Every year a number of archaeological experiments are carried out in Sagnlandet Lejre. We offer a research grant of DKK 150,000 (ca. 20,000 €) for carrying out practical, archaeological experiments. Portions of the grant are given to researchers and students on qualifiying application to Sagnlandet Lejre, Centre for Historical-Archaelogical Research and Communication.

A part of the grant is assigned to experiments working within a certain topic, which in 2009 was  War & conflict. The rest of the grant is available for experiments dealing with other topics and problems.

In 2009, the following experiments delt with the theme of the year "War and hunting":

• Fishing spear, harpoon or arrow point?
• Mysterious tools for hunting and fishing?
• From bog iron to chain-mail
• Bloody Bronze Age – Combat technique with bronze weapons
• Archery - without a slap on the wrist
• From flint to fish – Stone Age fishing gear
• The Stone Age super-chemical!

Here it is a list of other experiments, which were sponsored in 2009:

• Garum – The ketchup of the Romans! 
• A 15.000 year old Swiss army knife - Reindeerhunters on the move
• The wardrobe of the Stone Age
• From rotting plants to fine cloth
• Fired or baked pots
• The experiment that went wrong! – A Stone Age bucket.

Read about previous experiments (since 2002) carried out at Land of Legends Lejre.

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THE SKELHØJ PROJECT

For a number of years, Land of Legends has cooperated on a cross-disciplinary project which aims at creating better understanding of the good conditions for preservation found in some of the Bronze Age burial mounds, for example that of the Egtved Maiden.

Read more:

• What the mound can reveal - presentation of an experimental study by Ann-Maria Hart and Helen Lewis
• Bronzealder-ingeniører (Bronze Age engineers) by Marianne Rasmussen (in Danish)
• Jernkapper i bronzealderens høje (Iron cores in Bronze Age mounds) by Henrik Breuning-Madsen, Mads K. Holst and Marianne Rasmussen (in Danish)
• The Skelhøj Project - the website of the project (in Danish)

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EXPERIMENTS WITH PREHISTORIC TEXTILES

CTR is a research centre at the University of Copenhagen, which for the period of 2005-2010 will be working with textiles in history and archaeology.

Read more:

• Tools and Textiles - Texts and Contexts - a coorporative project between CTR and Historical-Archaeological Research and Education Centre
• Centre for Textile Research (CTR)