From: 2001
Public Archaeology
How big is experimental archaeology worldwide? And what about archaeological open-air museums? With these thoughts in mind, I developed an inventory and made it publicly available.
On experimental archaeology, several bibliographies exist, one of them with almost 2,100 titles. But this was only the tip of the iceberg and I thought that an online bibliography database would have many more possibilities for the users and reach more people. With the right bibliographical references, nobody should be reinventing the wheel anymore… Challenges are in finding all grey literature in many different languages. The listing so far has over 13,000 entries.
The other thing I developed for the interested professional or layperson is a listing of all archaeological open-air museums we could find, each of them described in English. A very small selection was published by EXARC / Pfahlbaumuseum in 2002, a much larger listing (based on our work) was published in 2009 as part of the liveARCH EU project by Parco Montale. Following on this I keep the listing updated with new museums appearing every month.
Both the bibliography and the list of venues were published on a dedicated website called Public Archaeology. In 2011 I shared the right of using these data with EXARC and launched it under the name www.openarchaeology.info. EXARC added a calendar of professional as well as public events. With help of OpenArch, they updated the database and search engine and secured its existence.
I moved the Bibliography in 2017 to TDAR, as it grew too large, see: www.experimentalarchaeology.net. The venues moved to EXARC in 2018, see: https://exarc.net/venues