Fornvännen's summer issue (2010:2) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!
- Kalle Sognnes looks in commendable detail at a rock art site in wooded central Sweden and demonstrates that contrary to previously voiced opinions, it does not much resemble Norwegian rock art in its style. He suggests that hunting bands at the time kept their holy places secret from each other, thus preventing the spread of stylistic traits.
- Morten Axboe & Lars Lagerqvist publish a Migration Period gold bracteate found unexpectedly in a large & venerable coin collection that was recently put up for auction.
- Claes Pettersson presents a cache of coins and small metalwork from an urban dig in 17th century Jönköping that suggests the presence of a historically undocumented group of war refugees from the area of the current Baltic states.
- Leif Häggström discusses whether sites in poorly explored woodland regions should be evaluated using the same high standards as sites in well-known agricultural regions.
- Henrik Thrane has an essay on the completion of the "Neue Hoops", a multi-volume archaeological encyclopedia for Northern Europe. The piece is interesting not least because it features a picture of professor Herbert Jankuhn, one of the few Nazi archaeologists (he was in the Waffen-SS!) whose careers survived 1945, being chummy with Danish and German colleagues in 1969.
- Magnus Källström reports from a runology conference and Staffan von Arbin from a maritime archaeology conference.
- Bodil Pettersson reviews two big new permanent archaeology exhibitions in Copenhagen and Stockholm.
[More about archaeology; arkeologi.]
- Log in to post comments
More like this
My buddy Claes Pettersson is a field archaeologist in Jönköping and always has a lot of fun projects going. Last year he told me about an undocumented manor park he had studied through geophysics. Right now he's digging bits of Jönköping's obliterated castle. And recently he sent me an…
A year ago I showed some pictures of particularly cool finds that Claes Pettersson and his team from Jönköping County Museum had made in 17th century urban layers near their offices. One of them was the above clay mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. Claes believes that it may have been…
Archaeology Magazine's May/June issue (63:3) has a good long feature by Jarrett A. Lobell & Samir S. Patel on North European bog bodies including some new finds: Lower Saxony in 2000, the Hebrides in 2001 (you may have heard about the weird re-interred bog bodies found under a Bronze Age house…
German archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn (1905-90) is a contentious figure. A passionate Nazi soldier and SS archaeologist up until 1945, he became one of the country's most influential post-war archaeologists from the late 50s onward. Fornvännen 2011:3 has just come out containing a contribution on…
Beware! You-know-who is off his meds and trolling all over Scienceblogs again. A good argument for government-sponsored medicine, BTW.
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
"professor Herbert Jankuhn, one of the few Nazi archaeologists (he was in the Waffen-SS!) whose careers survived 1945, being chummy with Danish and German colleagues in 1969"
If he was in the Waffen-SS, he may not have been quite as big a freak as the creeps of SS-Ahnenerbe.
The specialist mountain soldiers (division "Heydrich") that fought in North Finland were apparently pretty much like ordinary Wehrmacht units, but it varied much between different Waffen-SS units. "Totenkopf" was, for instance, formed by concentration camp guards. Anyway, nazi scientists should be considered guilty until proven innocent, considering Abderhalden and his "abwehrfermente" hoax.
Jankuhn did fine work as a professor after the war, and accounts vary as to whether he was a psycho murderer or just a politically opportunistic young academic. I don't know, myself.
From what I've read, Jankuhn was member the SS-Ahnenerbe, not the Waffen SS. About the only bad thing he was involved with was Himmler's claim that a Norwegian sword was of "Germanic" origin. Himmler wanted Jankuhn to obtaint the object for his museum. A Norwegian archaeologist refused, and wound up in the Camps.
Reading about the Nazi involvement with archaeology is fascinating stuff, even if it is disturbing.
This has nothing to do with archaeology, but it is a nice way of unwinding the brain when you are blogging at two in the morning:
"A logic puzzle for Martians" http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/a_logic_puzzle_for_martians…
I rather like comments @ 13 and 37 the most.