Not far from my home, in the woods down by the tracks, are the foundations of an abandoned railroad man's homestead. Its name, Vinterbrinken ("Winter Slope"), survives in a nearby street name, though few know that anymore. The house was built by the railroad company in the 1890s and was torn down, along with its barn, in the 1950s. The municipal archives have photographs of the buildings and the people who lived there, and they are all known by name. Lately, the staff at a nearby daycare centre has been taking the kids down to the site and had them excavate parts of it, collecting hundreds of…

Who is responsible for a package? The sender or the volunteer messenger who carries it? Do they perhaps have a joint responsibility? This issue has led to quite a number of arguments between me and my wife over the years, and we still haven't resolved it. Here's the deal. Let's say that Jenny's in bed with a cold and asks her partner Anne to take out a book for her from the library. This Anne does, but on the way home she loses the book. Maybe she absentmindedly puts it on a shelf in the grocery store and it gets stolen, or she forgets to close her backpack and the book falls into an open…

Signs of spring so far around where I live, apart from the obvious sunshine and disappearance of the snow & ice: Crocus Snowdrop Scilla Blackbird singing at sundown (ah!) Magpies brawling

We recently installed an air source heat pump to heat our house. If you heat yours with electricity from the grid, and if the structure isn't divided into many small rooms, then a heat pump will cut your power consumption so dramatically that the whole $2500 installation pays for itself in two years. And power consumption equals environmental footprint. It's quite a fascinating technology, and friendly to the environment too as long as you don't rupture a pipe and release circulation fluid. You know a fridge? An air source heat pump makes your house into a fridge turned inside out. Heat is…

As chronicled here before, some forward-thinking colleagues of mine in the Swedish heritage business are embracing the social web and launching cutting-edge apps and projects. This is impressive not least because they are all working for state bodies founded in the 17th century. Just the other day Minister for Municipalities and the Financial Market Mats Odell gave the National Heritage Board a big shout-out for their Flickr project. (This is funny because Odell is a Christian Democrat and my buddies Lars and Johan are not so much.) Well-deserved praise! Now Ulf Bodin has announced the start…

Spring's finally reached Stockholm! To celebrate, here's a song by one of the city's finest folk singers, Stefan Sundström, off of his 1992 album Happy Hour Viser, "Happy Hour Songs". I translate: Spring Samba By Stefan Sundström One morning when he awoke spring was already here He was bleary, tired and hung over, pretty bedraggled She got in through the window like a crazy samba in April And took him right there, no ifs ands or buts She danced around the room like a stoned tornado Like a fairy there to wake the mountain trolls And she ran up to the window and yelled "Our time is now!" And…

The Mama Mia movie has revitalised interest in Swedish 70s pop giants ABBA. The other day I heard 10-y-o Junior's school choir perform "As Good As New". 5-y-o Juniorette and her pals at daycare sing garbled versions of all the hits, such as "Oo-nay-boo" ("Voulez-Vous"). I grew up with ABBA and I'm still a big fan. But I haven't listened systematically through their oeuvre, haven't really paid much attention to the lyrics as I do when I encounter new music. Looking at "Voulez-Vous", the title track of the band's sixth 1979 album, I found something funny. "Voulez-Vous" is a rousing disco tune…

The sixty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!

I suddenly remember a few times when I was mean to girls when I was fourteen. I feel really bad thinking about it now. Being mean and bullying was particularly ugly for one such as myself who had just barely reached the end of his years as an object of bullying. But I see a pattern there that wasn't visible to me at the time. It doesn't excuse my behaviour in the least, but it sort of explains it. H was thin as a rake and had a highly strung personality. She didn't seem to expect to be liked, and I believe few did like her much. Yet she wasn't the sort to fade into the background: she was…

Denmark has an excellent system in place to enable and govern a responsible and constructive metal detector hobby. While the UK's ploughsoil heritage is largely being trashed by nighthawks (despite the valuable efforts of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and Sweden's is left to corrode untouched out in the fields, the Danes organise metal detector festivals, inviting skilled amateurs and professionals alike! One is taking place at Halsted on Lolland between 3 and 5 April. The public is welcome to watch on Saturday the 4th. Rest assured that the international crew of 70 detector-wielding…

We've all had the same realisation: sooner or later somebody just has to make a series of several thousand short films of themselves smoking various tobacco pipes and listening to tango music, and put them all on YouTube. Well, fret no more: it's been done. And don't tell me this isn't an art project on a par with anything shown in up-scale galleries in the world's largest cities! Thanks to Pär for the tipoff.

It looks like chocolate fudge cake. It tastes like compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. It is basically compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. You have it at Easter, cold, with cream and sugar. It is a Finnish thing. It is very strange. It is memma. You will grow to like it.

Last September I directed two weeks of excavations at Sättuna in Kaga, an amazing metal detector site I've been working at since 2006. I was hoping to find building foundations from a late-6th century aristocratic manor indicated by the metalwork. But I couldn't get permission to dig the most promising bit of the site. Instead my team of Chester students and I dug off to one side and found no end of pits and hearths, but hardly any artefacts at all. Those bits that we did find are lithics, apparently belonging to a Late Mesolithic shore site. Yesterday I got the radiocarbon results. They…

On a whim, I've grown one of my infrequent beards, and it's starting to itch. The beard hairs are hard and bristly, and the mustache feels like having the skeleton of a herring glued to my upper lip. Kissing and snuggling my loved ones isn't at all as nice a usual, since the 'stache makes contact with them long before I do. Judging from the compliments I've received, though, a beard seems to be the way to go if you're into ladies born in the 1940s. Another possible explanation for the data I have is that women of all ages love my beard, but that only ones of a certain age are daring enough…

The Swedish Heritage Board (or, more specifically, my friends Lars and Johan who work there), has begun putting historical photographs whose copyright has expired onto Flickr Commons. Well done! Check it out! The Board is a lot like the Museum of National Antiquities: even though some of its projects just make me want to weep, it also has excellent world-class stuff going on. This is of course an effect of the individual people behind each project. And the, shall we say, wide-open-mindedness of their superiors.

Since a bit more than a year, Fornvännen's first 100 years (1906-2005) have been freely available and searchable on-line. It's a quarterly multi-language research journal mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and Medieval art, and I'm proud to be its managing editor. Now we've gone one step further and made the thing into an Open Access journal. The site's run of the journal is complete up to 6 months ago, and every issue will henceforth appear on-line half a year after it was distributed on paper. Here, for instance, is an excellent paper in English by my buddy Svante Fischer from last…

My buddy Mathias is planning an interesting course at the University of Gothenburg for this autumn: "The IT Society's Vulnerabilites". I translate: The goal of the course is to improve understanding of the vulnerability inherent in the central role information technology plays in society. The course offers seminars on the relationship between IT and society. Various implementations of IT are presented and discussed, as well as their influence on individuals, organisations and society. The course imparts knowledge about the role of information technology and issues of responsibility,…

The sixty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the The Swedish Osteological Society's Blog. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology from a bony point of view! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 22 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny. As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an ice cream stick, dating from the '00s. Its context is unusually unclear in the on-line info, but it appears to have been donated during an outreach project where kids were invited to give the museum stuff and speculate about how people in the future will one day interpret it. I don't think curating,…

Current Archaeology, "the UK's best selling archaeology magazine", has kindly given me a complimentary subscription. I recently received my first issue, #228 (March '09), and I found it an enjoyable read. Best of all, I liked James Barrett's and Adam Slater's piece on their recent fieldwork at the Brough of Deerness, Mainland, Orkney. This scenic and Scandy-flavoured site would have interested me anyway, but now I also happened to have visited it last June in the company of Barrett and the Brough's 1970s excavator Chris Morris. That visit took place as part of a conference excursion, and…