to modern blowers, and how that affects the experiment. The selective interpretation of experimental results is also discussed in detail.

And finally, the conclusion, of course, brings it all together. So I would really, really strongly recommend that anyone starting out in experimental archaeology and wanting to find papers that kind of discuss the real issues and conflicts that are happening within experimental archaeology… this is a really good one because this one provides really nice overview of part of the world that those of us based in Europe or even the US - I know of course there are other parts of the world, but the majority of EXARC membership at least is based in Europe and the US -  although of course we have some members from around the world, which we're very happy for. We're always looking for more. So if you are based in other parts of the world, please do get in touch and join the network. It would be fantastic to be able to broaden our horizons in that way and gain input from researchers all over the world.

And this is a perfect example of that because it's a wonderful opportunity for collaboration and for gaining an insight into the research context of part of the world that I think a lot of our members at least, will not have had access to.

So the final - it's a short issue, like I mentioned this time - the final peer-reviewed article is entitled The Transformation of Glass Debris from Apollonia-Arsuf (Byzantine Sozousa), written by Oren Tal, Ruth E. Jackson-Tal and Dafna Kaffeman. This is talking about the replication of glass, at a site which is on the Mediterranean coast, 17 kilometers north of Joppa, Jaffa and 35 kilometers south of Caesarea Maritima, which has been kind of continuously excavated over the last 40 years by a particular project.

One of the periods of that site it became a major centre of primary and secondary glass production. This article aims to investigate this sort of glass production technology further, particularly by looking at the transformation of glass debris. The authors first start by introducing the excavations and the context of the excavations, the different ethnographic studies that were undertaken as part of it as well, which is quite interesting, how to distinguish the different kinds of glass.

So a really in-depth archaeological background and archaeological context here. Then ask the research question: why were particular raw glass chunks left on-site? Some of the suggestions was that they were perhaps considered of inferior or contaminated quality and not up to par with the known quality of other Apollonia glass of that time or glass exports.

They put this to the test with the help of a contemporary glass artist, Dafna Kaffeman, to see whether these chunks were workable and could be used to produce glass objects and glass vessels. They then provide a very in-depth overview of the results, where they have a lovely graph showing the different melting ranges, et cetera, discussing the different kinds of glass that are used, the different types of chunks that were used.

To conclude the article does apparently find that while of course these particular glass chunks would've been perfectly usable in the sort of primary working, the use as secondary reworking was a lot more difficult. There were a lot of difficulties in the secondary reworking of this glass, so therefore they suggest, this is probably why they are left as refuse on these sites of primary glass production because they weren't usable, as a secondary level. So a very nice experiment. They have some very pretty pictures as well of the objects that were made by the artist. And this also is a really nice example of the different collaborations possible within experimental archaeology research projects. So here you have archaeological researchers from an excavation project collaborating with an artist. A nice article there to have a look at as well.

That concludes the peer-reviewed articles. There are also several unreviewed mixed matter articles. First of all, we have an event review of Experimental Archaeology in Denmark 2025, which was reviewed by Gustav Hejlesen Solberg.

We then have a book review by Aleksandra Cetwińska of Bog Fashion. Recreating Bronze and Iron Age Clothes by Nicole DeRushie.

We have a review of the The Bloomsbury Handbook of Experimental Approaches to Roman Archaeology by Lee Graña Nicolaou, Tatiana Ivleva and Bill Griffiths which was reviewed by Alexander Iles. If you're interested, by the way, in learning more about Roman experimental archaeology, we do have a Roman experimental archaeology working group that you can join through our Discord server. Lee Graña, who's one of the authors of this book that was reviewed, is one of the coordinators of the group, so do go and check that out if you're interested.

We also have a review of the much awaited book by Sally Pointer Nalbinding: It’s not Knitting: Heritage techniques for the contemporary textile crafter. That was reviewed by Niina-Hannele Nuutinen (and I'm so sorry, Nele for mispronouncing that). And Nele is also a coordinator of one of our EXARC working groups. She's the coordinator of the textiles working group. So if you're interested in experimental archaeology related to textiles, please do come and check that out.

And then the final book review is written by Lauren Mooney and is reviewing Experimental Archaeology: Reconstruction of Material Heritage of Lithuania, Volume III by Daiva Luchtaniene (ed).

We also have another event review of the PaleoFest, the Prehistory Festival of Montevarchi (Arezzo, Italy), which took place in October of 2025. That review is written by Federico Cappadona. Those of you who are EXARC members will know Federico, he is our communications manager here at EXARC.

So short but sweet this particular issue. Really fascinating articles, very different articles this time as well. So do go and check that out. And as I said before, please if you're interested in potentially publishing your research with us, we are open for everyone, we are happy to receive your articles. So please do check out the Journal website, which is www.exarc.net.

I also just wanted to discuss a couple of other things that are happening with EXARC. I'm taking advantage of the fact that this was a shorter issue, that I have a little bit more time left in this episode.

We're only at the start of the year, but there are already so many things planned. This is very exciting for EXARC because it is actually our 25th year of being an official organization. So very, very exciting. Those of you who are more involved with EXARC will be aware that in the last couple of years there's been a lot of changes in terms of the sort of organization and the structure of EXARC, just because we've had our sort of more established team who founded EXARC as an organization stepped back, stepped down, to make way for some new faces, myself included. Because of that we haven't planned anything particularly for the 25th anniversary this year. However, we have a lot of very exciting things happening this year, so it is definitely an exciting year nonetheless. 

First of all, we have a symposium which is happening on March 13th. We have the symposium for the project Putting Life into Late Neolithic Houses, and those of you who have listened to this podcast for a while will be familiar with the project, but just to give a little bit of an overview.

In 2016, Leiden University collaborated with volunteers from the archaeological open-air museum Masamuda to reconstruct a Neolithic Vlaardingen Culture house using only Stone Age technology. And the house building project provided a lot of new insights - I was actually personally involved with that project when I was a master's student at Leiden University - but it also raised a lot of new questions. This actually then led to the house becoming the incentive for a new research project called Putting Life into Late Neolithic Houses, which is a collaboration between multiple partners, so we have been a part of this project as well.

The project zoomed in on the wetland sites of the late Neolithic Vlaardingen culture using different methods of analysis, experiments and public participation, most interestingly. And this is now coming to a close, the project, after five years now of collaborative research by a team of archaeological specialists, craftspeople, and also open-air public centres. So on March 13th, there will be a one-day symposium held to celebrate the end of the project and to share the results of it.

Our particular role as EXARC in the project was communication and dissemination, so making it more widely available to a broader public, building engagement with the project. If you want to find out more, we've created a lot of content about it: numerous news items, there’s various social media posts, short videos even as well. If you go to our YouTube, you'll find a playlist, with all the different videos that we have from the project. We also have a podcast episode, so if you want to go through and have a listen, you'll find some of the partners of the project discussing their work with the project and how it's gone. There's videos on the YouTube channel about, for example, how they managed to turn a 2,500 kilo log before they started work on a dugout canoe, which was one of the big parts of the project. Different techniques that were used to work on that canoe, chopping with flint axes, recycling a flint axe, hide working with flint scrapers in order to document tool marks left on the hide and also usewear on the tools as well. Replicating food crust in a cooking experiment to compare that with food crust found on Vlaardingen culture pottery shards, and also the grinding of hazelnuts between two granite stones in order to investigate what plant-based materials were ground by the people of the Vlaardingen culture and which materials they used.

In addition to what you can find in our different YouTube videos, through the podcast episode, through our various social media posts you can also visit the project website at puttinglife.com where you can find more information about it, its partners, its participants, as well as various kind of visual materials.

If you want to join the symposium, you can either attend in person, if you are around. There is still time to contact us. You can also join in the online part. You can contact us by emailing me: m.siebrecht@exarc.net. So we have that event coming up next week and we're very excited for the project to be coming to a glorious conclusion in this case.

We also have our EXARC conference, which has just been announced. Back in January we announced that we were having the conference Staging the Past: Living History, Live Audiences, Real Challenges, which is a collaboration with the Museumsdorf Düppel team, from the Stadtmuseum Berlin and that will be taking place in November, 2026. If you visit the website, you'll see all of the details of how to participate and register for that. The call for papers is also now open. You can find more details of that on the website as well, and abstract submission deadline is the 20th of April, so still a couple of weeks to get your submissions in for that conference. 

There's also various other events happening throughout the year, which you'll be able to find on the EXARC calendar, which is now up and running on our EXARC website. So also, if you are an EXARC member, please do let us know what's taking place, what's happening so that we can share it on our website. If you have a particular event coming up that is of relevance, you think, to our EXARC members, so involved with experimental archaeology, open-air museums, ancient technology or heritage interpretation, then please do get in contact and we will be very happy to share it on our website in the calendar and on our various social media channels.

That's about it for this episode, thank you very much. I hope that you enjoyed hearing about all of the different things that are happening at EXARC this year, as well as this latest issue. And I will be back in a couple of months when we have the second issue out.

As always, if you want to read any of the other articles or other issues from the EXARC Journal, which are completely free to access, you can go to the Journal website, which is www.exarc.net. If you want to find out more about EXARC as an organization, you can go to our EXARC website, which is www.exarc.org.