archaeology
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2010
Professor Nancy Edwards and associates take stock of the western trench at the end of the day's work.
Today offered much better weather, but due to permit trouble very little metal detecting. Instead I've been "cleaning" with the students, which basically means slow removal of soil using a trowel and a brush. I found a large piece of glazed Buckley ware (19th century), a piece of clay-pipe stem, some quartz and not much more. Somebody found a piece of Roman black burnished pottery that had been partly refashioned into a crude spindlewhorl. But we're still on top of the barrow's capping slate…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2010
I'm in north-east Wales for a few days' work on a Universities of Chester and Bangor dig. We've had a rainy day, which meant that we couldn't work effectively for very long. But I did some metal detecting, finding lead spatters that may have to do with 18th century repairs to the 9th century Pillar of Eliseg, and two 20th century coins, and of course a few aluminium ring-pulls. And I took part in de-turfing and trowel cleaning on the flanks of the barrow and the flat field around it. The weather forecast for the next few days looks somewhat more favourable.
Meanwhile, here at Sb, the crisis…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2010
Motala in Ãstergötland has been recognised in recent years as one of the richest Mesolithic sites in Scandinavia north of the current and former Danish provinces. Excavations in waterlogged sediment along River Motala ström have produced great numbers of bone and wood objects that have rarely been preserved elsewhere. Most are harpoon and leister points, but now a bone dildo (a boner?) has joined the growing collection. Measuring twelve by two centimetres, its size is perhaps not very impressive, and there are many non-dildoish uses for which it may have been intended. But without doubt…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2010Archaeology Magazine's July/August issue (#63:4) has a lot of Old World articles which made it particularly interesting to me. We get Nabataean mausolea in Arabia, Europid Bronze Age mummies in Xinjiang, the Neanderthal genome, Greek temples in southern Italy, and a great feature on new developments in the urban archaeology of Medieval Jewry in France and Germany. As it turns out, Medieval Jews are to some degree archaeologically distinct from their Christian neighbours. But more importantly, their culture turns out to be distinct from recent Jewish culture and the Medieval written ideals of…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2010
The most dedicated man in Swedish fringe archaeology is at it again. I've reported on and off about Bob G. Lind's antics in Scania (1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5), but it's been a while now. I didn't write about the time when he interpreted a dotted line on an old map as an alignment of standing stones that had been removed, nor about his recent statement to the effect that his new discoveries would topple the current Swedish government once he presented them. But now Bob's made the news again and Ystads Allehanda has the story.
Ystad municipality has temporarily cancelled its guided tours of the Ales…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2010
Next week, 20-23 July, I will work on a Universities of Bangor & Chester excavation in north-east Wales headed by Nancy Edwards and my friend Howard Williams. The fieldwork concerns the site of a 9th century memorial cross, the "Pillar of Eliseg", mentioned here in February of last year. Having grown up with the Welsh-inspired fantasy fiction of Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, I'm thrilled to dig in Wales! I mean, the area of the site is named the Vale of Llangollen ("thlan-gottlen"), can you beat that?
Aard readers in the Wrexham/Chester area, give me a shout and maybe we…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2010I had two pages in the May issue of Forskning & Framsteg (Sweden's equivalent av Scientific American) about recent books on the Scandinavian Bronze Age. I was happy to publish there, but not very happy with the rushed chop job the contribution went through without my involvement before it was sent to the printers. So, below the fold is an uncut review in Swedish of the following books:
Det 10. nordiske bronsealdersymposium. Trondheim 5.-8. okt. 2006. Red. Terje Brattli, Trondheim 2009.
Changing landscapes and persistent places. An exploration of the Bjäre peninsula. Jenny Nord. Lund…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2010
Like everything else we make and use, gaming pieces form part of the archaeological record. I once had the pleasure of lifting a particularly fine set of 9th century hnefatafl pieces out of the ground. Now I have seen a set of 20th century mah jong pieces go into the ground.
The site of the burnt and demolished house near mine is now clean and ready for the new building planned there. But, as has often been observed, two important reasons that the archaeological record contains more small objects than large ones are that the larger ones are easier to find when you lose them and they get in…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2010
A metal detector is very nice, particularly when there isn't a lot of aluminium in the ground. Archaeology cannot do without it. But what I really want now is a holographic radar instrument. Still in the prototype stage, this technology is being developed by Tim Bechtel of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and colleagues, who primarily have land-mine removal in mind. It will image underground metal objects in 3D. Gimme gimme gimme!
And oh, how I hope that my country's legislators will allow a responsible metal-detector hobby to develop here before holographic radar…
aardvarchaeology | July 5, 2010
The recently found Norwegian 5th century runestone of Hogganvik carries a memorial inscription and so might be expected to have stood on or near a grave. My buddy Frans-Arne Stylegar has excavated the site and sadly found no preserved burial, but he did find the original stone setting of the monument. This is a rare kind of knowledge, as many runestones have been moved around through the centuries. Now the runestone stands again, the site has been cleaned up, and the public is free to come see the most important early runic document to surface in many decades.
Photograph by Frans-Arne…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2010
Image by Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre.
Archaeology is a famously ghoulish pursuit whose practitioners are always on the look-out for dead bodies to gloat over. If we can't find a grave, then at least we'll try to get hold of animal bones from kitchen middens and sacrificial deposits. I've seen desperate Mesolithic researchers cackle with funereal glee over the toe bones of long-dead seals. Osteologists are of course the worst necrophiliacs of the lot. But nobody's immune. There's an anecdote going around about my old favourite teacher, where he lifts a pelvis out of a Middle Neolithic…
gregladen | June 27, 2010Even at the most extreme edges of the flow of stuff out of the volcano Pompeii, at the far edge of the mud and ash that came from the volcano's explosion, the heat was sufficient to instantly kill everyone, even those inside their homes.
And that is how the people at Pompeii, who's remains were found trapped and partly preserved within ghostly body-shaped tombs within that pyroclastic flow, died. They did not suffocate. They did not get blown apart by force. They did not die of gas poisoning. They simply cooked. Instantly.
That is the conclusion of a study just published in PLoS ONE by…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2010Friendly correspondent Peter Woods is working with chapes or ferrules, that is, metal mounts from the ends of knife sheaths or sword scabbards. He has sent me lovely images of these things in the hope that Aard's readers might be able to suggest parallels. Neither of the finds has any solid provenance, and though I believe them to be from north-west Europe and date from the 11th/12th centuries, I've never seen anything quite like them in my work with Scandinavian small finds. Being fragile yet excellently preserved, they're almost certainly grave finds, not metal detector finds from plough…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2010
One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward the end of the 10th century. It's got the lines "There's thyme in it, said Toki in a cracked voice" and "He's done pissing now", and a duel that ends in a man's severed head landing in a tub of mead. (You can see why Bengtsson is one of my favourite writers.)
I recently complained about Skalk running…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2010Popped down to Lund over the day to teach a class on new media reach-out in archaeology. I showed the students a presentation and spoke for about 2 x 45 minutes. Spending only four hours in town, I had little time to do anything else, though I passed the venue of James Randi's upcoming lecture, checked out the relocated runestones outside and peered into an enticing sewer trench cut into the stratigraphy of Lundagård, Sven Forkbeard's old hangout.
Here are the main points of my talk. (And here's the whole thing in Swedish.)
Old media - New media
Gatekeeper - No gatekeeper
Pros write -…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2010
Back in August of 2006 I wrote about an absurd plan to relocate the Israeli embassy in Stockholm temporarily to vacant office space in the Museum of National Antiquities. This plan became reality. But the Israelis are having trouble with the building they're headed for on a more permanent basis, and so the embassy is still there, over three years down the line.
The Israelis have had one or two rockets too many fired at them from the Gaza strip, and so are doing their best to cut off supplies to the area. Pro-Palestinian groups have responded by organising aid flotillas. Recently Israeli…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2010From '05 to '09 my main research project concerned the Late Iron Age elite in Ãstergötland, one of historical Sweden's core provinces. It's Beowulf country, Beowulf centuries, Beowulf people: the resulting book manuscript is titled Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats. Elite Settlements and Political Geography AD 375-1000 in Ãstergötland, Sweden. The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters has now accepted the manuscript for publication in its main proceedings series whose first volume appeared in 1789, ''Handlingar, Antikvariska serien''. The list of colleagues who have published there before is awe-…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2010
The Pukberget sacrifical cave, Uppland
I recently submitted my contribution to the proceedings volume from the 11th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium. Here's the manuscript and here's the abstract:
Gods of High Places and Deep Romantic Chasms
Introductory remarks to a study of the landscape situation of Bronze Age sacrificial sites in the Lake Mälaren area
This paper outlines work in progress with the Bronze Age sacrificial sites of the Lake Mälaren provinces in Sweden. The project's goals are twofold: a) to understand the landscape rules behind the siting of deposits, and thereby b) to develop…
aardvarchaeology | June 3, 2010What's the most dangerous find an archaeologist can make? Some fear anthrax spores in sealed burial caskets. Others the asbestos used to temper certain types of North Scandinavian pottery. But German construction workers are on a whole other level than us. They regularly find Allied bombs from WW2.
One weighing 500 kg was recently found six metres below ground level in Göttingen, Germany, during work on a sports arena. And when the bomb squad set to work on it two days ago, the bomb exploded, killing three and injuring six. They're civilian casualties in a war once fought by their…
gregladen | May 31, 2010This just in from OZ:
Scientists say an Aboriginal rock art depiction of an extinct giant bird could be Australia's oldest painting.
The red ochre painting, which depicts two emu-like birds with their necks outstretched, could date back to the earliest days of settlement on the continent.
It was rediscovered at the centre of the Arnhem Land plateau about two years ago, but archaeologists first visited the site a fortnight ago.
A palaeontologist has confirmed the animals depicted are the megafauna species Genyornis.
Archaeologist Ben Gunn said the giant birds became extinct more than 40,000…