archaeology
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2011Once I went metal-detecting without my GPS. Luckily the site was not far from my home and I found only one object worth collecting, so I could mark the spot with a stick and return after dinner to get the coordinates. Another time I forgot my rubber boots and was confused by my detector's strange behaviour until I realised that I was wearing heavy steel-capped workman's shoes that triggered the detector at a distance of decimeters.
These days I have a checklist that I use to pack for metal-detecting. Here's what I need to bring when going into the field.
Metal detector (!)
Batteries
Spade…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2011The other day asked what UK practice regarding the treatment of archaeological human remains has been like in recent decades. Dear Reader Dustbubble gave such a good answer that I must promote it to guest-entry status.
Martin sez ".. But what, then, was the practice like between 1857 and 2008?"
Well from personal experience, in the last quarter of the C20th it would be infinitely carefully excavated and drawn/photogged in situ (did you know that a well-preserved adult skeleton, if arranged in the now-traditional urban mediaeval digger's fashion, fits perfectly in a two-gallon builder's bucket…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2011For some years I have been a happy reader of (and frequent commenter on) Current Archaeology. Now Dear Reader Marcus Smith has arranged (or bought?) a complimentary subscription for me to the other big UK pop-arch mag, British Archaeology. While CA is a private property, BA is published by the Council for British Archaeology, "an educational charity working throughout the UK to involve people in archaeology and to promote the appreciation and care of the historic environment for the benefit of present and future generations", as Wikipedia puts it.
The first issue of British Archaeology to…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2011
My dynamic colleague Bengt Nordqvist, for whose project I volunteered a few days in the summer of 2009, believes that contacts of his have found two Classical figurines of Venus (above) in the Gothenburg area. It looks like a fun possible case of misidentification. I don't know Classical Mediterranean sculpture, and I don't know neo-Classical 17th century sculpture either, so I can't really comment except to say that the bearded praying guy below definitely looks post-Reformation to me. But here's what my correspondent John Kvanli tells me (and I translate).
Us in Rygene Detektorklubb have…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2011
When I was in grad school, twelve years ago to the day, my thesis supervisor gave me a part-time job. He got me onto the editorial board of Swedish archaeology's main research journal.
I became co-editor of Fornvännen on 15 April 1999. The other editors were pretty busy people, I was paid by the hour, I enjoyed the work and I saw the career potential. So I made sure from the start to grab all the responsibility I could. This state of affairs was formalised in 2008, when I was made Managing Editor, a box that hadn't existed on the org chart before. I did the journal work in my research…
gregladen | April 13, 2011Today, I took out the trash. I may or may not have taken the trash out last week, but I can tell you that the last time I did take it out, whenever it was, I had to drag the trash barrel across ice. Yesterday I went to the gym without a coat or jacket. That made me have to decide if I wanted to go to the locker room to stow the contents of my pockets (car keys, etc.) or just keep those things in my pocket. The grass outside is green. We expect snow on Friday.
Where I grew up, in what is now known among gardeners and cooperative extension agents as Zone 5b (though a short drive from a…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2011
Touching down at Minneapolis airport shortly before 19:00 last night, my wife and I were met by the charming Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich from the Anthro Dept. They got us installed at our hotel and joined us for dinner at the food court of the monstrous Mall of America. (There's a theme park inside it.) Then to bed.
This morning we negotiated the ample, varied and sugar-rich breakfast buffet here at the Fairfield Inn, and then went to the light rail station. We're in the second-generation periphery of Minneapolis near the airport, outside the old industrial fringe. The roads are 6-lane…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2011
Success and failure in archaeological fieldwork is a graded scale. I wrote about this in autumn 2008:
My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2011I've got a lot of fun stuff going on right now. Yesterday I drove to Uppsala, talked to the County Archaeologist about a site for almost two hours on an empty stomach, was fed cake by my friend and colleague Ãsa of Ting & Tankar, spoke about Bronze Age sacrificial sites to her staff at the SAU excavation unit, was treated to dinner by Ãsa and my old buddy Jonas, drove to Norrtälje, ran into the local history society's meeting a quarter late and gave the Bronze Age talk one more time. Then drove home and spent half an hour before bedtime getting paperwork into shape as per the County…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2011
Half a year ago I gave a talk about sacrificial sites to a Bronze Age seminar at the Stockholm County Museum. Now the contributions have appeared in a fine little volume in Swedish that can be read on-line for free or mail-ordered from the museum. Thanks, editors, for swift and accurate work!
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2011
Sankt Joachimsthal ("Valley of Saint Joachim") is the German name of Jáchymov, a small town in the Czech Republic. It's in the Erzgebirge mountains near the country's north-western border towards Germany. This place currently has only a bit more than three thousand inhabitants, and yet its name is used daily by billions of people worldwide. Jáchymov is the birthplace of the Valley Coin, the Thaler, the daler, the dollar.
In 1516 a major silver lode was discovered near the Bohemian village of Conradsgrün. The following year the village was re-christened Sankt Joachimsthal, and in 1519 the…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2011Skalk's first issue for 2011 opens with a great article by Mr. Bronze Age Religion himself, Flemming Kaul. It deals with two wooden votive helmets found in a bog on Lolland in Denmark. Their closest parallels are from a big multiperiod deposit of pre-Roman metal helmets found at Negova/Negau in Slovenia. One of the latter carries an extremely early inscription in Germanic, the name Harigasti, which makes the link to the Uglemose find even more interesting.
Kaul shows further parallels from coeval situla art where boxers compete for similar helmets. And then comes a passage that made me laugh…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2011
In Sweden, as increasingly in the entire industrialised world, the cost of archaeological rescue excavations rests upon the land developer. This is known as "contract archaeology" or, euphemistically, "mitigation". Here it's largely an affair within the public sector: most of the fieldwork takes place because of state road and railroad projects, and most of the contracts are picked up by state or county organisations. Though private foundations and limited companies do operate here, Swedish contract archaeology is mainly a question of routing money from taxpayers to public-sector…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2011
From the York office of archaeology's equivalent of Nature:
Antiquity invites the submission of high-quality archaeological photographs for publication in the journal.
Two photographs will be selected and published each quarter. A judging panel will decide the best photograph published each year and a cash prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner.
Photographs must be sent as digital images at a minimum width of 135mm @ 300 pixels per inch and a maximum height of 165mm. All photographs should be accompanied by a short caption providing details of the site/artefact, when the image was…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2011
The National Geological Survey of Sweden has put an interactive deglaciation and shoreline displacement model for the country on-line for free. You can download detailed hi-res maps of your favourite parts of Sweden for 0-16 thousand years ago, and a few thousand years into the future! (But only at intervals of whole millennia.) Invaluable for Swedish prehistorians!
Above is the area between LÃ¥ngbro and Hjortsberga in VÃ¥rdinge parish, Södermanland, where I'm planning some fieldwork, as it looked in 1000 BC according to current knowledge of the shoreline displacement process. I scouted the…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2011I've told you before about the Chiemgau Impact Hypothesis, where a small group of researchers cultivate a minority view of a glaciogenic lake basin in Bavaria as a meteorite crater dating from the 1st Millennium BC. Here on Aard I've published a paper in collaboration with geologists Robert Huber and Robert Darga where we explain that it's an unlikely fringe idea. And now a peer-reviewed paper (pay wall) has appeared in Antiquity where the hypothesis is refuted, gently but crushingly.
Gerhard Doppler and colleagues at the Geology Service of the Bavarian State Board for the Environment explain…
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2011
I've shown samples of Spanish archaeopotter Pablo Zalama's Beaker Culture pieces before. Here are some new replica Roman lamps of his.
If only Swedish pottery had been this good prior to the High Middle Ages! OK, the burnished ware of Ãland and Gotland in the Early Roman Period is good. And some of the stamped ware of Gotland's Migration Period isn't bad either. But when I read Thomas Eriksson's recent & solid PhD thesis on our Bronze Age and Earliest Iron Age pottery, I almost wept at how ugly and poorly fired the stuff is.
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2011I spent most of last weekend in Blankaholm, a small village on the Baltic coast of Sweden between Kalmar and Västervik. My colleague Michael Dahlin (who keeps the Misterhultaren blog) lives there, and this weekend was the fourth time that he headed the annual Blankaholm conference on Swedish east coast archaeology. There's nothing quite like it that I know of: a true grassroots event, gathering amateurs with no formal training, amateurs with archaeology degrees, trained professionals and even a few pros without formal training. 25 hours of talks, discussion, book trade, communal meals and…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2011
A citizen in the island province of Gotland has submitted a Roman cavalry-officer's helmet mask to the County Archaeologist. It is said to have been in the family for some time. The state of the piece shows that it can't be from a ploughed field, which makes it unlikely to be a recent metal-detector find.
Thanks to Jan Peder Lamm for the tip-off.