archaeology
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2011My detectorist friend Svante Tibell pointed me to an extremely interesting term paper by Ingrid Ulst, one of Marge Konsa's students at the university of Tartu in Estonia. The title says it all: The Regulation of Metal Detectors and Responsible Metal-Detecting: the Examples of the UK, Sweden and Denmark. Check it out!
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2011
Here's another artisan taking inspiration from archaeology: Ted Bouck made the above arm ring out of brass sheet, punch-decorated and silver-plated it. Ted comments, "I left the perimeter wave from stamping because I liked the organic look. The diamond with dot inside is a period stamp, though not from the York armring. I did not want to make my armring an exact duplicate." He is currently working with new versions of the Small Punched type of domed oblong brooch that was common in south-east Sweden in the early 8th century.
Below is the original: a gold arm ring from the Vale of York hoard…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2011
Being a prehistorian, I tend to see Stockholm as a cancerous growth. It has expanded for the past seven or eight centuries from small beginnings on an island right where Lake Mälaren debouches into the Baltic. In this process, the city and its suburbs have ruined or covered up great swaths of a pristine rural landscape and archaeology. Sitting on the border between the Medieval provinces Uppland and Södermanland, Stockholm has even managed to rearrange the country's provincial borders. A new-fangled Stockholm county now covers large chunks of the two older provinces.
An expanding city is,…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2011[More about archaeology, reenactment, darkages, shields; arkeologi, vendeltiden, Uppsala, sköld.]
David Huggins is a member of the Wulfheodenas Dark Ages re-enactment group. Among mid-1st millennium Scandies, a wulfheoden was a kind of berserker warrior, only one who identified with wolves rather than bears. David recently commissioned Polish master artisan Grzegorz Kulig to make a replica of a display shield from boat grave number 7 at Valsgärde near Uppsala, whose inhabitant was a 7th century petty king among the Swedes. I think this is a thing of astonishing beauty.
All archaeological…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2011
I once wrote about a miniature køkkenmødding shell midden that accreted in our kitchen sink when we had oysters (image below). Another type of archaeological assemblage that occurs far more commonly in our house is the chicken or pork bone dump. The chicken bones usually don't look very archaeological when we throw them out since they tend to be discoloured and still partly covered in soft tissue. But as you can see above, what remains after my wife has cooked pork broth on fläskben, cheap bony butchering leftovers, could be sitting in a tagged zip baggie on any urban dig.
Our boiled pork…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2011Spent most of the day in Stockholm County Council's building in town, where our new County Archaeologist Maria Malmlöf had convened a seminar for the region's excavation units. The agenda was for everybody to present some highlights from last contract archaeology season in Stockholm County. These seminars have apparently been going on for years, but since I don't work in contract archaeology I haven't been invited before. This time a friend told me about the event, I asked the organisers if I might come, and they bid me welcome.
I really like events like these: it's so rare for me to meet my…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2011Utskrift is a book-format archaeological research journal put out roughly biannually by Kulturmiljö Halland, the heritage management section and excavation unit of the Halland County Museum in Halmstad. The language is Swedish, with English abstracts and summaries. The first issue appeared in 1991, the eleventh in 2010, and that latter issue was generously sent to me by my buddy Leif Häggström who happens to be Utskrift's current editor.
The journal has a funny title: Utskrift means "printout", and I don't know why they chose this. Possibly as a reply, another regional journal was once…
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2011
I'm very pleased to have made it back onto the courtesy subscription list of Current Archaeology, which is a popular zine about UK archaeology. Not only does it offer good writing and photography, but it covers an area whose archaeology is actually relevant to what I do. Not too many millennia ago you could walk a straight dry-shod line from Gothenburg to Edinburgh.
I recently received Current Archaeology #250, whose cover story is a collection of attempts to look in a positive light at the future of UK archaeology after radical public spending cuts. These were occasioned by two unfortunate…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2011
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…
gregladen | January 13, 2011Remember this?
That was from the time of the first big Tut tour. Well, Steve Martin's silly rendition was not part of the tour, but one of the many fine cultural sidebars.
This is not a cultural sidebar resulting from The Treasures of Tutankhamun:
That comes from the observation of people trying to not fall down while walking on the ferry. Someone thought they looked like the figures in Ancient Egyptian paintings.
It's all fairly culturally insensitive yet demonstrative of talent and highly entertaining for most people. I've not decided if making fun of Ancient Egyptians is OK or…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2010Archaeology mags have accreted on my shelf, though something's happened to my subscription to the always enjoyable Current Archaeology. I've written the editors.
Populär Arkeologi 2010:4 opens with a look at the garishly painted reality of Classical sculpture. The only place where you could see white marble statues in ancient Greece and Rome was actually a sculptor's workshop.
Then there's a spread by my buddies and Fornvännen contributors about this summer's rock-art discoveries in Småland province, reported on here and here back in May.
Johan Rönnby reports on a beautifully preserved…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2010Dear Reader, are you of such a bent that you are not content with reading what I write in English? Is your inclination also to hear me speak in Swedish? Is that what you want, now? Is it? Say it! Is it?
Let's be frank. I think we both know what sort of pleasure-seeking little beast you are.
So head on over to Skeptikerpodden and hear their long interview with me about the Swedish Skeptics Society, ending with some views on archaeology.
[More about skepticism, podcasts, archaeology; podcasts, skepticism, arkeologi.]
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2010
Thebes is a multi-award-winning 2007 German board game by Peter Prinz. I just bought it on a tip from my buddy Oscar, who found a good offer on-line and thought of me because of the game's theme. It's about archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s. The box is big, the production values are lavish, and I really look forward to learning it. But before I can say anything about its qualities as a game, I have to share an opening paragraph from the rule book with you (and I translate from the Swedish version).
The players travel as archaeologists through Europe to gather needful knowledge…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2010
According to a fresh press release from the County Museum of Bohuslän in Uddevalla, western Sweden, the museum's maritime archaeologists are studying a well-preserved shipwreck whose construction date lies in the AD 1210s or 1220s.
The shipwreck is in shallow water in the Jore fjord and was identified on aerial photographs by the local firm HydroGIS Ltd, whose staff reported it to the museum. HydroGIS also provided the photographs shown here.
Dendroanatomical measurements have not only proven the wreck to be the oldest known to date along the Bohuslän coast, but have also shown that the…
gregladen | December 16, 2010If you go to a place where humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years and bone happens to be well preserved, you will find bits and pieces of people on a regular basis. If you go to a Polynesian island and look for bones you are more likely to find a turtle or fish bone than a human bone. Thus, when I see ....
... an array of artefacts from the 1930s and bones found on the uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, endured lingering deaths as castaways on a desert island and were eventually eaten by crabs.
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aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2010Yesterday I had been invited to speak at a seminar organised by the Forum for Heritage Research, a network sponsored by four Swedish organisations in the field. The headline was "Hope for the Humanities", and I must admit that I gritted my teeth at the idealist, anti-market and downright unrealistic perspective presented in the invitation copy. Here's a piece based on what I said at the seminar.
I'm very interested in the humanities, particularly archaeology, which is my profession. But I have no interest in TV game shows, even though I know that they're extremely popular. Why is that?
A…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2010
Hot on the heels of the Motala bone boner, here's another ancient likeness of a wee-wee.
Dear Reader Martin Kenny has kindly given me permission to publish a few pictures of his cock. It's made of sandstone or a similar rock, and to my eye it's pretty clearly modified by human hands, though it may have originated as a fossil cavity of some ancient mollusc. Measuring 6 inches long by 1.5 inches thick (small by Martin's standards, he assures me), the rock-hard member was found in the 1990s on a construction site near Red Point in Elk Neck State Park, Elkton, Maryland.
I must admit that the…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2010In October, I wrote about a ruling of the European Commission against Sweden's restrictions on metal-detector use. The angle, kind of irrelevantly one may think, was that our rules counteract the free mobility of goods, which is of course a central concern of the EU.
On 30 November Sweden's Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied to the European Commission. The gist of the reply is that "We think protection of the cultural heritage, which is also central concern of the EU, should trump the free mobility of goods in this case".
Up until §27 there is little new here. But then we get this (and I…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2010Update 13 December: Florian at Astrodictum Simplex has translated the whole entry into German. Thank you, Florian!
Update 21 December: German pop-sci web zine Scinexx reports on the poor status of the impact hypothesis and refers to this blog entry. They also mention a really weird idea of the CIRT's that I hadn't heard about: that the impact event somehow taught certain Celts to make better steel, and that this material eventually allowed the Roman empire to expand!
Back in August, I blogged about this dodgy paper that had been published in Antiquity. Subsequently, German geologists Robert…
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2010Reviewing David Wengrow's What Makes Civilization? is made difficult by the discrepancy between its title and its contents. Out of about 240 pp in total, only ~180 are intended to be read, the rest being comprised of bibliography, index etc. And these pages do not offer meditation on the necessary conditions or definition of civilisation. Instead, a series of observations on the early state societies of the Middle East and Egypt fill the first 150 pp, and then the modern reception of these cultures is covered on 30 pp.
Wengrow's main goal with the book (p. XIV) is to offer a new account of…