Haynes Publishing UK

The illustrated Slow Tech Manual will interest historians and re-enactors, parents managing their children's screen time, and young adults looking for mindful and practical escapes from the digital age

Featuring topics such as building bread ovens, making clay pots in a bonfire, felling and processing trees, cooking on open fires, blacksmithing, beer making, wattle and daubing, this book is a combination of the dangerous book for boys and a practical manual of experimental archaeology and historical research. Highly readable and hugely practical, the book is either armchair reading or a valuable guide to getting your hands dirty and creating something useful as you discover the art of slow technology. Light a fire without matches and cook a meal on it. Weave a basket, build a bread oven in your back garden and brew your own beer. Go camping in the wild, build a shelter, catch fish without a rod, and teach your kids how to knap flint. Whether you decide to try to make your own forge in the garden, carve a wooden spoon, build a dry-stone wall, or process your own salt, you will be reconnecting with your own practical abilities and creative impulses.

Peter Ginn is an archaeologist and historian who graduated from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and has a particular interest in experimental archaeology. His research interests include Egyptology, field archaeology and primitive technologies, and he specializes in 19th-century farming practice. Peter is best known for his BBC TV appearances in series such as Tales from the Green Valley, Victorian Farm, Secrets of the Castle and A Tudor Feast at Christmas. Peter now lives in Somerset in an amazing Victorian mansion that he is renovating.