Description
The Working Committee on Industrial Archeology and Archeometry of the Veszprém Academic Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences – together with the Working Committee of Handicraft History, and with the supporting cooperation of the local professional museums – has organized annual scientifical workshops about the archaeologic, historic, and ethnographic relics of the material culture in the Carpathian Basin, and about the manifold investigation of the findings belonging to different groups of materials. The lectures dealt with the working and utilization of three very important elements of life, i.e. earth (clay, in 2004), wood (in 2005) and metal (iron, in 2006, 2007). After the Workshop in Budapest in 2004, ”a thousand of years of pottery,” we invited the specialists dealing with the investigation of ”archeology and ethnography of forest and wood” to Sopron, in May, 2005. Twenty researchers participated in the workshop in Sopron, held in the lecture hall of the Collection of History of Forestry, Wood Industry and Surveying of the Forestry Engineering Faculty of the University of West Hungary (”Forestry Museum”). Before an interested audience, the lecturers explained different points of view the ”element” nearest to life, i.e. forests and wood. The two day meeting was rather short. Hence the archeologists, ethnographers, historians, restorers and foresters could only deal with some main matters. They gave reports on environment archeology of ancient forests as well as archaeologic, ethnographic and historic relics of the wood industry, with special regard to historic aspects of handicrafts. Lectures were presented on age determinations of wood remains as well as on the conservation of archaeologic wooden findings. The texts of the lectures are presented here with the hope that, at the next meetings, those other fields will be reviewed, (which were outlined in the preparation of the Sopron Workshop from the Ethnographical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), to use this immense scientific data on the research of forests and wood).
