All Fired Up

Pyrotechnology – the manipulation and control of fire – is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, and has impacted nearly every technology that we used in the past and study archaeologically in the present. Our guests Dragoş Gheorghiu and Femke Reidsma joined us for May’s #FinallyFriday to shed light on this ubiquitous but taken-for-granted subject.

Dragoş is a professor at the Bucharest National University of Arts in Romania. His research into prehistoric fire use has considered the alchemical transformations that occur at archaeological tel sites when buildings were burnt in the past, as well as the energy consumption of prehistoric kilns. His current work focuses predominantly on the proximity and the psychological aspects of fire use, particularly how it influences the senses and the links between fire and techno shamanism.

Femke is a PhD researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her research into palaeolithic fire use focuses on the effect of fire or the physical and chemical properties of bone and how these materials are altered after burial. She has developed tools to reconstruct heating conditions and fire function while taking into account the effect of preservation. Her work is predominantly lab-based using controlled experiments to investigate the influence of fire and pH from a geochemical perspective.