archaeology
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2011
"Pyramidology", says Wikipedia, "is a term used, sometimes disparagingly, to refer to various pseudoscientific speculations regarding pyramids, most often the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt." The encyclopedia goes on to explain that there are several kinds of pyramidology that do not necessarily correspond, one of which is the metrological kind, where the dimensions of these great edifices are studied. In the archaeological trade, we sometimes (uncharitably) refer to writings of this kind as "pyramidiocy".
In late March I got a call from Lars Lison Almkvist who has…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2011
Driving through Hagby parish in Uppland on a tiny road Friday, I was lucky enough to cross the bridge at Focksta right at the moment when the afternoon sun hit this lovely runestone straight on. I didn't even have to get out of the car to take the photograph.
Dating from the early 11th century, the stone is an unsigned work of Ãsmund KÃ¥resson (U 875). It's unusual in that it has a couple of Bronze Age cupmarks too. The inscription reads, "Tyrvi and Ingegärd and Tjälve had this stone erected after Kalv, Tyrvi's husband. May God and God's mother help his spirit."
Note the cross and the…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2011
In the Lake Mälaren area of Sweden, you rarely find any large pieces of Bronze Age metalwork in graves or at settlement sites. When the beautiful larger objects occur - axe heads, spear heads, swords, neck rings, belt ornaments - they almost exclusively come from odd find contexts that I for one feel comfortable with terming sacrificial deposits. My current main project aims to find out the rules that decided where people made sacrificial deposits. This entails looking at the finds we already know of and trying to trace the find spots, which is difficult as most finds were made about 1900…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2011Skogs-Tibble parish near Uppsala is unusually rich in Bronze Age sacrificial finds, so I'm looking closer at it for some future fieldwork. And I found an awesome site in the Sites & Monuments Register, Raä Skogs-Tibble 93:3:
Skrubbstenen [The Scrubbing Stone]. Boulder with oral tradition, granite, c. 4 by 4 m a side ... According to Ivar Hall, 80 years old, of Sågstennäs, his maternal grandfather told him that trolls used to scrub and delouse themselves against the inward-sloping side of the boulder in the two cavities there.
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2011I suddenly have this unaccountable urge to comment on the current issue of National Geographic Magazine. Maybe that isn't so strange. I mean, after all, I like reading the mag and I'm on record as saying, in the Swedish Skeptics quarterly no less, that my ideal museum exhibition would be a 3D version of a Nat Geo feature story. Though I wonder if that's the only reason. Well, anyway:
Nat Geo covers quite a bit of archaeology, usually of the same Great Civilisations and Opulently Furnished Tombs of Antiquity kind that we meet with in more specialised international pop-archaeomags such as…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2011Andreas Oldeberg (1892-1980) is rumoured to have had some pretty ugly political leanings. But just because you like cheese, you needn't socialise with cows. If you're into Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age metalwork from Sweden, there is absolutely no getting around Oldeberg's huge illustrated catalogue from 1974.
I'm currently grabbing data out of the catalogue for my sacrificial sites project. And I've come across a funny detail that shows that old Oldeberg was not up to speed with his day's archaeological methodology.
Whenever Oldeberg describes a spearhead, he classifies it according to…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2011
I've written before (1 - 2 - 3) about the Kenyan village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Medieval Chinese sailors. Now my buddy Axel Andersson has alerted me to a similar case. But here it's sort of the other way around: a Chinese village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Roman soldiers.
The village of Zhelaizhai (formerly Liqian) is in Gansu province in northern China, on the border towards Inner Mongolia and on the edge of the Gobi desert. People here tend to have an unusually Europid appearance by Chinese standards,…
aardvarchaeology | June 21, 2011
Is this part of the Stone of Mora?
After some issues with the image resolution in the PDFs, we've now put Fornvännen 2010:3-4 on-line. Read new research for free!
Middle Neolithic festival site in Scania
Roman bronze coinage found in the woods of northern Sweden
Roman mirror shard found on the coast of Western Bothnia
Pre-demolition documentation of a richly be-muralled Medieval church in Småland produced in the 1820s
1st millennium AD gardening
Thieves, counterfeiters and murderers in Birka
What happened to the Stone of Mora onto which Medieval Swedish kings were hoisted at their…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2011
The rivers run almost dry in Qingtian prefecture, Zhejiang province, China, because of recently built power dams. This particular dam on a tributary of the main river was completed three years ago. The resulting lake is 100 meters deep above the drowned villages on the valley floor.
And if they didn't build these dams? Either burn coal, build more nuclear plants or stay an undeveloped nation.
Cultivation terraces and tombs that were once way up the mountainside and hardly accessible at all are now at the lake shore. Note the zone of silt-grey terraces just above the current water level…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2011Current Archaeology #254 (May) has a pretty funny 6-page feature by Spencer Smith of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. He claims to have found the site of a Surrey manor house that saw the birth of the last Prince of Wales who was actually an independent Welsh prince: Owain Lawgoch, Owain of the Red Hand (b. c. 1330, d. 1378). But reading the article, I found that it is actually a long piece of special pleading to explain why Smith did not find the desired remains on site! The whole thing was prompted by a TV documentary, where of course you have to put a…
gregladen | June 13, 2011My interest is in developing a plausible evidence-based story of how modern humans emerged from ancestral species. This means guessing at what features of humans make us "human" and attempting to see the emergence of each of these features in the fossilized record of our bodies (bones) and behaviors (artifacts and archaeological sites). This question has traditionally been treated, inappropriately, as simple. Walking upright, or freeing of the hands, or using tools, or hunting animals, or scavenging from carnivores, violence, provisioning mates, bonobo-ism (a form of erotica, it would seem…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2011
Ever since I started blogging in 2005 I've been talking about my Ãstergötland project, where I've been chasing the elite of the mid-to-late 1st millennium in one of Sweden's richest agricultural provinces. This project has produced a number of journal papers, talks, radio appearances, archive reports and additions to museum collections. But there hasn't been a book (though Dear Readers John Massey and Deborah Sabo have helped copy-edit a manuscript).
Soon there will be one.
I'm very pleased to be able to show you its cover, designed by Tina Hedh-Gallant (who is also laying out the contents…
gregladen | June 9, 2011Please join Abbi Allan and me at the black Dog Cafe next Tuesday.
Art and Human Evolution - June 14, 2011
6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Are humans the only creatures who create art? At what point in human evolution did artistic creations become separate from tools, become art for arts' sake? What in us is so driven to create?
Dr. Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist who has done research in human evolution as well as eco-tourism in South Africa. In his own words: "I think of myself as a biologist who focuses on humans (past and present) and who uses archaeology as one of the tools of the trade…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2011I've criticised Western museums for buying or accepting as gifts looted Chinese antiquities. This practice, in my opinion, stems from an outdated and irresponsible fine arts perspective where the exact provenance of a museum piece is not very important. When you're dealing with anonymous prehistoric or early historic art, you can't attribute it to any named artist, and so an art curator will quite happily settle for "Han dynasty, probably the Yellow River area" as a date and a provenance.
As an archaeologist, I do not accept the category "fine art", and I claim precedence for the…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2011
Chinese tourist sites follow a set of conventions that seem to go back hundreds or thousands of years, far into a past when tourism, as we understand it, did not yet exist. Essentially we're dealing with named and inscribed sites. I have visited many in my Chinese travels, but since I can't read the language I have formed my ideas about them from reading English-language signage and asking my wife to translate or explain. So I may have misunderstood the nuances. Here nevertheless are my impressions.
A Chinese tourist site always originates with an educated male member of the elite some time…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2011
My mother-in-law grew up in the mountains near Fushan in the prefecture of Qingtian (pronounced CHING-tien), inland Zhejiang province. Though the prefecture's name means "Green Field", it's pretty poor and has been a major emigration area for decades. The owners and staff of many or most Chinese restaurants in Sweden are from Qingtian. Yesterday we rode a train for nearly seven hours from Hangzhou to get to the district capital, and all along the way we were accompanied by a line of enormous new concrete stilts on which a future fast railroad will run. Next time the trip may take only an…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2011
Here's a fun find, courtesy of my buddy Claes Pettersson. As detailed on Jönköping County Museum's blog, a funny little cast-brass trinket came to light during fieldwork at Odensjö ("Odin's Lake"), where recently a very fine Roman era weapon burial has also been unearthed. From a functional point of view it's hard to say what the thing has been used for (no surviving pin arrangements on the back side to identify it as a brooch), but Annika Jeppson's analytical drawing allows us to date it firmly to the Early Viking Period, probably the later 9th century.
Two birds are pecking a round-…
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2011
I've reported before [1 - 2] on the on-going discoveries in the Tjust area of NE Småland province. Here Joakim Goldhahn is employing the country's best rock-art surveyors to work through an area that is turning out to be extraordinarily rich and diverse in Bronze Age petroglyphs. These years will be remembered as a time when the Swedish rock art map was redrawn in a dramatic fashion.
Here are two fresh finds from last week, pics courtesy of my friend Roger Wikell. Some of this rock art is pecked on quartzite, a material so hard that Roger compares it to bullet-proof glass. The cool thing…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2011
My colleague Karl-Magnus Melin specialises in ancient and modern woodworking and has a major paper in Fornvännen's summer issue about well fittings made from hollowed-out tree trunks. He's kindly sent me some post-conservation pics of a Viking Period wooden drinking bowl. It's lathe-turned unless I'm very much mistaken. The bowl was found sitting in a back-filled well last autumn, during excavations directed by Anne Carlie for the National Heritage Board at Lindängelund near Malmö.
Waterlogged wood is a bit like precious metal in that little really happens to it as the centuries pass.…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2011
Today I did four hours of metal-detecting at a site in VÃ¥rdinge where a Wendelring bronze torque from about 600 BC has been found. Reiner Knizia's popular card game Lost Cities has a thinly applied archaeological theme, and on the board is actually an image of a Wendelring torque just like the one from VÃ¥rdinge. (A Lost Cities deck can easily be made from two packs of normal playing cards using a marker pen on a few cards.)
The torques often come in twos and threes, so I was hoping to find another one today. In early April when my team was there, the site was still largely covered with…