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archaeology
is a source of information about the past; our own past, “the here and then” so to say. Who do we want to have been? And how do we “know” that? Archaeology provides us with information about |
| the daily life of the past, of ordinary people, but as well about the very high and very low class people. It is a kind of “monkey watching” and as well: “how did people live back then without electricity, without all the comforts we now have? Were they smarter because they were more inventive with the simple means they had? Or were people back then more backward because they hadn’t invented yet all those things we now ...?” |
| “Who do we want to have been” also counts for the public. We can understand each other better if we know our own backgrounds, also those of our parents and ancestors. Of course we live in the present and not in the past. We can’t relive the past at all, but we can learn from it. Often this is even fun, both for the young and old. The public is very often quite interested, because the past is something personal, something very near. And a presentation with a low threshold is in that case an excellent means to bring the past closer by. |
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| Roeland Paardekooper was born in 1970 as youngest of a family of four. Alreadyat young age, he became active for the Dutch Youth Association for History (NJBG), both in the board of the local branch as at national level in the Workgroup Experimental Archaeology (WEA). In 1982, the Historisch OpenluchtMuseum Eindhoven was founded at short distance of the secondary school of Roeland Paardekooper. Every spare moment which he didn’t need to spend on his homework, everyhour of classes when the teacher didn’t show up, he was either at the ‘prehistoric village’ or at an archaeological dig near Eindhoven. Those were the years of the first excavations since ages in Eindhoven. When the “Heuvelpassage” was planned, a cut through of the medieval town could be excavated, from the market field down into the channels of the city castle. Those years formed the basis of the founding of the archaeological department of the city of Eindhoven. |
| Roeland Paardekooper received his MA in archaeology (prehistory of Europe),
with a lot of minors in Amsterdam. By the end of his secondary school and into his first years of study, the first international contacts came about: excavations in Germany and Denmark, helping with constructing Viking houses and other reconstructions in the same countries, experiences with living history. The attention for international contacts remained undiminished. The knowledge of languages as acquired in secondary school was expanded with Danish and basic knowledge in different other languages. |
| During his student years, Roeland Paardekooper has acquired ample experience in the running of Oxfam Shop Leiden,
together with a large number of employees. Purchase and running the IT and staff policy were his main responsibilities. |
In 1991, Roeland Paardekooper learnt to know his present wife in the student city Leiden. Because of her foreign backgrounds, Roeland Paardekooper learnt to look beyond the own culture with more ease: what in the Netherlands is “always done this way”, somewhere else is “always done” in a complete other way, sometimes with better results. |
| From 1982, the Historisch OpenluchtMuseum Eindhovenhas actually never let go of Roeland Paardekooper. For that reason, in 2004 he moved back to Eindhoven to accept a job there. With that, he was the first archaeologist serving the museum as employee. In 206 this contract ended to change jobs to liveARCH,
the coordination of an European project of raising professionalism in which the Eindhoven museum is project leader, but has contracted this to Paardekooper en van Valburg. |
| In the mean time, Roeland Paardekooper started a part time postgraduate research at the University of Exeter. This concerns archaeological open air centres across Europe and their quality, public and archaeology, this is. |
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