Heritage Interpretation: Shapes and Forms

In this episode of the EXARC Show, host Jess Shaw discusses heritage interpretation with Caroline Nicolay from Pario Gallico. What does the term cover? What forms can it take? How accurate should it be? What is the role of buildings and why are they important? 

Caroline addresses the challenges for open-air museums to find and hire the right type of living historians for their particular events or activities. She notes that students of classics and archaeology face hurdles getting hired for these types of jobs. Why is that and what can be done to better match ‘supply and demand’ in the heritage sector? 

Caroline shares her ideas on all these issues based on her broad and varied career as a professional living historian who, along the way, developed a keen interest and specialisation in ancient building techniques. This conversation was recorded on November 2nd 2025.

Transcript

You're listening to the EXARC Show run by EXARC, the International Society for Experimental Archaeology, Open-Air Museums, Ancient and Traditional Technology and Heritage Interpretation.

Jess: Welcome to the EXARC Show. My name is Jess Shaw, and today I'm joined by Caroline Nicolay to discuss the importance and nuance of historical interpretation and public engagement. Caroline is an archaeologist and heritage interpretation specialist who focuses on public interaction and the ways visitors can experience archaeology. She has worked in a number of open-air museums across England and France, but has since established her own living history and experiential archaeology company, Pario Gallico. With Pario Gallico  Caroline particularly focuses on recreating Iron Age daily life and crafts, especially paints, wall paintings and construction techniques. But she also likes to work on other areas of history, up until the Tudor period. To complement her research into prehistoric wall painting she has begun training in the conservation and maintenance of traditional buildings. She has also a fellowship with Historic Environment Scotland. Welcome, thank you so much for joining us. 

Caroline: Thank you for inviting me!

Jess: Really looking forward to this discussion. You have such a varied range of interests and experiences. Before we begin - because I think there'll be a lot of terminology - it might be worth defining some of the terms. So we're gonna be exploring reenactment, living history, heritage interpretation, experimental versus experiential archaeology. Can you set about kind of defining the differences or the differences are for you?

Caroline: Yeah, I'm glad you just said that because I'm gonna be very, very clear. All of this and everything I'm gonna say in this podcast is based on my own interpretation, my own experience - is basically what I think. So people don't have to take it for worldwide truth or anything like that at all. I've visited France, Denmark, Sweden, the UK obviously, where I'm living at the moment, Germany, I've seen a bit of Belgium as well, but every country and every site, every person has a slightly different interpretation of these terms. Just for a bit of context on ‘why is she talking about this, where does she come from’?

It's basically my master's research. The theme was, in essence, living history, the use of living history and reenactment in archaeological museums and open-air museums, as a tool for public engagement and the development of more varied audiences. That was a million years ago. The title still - to me at least - sounds really interesting.

It was awful. It was such bad research. The only thing that was really, really cool to do was a massive… like hundreds and hundreds of feedback forms that I had created for an event. At the end, the answer was: yes, the public really, really loves when you do living history and/or reenactment and you should definitely do more events like that, because you multiply your visitor numbers, at least on that site at that time. Public that never visited any other museum, never visited that particular site, came for these events. It was a big ‘wow’. But all of that has evolved a lot in the last, probably 15 years now.

So, that's the main question people ask me usually: what's reenactment, what's living history, is it the same, is it not? Technically speaking, reenactment, you reenact something that happened. Something like a battle, say the Battle of Hastings, for example. You recreate what actually happened - as an event, a battle, a ball, a meeting, a big fair or a market. Anything goes, but it's something that has actually happened and has been recorded. You reenact that. Living history is the rest… is extrapolating from archaeological finds, historical research. The daily life of people, be it lower classes or anybody, but you present crafts, tasks, skills, outfits, anything that isn't recorded as a one-off event that can't be reenacted, but you show life at a specific point in history. So that would be the difference.

Now, especially living history and reenactment groups might use these two words - especially in Britain - completely interchangeably. That really depends on how far you have thought about it and how you actually want to present yourself to potential hirers, employers and clients. Because reenactment as a word and as practice, has existed for a long, long time. It's seen as the people who dress in historical - but not so much well-researched - outfit, and then they go fight on the battlefield. That's the view a lot of people and employers and people in the heritage sector still have nowadays. Reenactment: not so serious on the historicity, big groups and especially battles.

Now, living history. That means, in many people’s head, it's more research, it's more historically accurate, and it's more about daily life and crafts and not so much the battles. Again, in Britain, from what I've seen and heard and discussed, this is what people think. So reenactment groups started calling themselves living history groups. And when that happens, living history groups might be now seen as not so serious and doing a bit of battles, et cetera. So people and some groups have started saying: oh, actually we don't do living history, we do experimental archaeology. Because now experimental archaeology is regarded as the new thing, with even more research, even more professional, even more accurate. It's mainly about crafts.

The problem is the people who I meet all around and hear about and read about that say they do experimental archaeology, don't seem to do experimental archaeology. I have corrected people many times calling me an experimental archaeologist… no, I don't have many problematics, I don't do reports, I don't write things down. I usually say, sorry, I'm not that good, I don't do enough analysis and structured work to be doing experimental archaeology, but I do experiential archaeology. I get myself and visitors or workshop participants - anybody who comes with me, basically - to experience archaeology, a side of it, from an object, wearing an outfit, tasting recreated food. So you engage the senses and you get an experience of a little nugget of what archaeology or effectively living history is. So it's experiencing, making, using, tasting, touching, feeling, et cetera, et cetera. Experiencing being in a replica building, for example. Making pottery, all of this, again, very daily life and craft-centered. It's another way of telling living history, really. Sally Pointer has given a name to what she does and what I assume some of us do, ‘heritage interpreter’, and I find that absolutely brilliant. You are interpreting heritage, myself particularly archaeological heritage, but it could be heritage from very many different time periods. It could be history, can be archaeology, can be craft, et cetera.

So yes, as a professional I just say now I'm a heritage interpreter and I find that a good translation from the word I have always used in France, which is médiateur du patrimoine archaéologique, of archaeological heritage. The visual image I have for this job, for this work is… think of a prism, this little pyramid shape of crystal. The light, the boring white light of reading archaeological reports, it's dry, it's complicated, people don't really want to read all that. They want the key information and they want it condensed and entertaining and educational. So as a heritage interpreter or people doing public engagement, visitor engagement, you are the prism. You are getting all of that information out of all your research that you might do, and you distribute it to the public and visitors as a magnificent rainbow of interest. It's super pretty, but you have had to work a lot to become that little prism that can distill that light!

Jess: Brilliant distinction. There's so many terms and you're spot on, everyone uses it slightly differently. Experimental archaeology in itself can be so broad. Do you do the hard science of… you've controlled every variable and you're doing it in a lab, or is it more bordering on the experiential/experimental and yeah, there is a bit more perceived kudos to experimental archaeology… reenactment could be seen more as a hobby and people do it in a casual/hobby way, which is brilliant. Your point about there being different titles for different jobs, I know that some museums have an education team or I think there was some museum that had the title ‘education enabler’, which sounds vaguely questionable, but very hard to look for jobs across the museum industry, because every museum calls their role something else. 

Caroline: There's lots of different wordings. I never clicked on that, because in France there's only that word, you know, you're a médiateur of cultural heritage. And tour guides, actually, I would regard tour guides’ work as being heritage interpretation… 

Jess: It's such a skill. I think you and Sally Pointer and various other people do such a brilliant job of, as you say, bringing together lots of different strands. Archaeological reports, not everyone's jammed to read through all of that and to distill it into something that people can really experience. You are creating an immersive experience, have that food and smell the cooking and feel the textures of the food. It’s so much more accessible to a much bigger crowd of people. The founder of Butser Ancient Farm, Peter Reynolds, had quite a dim view of reenactors. He didn't think they were grounded enough in science and thought they were just people dressing up. And now actually Butser's events… so many of them are particularly good because of the reenactors or the living history groups. That's where a lot of the good feedback comes from. It's like, oh, we had a wonderful interaction with this group and we got to learn how natural dyeing was done. It's nice having, obviously, a display of natural dyed fabrics, but Butser really believes in not having too many signs everywhere, because that can kind of take you out of it. So to properly immerse you, you need people there to tell you about it, because otherwise you don't know what you're necessarily looking at in a space. So having those people, having a person to talk to is that they can follow the public's interest. If someone's particularly keen on fabrics, they can ask, oh, and, and what's this type of wool? Or if they're a bit more interested in medicinal properties of the plants, rather than the natural dyes, the interpreter - if they really know their stuff - can feed that interest of the public, which I think is so special because a sign can't give that amount of information.

Caroline: Absolutely. There's places now talking about using videos or AI videos, portraits with streams of living historians that are not actually there to interact more ‘adaptedly’, to react to the people and the questions that they get in front of them. But you mentioned that Peter Reynolds didn't really like or believed that reenactors were very knowledgeable. He is not alone. There's quite a lot of people, usually, as far as I can tell, more academic background… maybe a bit older generations… Reenactors dress up and people don’t make quite the difference between historical clothing and fantasy clothing. We have medieval fairs in France and it's still very much the case, you have half of the people doing really historical stuff, half the people being dressed up…

Jess: …like American REN fairs, there’s fairies and elves… a fun excuse to dress up, fair enough. We love to dress up, but it's such a broad space and there's things like LARPing and various ways to have fun and be social with your friends, but it's not grounded in research. But then there are groups who are really dedicated and have researched their things and their kit is based on finds from archaeological excavations. It's a struggle to find the ideal balance. I know that a lot of museums have a really great system of training up their volunteers. I know Stonehenge, they have you and Sally Pointer and various other people come to visit them to train up their volunteers. Because their volunteers are kind of the front line, they're the main ones interacting with visitors.

Corfe Castle I know as well are brilliant at training their volunteers and making things like medieval tiles and so they can talk with authority on this because they've done it themselves. But how accurate should one be? I know from my experience that some museums can struggle with having lots of enthusiastic staff, but they're casual or they're volunteers, and they want to wear kit or offer an immersive experience but they're still wearing their modern hiking boots. Is it better to wear a modern uniform or kind of half wear it, so wear Viking clothing but wear your glasses and your boots? Is that bad?

Caroline: Wow, that is the best and the widest and the wildest question about the core of what is reenactment, living history, experiential archaeology. You can do public engagement and heritage interpretation in loads of different ways. There's not really a right or wrong because every site, every team, every director will be looking for something different. The key point is you have to realize as an employer, as a museum, staff, volunteers, friends of, as a living historian and reenactor, anybody, even if you are not a professional: you have a responsibility towards history, archaeology and education. If you don't want that responsibility, go to do historical LARP. It's brilliant. Honestly, I've seen historical LARP way more informed, way better researched than many reenactment groups.   

Jess: What is historical LARP?

Caroline:  The difference is there is no public. You dress up, you come up with friends, participants, et cetera, et cetera. It's all very well organized, usually, and  you are in a private space, be it inside a building or in a massive field and you have an event and you play with specific rules around that space. It can be super historical, but you're not here to educate, to share or anything, apart from the other participants. So, say, a Georgian ball could be classed as historical LARP. It might be just a historical event. You don't need to play a role to play games. So you have LARP, events, happenings, meetups, balls of any sorts, feasts, but you don't have to engage with visitors all the time if you want to 'live' history, if you like. The difference is if you do reenactment, living history, public engagement in the public space, you have a massive responsibility. Even if you're not a professional. 

Jess: LARP is Live Action Role Play… yes, there are some people who don't want to educate or are not interested in that, even if they really know their stuff. But you're absolutely right. When you're educating, it's so easy to get carried away. You want to give these keen members of the public a good answer. But we don't have to have all the answers. There's a danger sometimes of enthusiastic people who maybe don't have the grounding in the facts.

Caroline: It's the main thing, and that's what I've seen with reenactment groups, living historians, professionals and with organizations that don't have that kind of mindset or, just don't see what's happening on site when they are working maybe more in the offices and the organization of the site. You want to talk to people and engage and present replica items, historical techniques and crafts in fully modern logo-ed t-shirts for the site: no problem at all, because you're not playing a role, you are a modern person explaining an ancient technique to visitors. Fantastic! You can have that and living historians on site. Living history: they will be dressed up. They have to know their stuff - at least to a point. You don't have to know everything about the 16th century if you are, say, presenting natural dyes in the 16th century. You can do a demonstration, you can talk about that, and you can very truthfully say, sorry, I can't answer that question because it's not my specialty. It's not my time period. You know what, I'm actually gonna go and check this out at the end of the day. Or, don't hesitate to ask my colleague Dave. He knows everything about such and such. That's not a problem - at least anymore.

We have managed to get out of that image of the archaeologist, the museum person, the tour guide who needed to know everything. Even if we know archaeology we cannot answer everything: we know we don't know. But now we are okay saying, actually, we don't know. Or: there are these theories, what do you think? We should be able to be confident in the person delivering the knowledge that it is actual knowledge, and they should know the limit. Of course it's difficult, especially with history, because we don't know everything. I don’t know everything about history. I can tell somebody if that pottery or that fibula, that brooch or that outfit is not quite Iron Age enough, or if you don't do natural paints like they were in pre-Roman France or something like that. If you ask me something about Napoleonics, no idea, it was the 16th century, no clue. And I wouldn't pretend I do.

Jess: No, I think it's a very healthy trait.

Caroline: I didn't even answer your question: how accurate must you be? Well, do the best you can, but with a minimum. There's no maximum, but there's definitely a minimum there. You are right when you mentioned Stonehenge, Corf Castle, the Chilterns open-air museum,  Samara Park. All of these sites, I know, train their volunteers and kind of treat their volunteers and staff to some workshops and trainings and talks from external contractors, external professionals. Some of them myself. There's a lot of other people who do that, and it varies massively. Some people, some sites want you to teach their volunteers each and every craft of that specific time period. Other places, it's more general daily life, a few bits and bobs that they can engage with their visitors about on several different time periods. So it can be something very topical, very specific or very broad. Or just a technique, whatever they like. Some people might ask to just come and help them create a new activity for next year for the school groups. We want to do some prehistoric cooking, but how do we go about using the fire with kids, food allergies? It really is developing massively, I find.

Jess: You've really used your various skills to shape an incredible role. You are a consultant for museums I think you could say. You are helping them develop especially a lot of their natural building. I think you're a fantastic bridge between the natural building and the open-air museum worlds, because there's a lot of crossover, but there hasn't been enough collaboration. What's the kind of exciting developments that you are hoping to inspire?

Caroline: You said at the start that I'm retraining effectively into historical and traditional sustainable building and construction. I didn't know anything about it. And working in various open-air museums, just visitor, as an advisor/consultant, whether living history or just working for so many years on sites, I realised that we all have buildings - recreated buildings - made of natural materials. And even if thanks to archaeology, we know about the materials, we don't seem to have acquired the techniques.

My light bulb moment was building a little, I would say an Iron Age roundhouse-ish for a very, sweet little site. We were asked to make a wattle wall, so woven for example, and the daub, which is a mix of clay, of vegetal materials and a bit of aggregates of sand. We don't usually make the daub, we let the kids on the site or the staff do it. So we make a structure of the house and we build it. When we were asked to do that we had a go, we made it and the walls completely cracked. Nothing structural but the door, so the clay mix, completely cracked. I couldn't figure out why. How did that work? And I have seen that on so many sites, I would say 90% of the sites I've been to, be it pre-history, Iron Age, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, it doesn't matter.

Every time there's something built with clay, there's cracks. And the weird thing is, nobody questions the techniques: oh, they used to do it like that in the past. No consideration that we might be the problem. We might be the ones who don't know how to do it. And I see that a lot in experimental archaeology. Not for nasty reasons or immodest reasons. We just don't click on that very regularly in our modern world. And at some point, I clicked, not that I'm super special or anything, but I thought, oh, I'm really, really bad. My results are awful. What can I do better? Where can I learn? Shock horror: I didn't need to go to Africa, Romania, Indonesia or South America to learn. I had to go a few miles up the road because it turns out that earth building is a craft in the UK nowadays, in France, there are plenty, Germany, there's so many… Romania, let's not even talk about it. They exist.

And in the archaeology sector, we didn't know about that. There's hundreds of them in the UK. One of them lives in the next village to me! It's nuts. And I just thought, do you know what I'd probably go to… yeah, to Eastern Europe, or maybe I'll have to go to Africa, but not at all. So I'm a member now of EBUKI Earth Building UK and Ireland. There is an association. And if you say that to any natural builders, like straw building, sustainable construction, not even specialists, they know really well about that. They worked with us every single day. So that's why I'm retraining into historical and traditional building, because from my archaeology background, I had no idea natural sustainable building were still crafts done in the UK. On their side, they have no idea that archaeology and history is actually interested and interesting. So I brought a group of earth builders to an open-air museum in the UK. Some of them had never been to an open-air museum - they didn't know the concept.

Jess: The Weald & Downland Museum in the UK has a Conservation Master’s or there's definitely…  timber framing. They have, rather than recreations of historic buildings, they have genuinely historic buildings and maintain them and have things like wattle and daub. But I guess the difference is that's not an open-air museum where they've built it from scratch. They're really in tune with the kind of conservation skills, it's a different skill. I think there's lots of people doing similar things, but in their own bubbles. 

Caroline: It’s exactly that. They exist, for example EXARC. You know about it, but not everybody does. So  it'd be really interesting to have open-air museums, replica buildings people, meeting with open-air museums with 16 hundreds, 17 hundreds, 20th century buildings and having a look and a chat for comparison. But yeah, the vast majority of archaeological open-air museums have no idea that natural and sustainable construction exists in the 21st century.

The big thing for me is to get these two worlds to really chat with each other and connect, because open-air museums can become ambassadors of natural, sustainable, local building materials. So that new definition - the ICOM definition of museums - that includes sustainability and then community building… that is one way the buildings, the building skills…. it's not just supporting heritage skills and traditional skills. It's also supporting all these modern people who work with the same local natural material in a very different setting. It's architectural drawing, clay plasters that are super neat and sleek and colourful but: same basis. That's where I want to connect, really, and give open-air museums that potentially new role.   

Jess: Absolutely, sustainability is one of the UN's goals as well for many organizations. It's something we should all be striving for. Buildings have always been relevant. We were talking about how great reenactors are for museums, for engaging people and for helping with historical interpretation, but obviously the buildings themselves are the main, super-important part. So many of the sites, their atmosphere and their presence comes from these buildings. From various places I've been, as soon as someone walks into a building they're awestruck. It's so transportive. And to use those buildings to demonstrate still alive, current crafts and make people aware of different ways of creating their space or restoring buildings as you are doing, is so fantastic and it's just as important. It's part of that public engagement.

For listeners, if you're interested to hear more about Caroline's very cool earth building, we've also got a previous podcast episode, called ‘Mud Matters’, where she talks about it in more detail - as a side note.

As someone who is a historical interpreter, and you've managed to build a really interesting range of jobs, do you have particular things you want to see from museums? Do you have advice for people who would like to build up their skills to be a good historical interpreter who engages the public?

Caroline: I always want to see… to see things from museums and sites. At the start of the podcast I was saying: it doesn't matter if you are professional or a group of living history reenactors et cetera, you have a responsibility. Consider your buildings like a heritage interpreter as a full on part. They can't talk, but they're there and they will interpret history and archaeology just by being there and the visitor experiencing, looking at them, touching the walls, being inside. You yourself have a responsibility to get your buildings presenting as accurate as possible an archaeological reality as you can.

Okay, my bug bear, for a start, is I study Iron Age paint and Iron Age wall finishes - so plasters, paint layers - and the fragments I see are brilliant. They are exactly the same techniques as the ones I'm retraining into in earth building. You have, say, wattle and daub walls. It could be a massive cob wall. Then you have a plaster layer to even everything out. Then a thin, finer plaster layer to make it really nice, really smooth. Then a tiny fun layer of plaster, like for Roman frescos, really small on the surface to make it beautiful, smooth, almost shiny. You can polish it, it is sometimes polished. Then you paint or you whiten and then you paint. And that's really early… and I'm saying eighth, maybe sixth century BC in Germany. We have some fifth, sixth to third BC in France. So it's early-ish Iron Age. There's some Bronze Age as well and there's even some traces of painted walls on the Orkneys that's Neolithic. There's actually quite a lot of evidence everywhere, but they haven't been published. It's kind of a new field of research. So what I would like to see more, and actually almost everywhere, is good walls, good floors, good roofs, good buildings, because it changes entirely the perception of history - and especially prehistory - that visitors get. When you don't know anything about a time period, you come into a house, you come into a site and what you see is what you think it looked like. It's the same when you see a heritage interpreter, you see their outfits, you see what they're doing, and you automatically would assume that's what it looked like, that's what people were doing. So that connects with a question of accuracy.

It entirely depends on your goal, but there are things you should try to avoid if you want to have a completely historical, immersive environment. You mentioned it's really difficult and it could be quite expensive to get some really nice historical clothing. Effectively, you start in the 16th, so say Tudor 16th century, and you want to portray especially a merchant class or a nobility or even higher. If you wanna do it well, it's gonna cost you. Unless you are a seamstress yourself, it is gonna be expensive. So a good start is to start by lower classes and I never got tired of it! I love being the grubby, dirty, working woman of any time period, that's just so comfortable for me.

What would entirely take you out of it is usually the shoes. It's a really difficult question.  Historical shoes: expensive, might not last as long as modern ones, might be cold in the winter. So you have, to me, two choices. One, you accept that you will have to wear modern shoes, and either you try to disguise them or you choose shoes that are made of leather, round, and you explain to people that: this is a shoe from the period, we have one example here, but we can't actually wear them. That I find is a bit of an easy solution. I wouldn't  consider myself like a hardcore living historian… everything has to be super accurate, but I'm getting there and I love it, because I've worked - unfortunately the site has closed - on the Tudor Farm for many years. And one of the beauties of the site, like at the Middelaldercentret in Denmark that I visited just this summer, it's super accurate and people, even if they don't know, actually get to appreciate it. They'll ask you questions they would never have thought about before. They will look at the shoes and, well, so many times do you get: can I take a photo of your shoes? It's not just a talking point. It actually gets people to get into that kind of visual historical environment. And there's nothing that saddens me more than being in a perfect historical outfit and suddenly they walk and it’s bright orange trainers or even if it's discrete modern shoes, to me is a difficult one because it does break everything, though we all understand that it's really difficult and sometimes uncomfortable. But once you have walked the walk, literally, and you have done it, you get such incredible feedback, such…  I want to say reverence. People look at your shoes and go: wow, that looks uncomfortable. Turns out it's super comfy. Like if you like barefoot running shoes, oh my God, I wear historical shoes all the time, they are awesome!

Jess: Yeah, I definitely wear a lot more barefoot shoes since being a cavewoman. I've had to wear leather shoes, but I really understand the struggle. I think shoes… they wear out really quick. My leather shoes became polished on the underside, so I would slip and slide over furs, like I was on an ice rink. You're learning as you're going. You go, oh blimey me, I can now see why Ötzi had the kind of net over his shoes to give a bit more grip. It gives you, the interpreter, a better appreciation for how the shoes work. And there are workarounds. I didn't have the resources to make a full Ötzi copy or…, there's not as much research on shoes. I know Phoebe Baker of EXARC, who does some excellent research on early shoes. But for someone who was just getting into the job straight out of university, I wore some thin leather shoes and had some sneaky wetsuit socks on underneath in winter, because my feet were freezing and you couldn't see it. You're saying you're kind of becoming more hardcore but for those kind of getting into it, you need to start somewhere and you can't always go for full whack.

Caroline: I like the disguise. I've seen people with, effectively, fake leather shoes. They strap under your modern shoe and around your leg, and actually visually they look like a historical shoe, but you are actually wearing your modern shoes underneath. But you're absolutely right. Not only for the public it's a talking point, it's very visually attractive, it's very historical. The best is that for you, as an interpreter, as a living historian, you are getting an experience of the object. And when you look at it in the museum, in a publication or anything, you can see the same wear pattern that you've got on your shoes and what they had at the time, and you see all the dirty little patches, the repairs of the sort and you go, oh bro, yeah, I feel you, I have exactly the same thing…

Jess: I have so much more of an appreciation for certain objects in the museum. The Stone Age exhibition at the British Museum coincided with my time working as a professional cavewoman and it was thrilling. I went in and went: we use that for work, I've used that, I've eaten that, I've tried to make that. Oh, they've also done badly in the flint knapping. Oh, they've got a step fracture. So nice to see people's mistakes… or thatching, you've got on your wall behind you a very exciting thatching needle. If I hadn't thatched, I would never know what that looks like. Seeing people actually using gear makes you go: oh, that's how it's done. There are some museums that do a good job of explaining what that item is. I think the Mary Rose Museum does some quite nice explaining of different tools. But sometimes you can go to a museum and you just look at an array of tools and there's a sign that says thatching equipment, and you're like, great, what, how? And it's a bit of a rusty lump.

Caroline: I find it gives you as an archaeologist, as a historian, as just somebody who likes archaeology and history, such an incredible in-depth understanding of all these things. And you know what, that's experiential archaeology for you! Because we don't do problematics, we don't plan experiments, but by using very good quality replicas of different objects you actually get a sense of something that you might then understand, though you would never have thought about it or you would never have clicked on it if you had just seen it like that. That's a brilliant explanation for me about what experiential archaeology can also bring to people. We talk a lot about mental health, especially there are some PhDs being done at the moment about the impact of experimental archaeology and associated crafts for students, but also for just mental health support groups. That's a massive one. So I'm hoping to connect with also crafts, building techniques and skills for all of that.

What I would like to shout at the top of my lungs to professionals and professionals-to-be: this is a skill, heritage interpretation, public engagement as a whole under all its different forms, being a living historian in outfit, being a historical entertainer - yes, that exists as well. Be an amazing jester, a musician or just do some storytelling. But engaging with the audience is a real skill, and there's so many different aspects of it.

You can be an amazing tour guide and not know a craft at all. You might be an excellent artisan, but you might not know how to actually communicate with an audience. So finding people who can do a bit of everything or choose a few things and just do that is not that common. And I see that really massive development in commercial archaeology, any kind of archaeology company, museums, heritage sites, open-air museums, anything connected with heritage, be it online or in person, wants visitor engagement, public engagement, and they don't know what they're looking for. So quite often they will go towards marketing students, journalism, acting and theatre. Unfortunately, young students I have been talking to, especially at the University of Edinburgh, they found themselves having done history, archaeology, classics and they're not recruited on these jobs because potential employers know they have the knowledge, but consider they don't have the skills, the public engagement, the chat skills if you like, to actually fill these roles. That's really wrong because you have basically two choices: somebody who has the knowledge and needs to learn about the communication or somebody who's into communication and needs to get the basic knowledge. You can do both ways.

So people, if you want to work in these roles, being a professional living historian or tour guide in a museum or anything like that, you need both. And it doesn't matter if you have a bit of both, a lot of one and none of the other, you can get them. I've never found, personally, a place where you could learn museum and archaeology-based ground knowledge and public engagement at the same time. So I had to do two masters. It might have changed nowadays and it's on its way, but for recruiters or for sites and organizations, remember: reenactors, living historians, professional heritage interpreters, tour guides and so on, are all different people.

Reenactment groups, living history groups, they usually are not professional. So you are getting sometimes 20, 30, a lot of different people. It might be a battle, it might be demonstrations, but these people are volunteers for their group. They're not getting paid usually. Very rarely do they get a bit of money, even to cover expenses. So remember they are volunteers. If that day their kid is ill, it's rainy outside, they will not turn up to the events. So you pay not much money and you get a lot of people, but they might not be as reliable as a professional.

Professionals - if they're good professionals - they will be there. They will do their utmost to be professional. Some professionals might be very, very knowledgeable on one thing and none at all on the other. Some might know a wide range of information or craft or things like that. So you can cherry-pick what you want. Some people are excellent with kids activities, hands-on workshops, et cetera, for families. Others… so good at talking in depth about a specific topic and will engage with maybe your overseas visitors or maybe your academic visitors. So you can ask questions like that, you can request. Depending on what you want and what you're looking for, you might want one, maybe two reenactment groups, then some extra professional living historians or amateur living historians. Everything is possible, but all professionals are different. So that's for the organizers/organizations.

If you want to get into this, honestly, I can't recommend enough to start with a living history group, maybe experimental or experiential archaeology. I really advise everybody to get into a group and actually to get into several groups, maybe for different time periods. Maybe same time period but different groups, to see how everybody will work differently, think differently. Some are very sociable groups, but they might do a bit less research or be less into the historical accuracy. Some groups, wow, they are mega, super accurate. You can't do better than this, but maybe it's not what you want to do. Maybe you fancy a group that's more family friendly, for example. It can be as accurate - or not - as you want. There's a space for everybody, as long as you remember you are representing archaeology and history you have a duty, a responsibility. Unless again, you don't want it in which case go and have a look at historical LARP, it’s also amazing!

Jess: Absolutely fantastic to talk to you and hear about your wonderful experiences and varied skills. It's brilliant that you're highlighting that this can be a career. It's a really growing space and there's so many brilliant people like yourself out there doing fantastic things. A lot of them are EXARC members as well. So check 'em out, to our lovely listeners. Thank you so much for your time, Caroline. Normally we ask as a final question what your plans are for your future and how the EXARC community can help make a difference. I think you've beautifully summed up what EXARC members can do, but yeah, what are your plans for the future?

Caroline: Learn more about loads of different variation building techniques and be able to go to loads of sites and open-air museums and people and help them maintain the building better, better the building, or learn some extra skills and then they can do it all themselves and I can sleep really nicely, dreaming of all the beautiful replica houses that are so accurate now all around the UK and Europe!

Jess: I look forward to seeing these glorious buildings!

 Caroline: I hope in the future I can actually manage to share some of the skills I've learned over the years and actually with one very, very good teacher when I was at uni. Wow, that was an amazing one-afternoon event! There's a lot of little tips and tricks of the trade and how to keep the attention of an audience, how to place yourself and your body and how to project your voice - or not - in different directions, especially when you're doing a guided tour. How to deal and actually communicate with different kind of audiences… it's not just communication skills. There's a bit of customer service, a bit of acting and theatre skills.  There's a lot of different things and I really would like to share that with, especially, students archaeology, experimental archaeology…

Jess: That's so brilliant and I look forward to seeing what you do and develop…  it's so easy to be a classic student and only have brilliant experience studying classics. But translating that to engaging people of a whole range of audiences is such a different skill. I can't wait to see a whole new cohort of people trained by Caroline, how they present this exciting information. Thank you so much and thank you to our listeners for joining us for an episode of the EXARC Show by EXARC. 

You've been listening to the EXARC Show run by EXARC. For more encounters with the world of experimental archaeology and open-air museums, check out our free open access EXARC Journal. To find out more about the different research projects of our EXARC members, you can check out our EXARC blog, or join our Discord server, completely free of charge. If you're interested in becoming more involved with EXARC, you can also become a member. For full details and to find out more about what we do as a society, check out our website at exarc.org.