archaeology

In an an artist's CV, you'll read what museums own pieces of their work and what galleries have shown their exhibitions. A field archaeologist keeps no such list, but we sure keep track in our heads of when our finds get exhibited. Because to any scholar who wants to communicate with the public, it is a source of pride to have uncovered something that people are actually interested in. Most archaeological finds are of course unexhibitable drab fragments, but we love them anyway for their scientific potential. Still, every now and then something pops up that you know is going to be able to…

The National Heritage Board of Sweden has released a beta version of a location-aware heritage-data browser for Android. The name is Kringla Mobil, and it talks to the central mash-up database that collates information from museums and organisations all over the country. My Visby buddies Lars and Johan are driving forces in the project. I just stepped out into my yard, pressed Kringla Mobil's map button and searched for gravfält, "prehistoric cemetery". Immediately I got a number of markers on the map: not all the cemeteries in the vicinity, but the ones for which the database contains some…

I'm writing a paper for the conference volume of the Helsinki meeting I attended back in October. Here's an excerpt from the manuscript. In April and May of 2010 I visited nine sacrificial sites in Uppland and Södermanland provinces, selecting them by the criteria that I had to be able to ascertain their locations closely, the finds should preferably be rather rich, and I favoured sites located within walking distance of each other. The winter had been long and cold, and so vegetation was still sparse and much plough soil remained open to field walking. This ensured the best possible…

Wednesday was another day guest-digging at one of Mattias Pettersson & Roger Wikell's sites in the Tyresta woods, this one in the huge denuded area of the great forest fire. Otherworldly scenery! It's the unusually high site discussed here three years ago by Mattias. And since we're dealing with seal hunters in an area with swift shoreline displacement, it's in all likelihood the oldest of the lot: 10 000 years, give or take half a millennium. It's so old that it's pre-stone-axe. The characteristic greenstone flakes left over from the making of Mesolithic axes don't go as high as this.…

Roger Wikell, Kenneth Ihrestam and Sven-Gunnar Broström during a recent documentation session with oblique lighting in SmÃ¥land. Photograph by Emelie Svenman. Many important categories of archaeological site are never discovered by academic archaeologists. In the case of wetland sacrifices, it's simply because nobody's figured out a method to look for them. We just have to sit around waiting for decades until one turns up in the course of some unrelated activity. But in most cases, our problem is actually that we aren't good enough at the methods that exist, simply because we don't spend…

Archaeology Magazine's May/June issue (63:3) has a good long feature by Jarrett A. Lobell & Samir S. Patel on North European bog bodies including some new finds: Lower Saxony in 2000, the Hebrides in 2001 (you may have heard about the weird re-interred bog bodies found under a Bronze Age house) and Ireland in 2003. One of the bogged-down Irishmen was found with a bit of metalwork, which is to my knowledge unique. The piece that really caught my interest though was Eric A. Powell's critical appraisal of a recent speculative History Channel program on the 19th century fake rune-stone from…

Yesterday I did another hour with my metal detector in the disused potato patch where I found a 17th century coin in September 2008. No luck really this time: the only coin I found dates from 1973 and the rest of the stuff wasn't much older than that. But I did make one unusual find: a nickel-silver soup spoon from about AD 1900. It's not an unusual kind of cutlery. The design, known as Gammal Fransk, "Old French", is a perennial classic. But you rarely find complete pieces of cutlery in tilled soil. It probably ended up on the plot with garbage after cultivation ceased. Nickel silver, by…

Last year part of my daughter's schoolyard was landscaped and fitted with new entertainments. The landscapers also built a stone circle right next to her classroom. (I attended that school myself in 1982-85. The building in the background was the council dentistry clinic where I was fitted with braces.) Structures like these are known as domarringar, "judge circles", in Swedish archaeology. They're Early Iron Age grave superstructures dating from c. 500 BC to AD 500, each usually with a cremation urn buried somewhere inside the circle. The term "judge circle" comes from recent folklore (or…

Rock art in southern Scandinavia generally dates from the Bronze Age and depicts boats, long war canoes with lots of oarsmen. Here are some recently found ship panels at Casimirsborg in northern SmÃ¥land, the new big dot on the country's rock-art map. Although rock art is some of the most intriguing source material Bronze Age people left behind, we have a perennial problem tying it into its wider societal context and understanding it. There are few examples of rock-art motifs repeated on bronze artefacts, and few examples of rock-art located in or near other kinds of Bronze Age remains such…

The dams in River EskilstunaÃ¥n at Hyndevad regulate the water level in Lake Hjälmaren. Around 1880 when they were built, and the lake lowered, the river bed was temporarily laid dry. A major prehistoric sacrificial site was discovered, and luckily geologist Otto Gumaelius was there to document it. (He used the finds to date events in the watershed's recent quaternary geology.) The landscape has since been thoroughly messed up at Hyndevad, but still I went there yesterday to get a feeling for the place. I wish I had the resources to lay a few lakes and river stretches dry. [More blog…

The local cub scouts had asked me to accompany them on a forest walk to give them some culture and history. And so I guided them in the evening sun to the singing of blackbirds along the wooded southern shore of the Baggensstäket narrows. History is thick there. Early and Late Modern sea-lane tavern. Napoleonic era small fort. 20th century cemetery. Early Modern customs station. Viking Period cemetery. 1719 battlefield. 1905 memorial celebrating the 1719 debatable victory. Early and Late Modern cemetery. And all the while across the water, Boo Manor with more Viking Period burials, a rune…

The full text of Fornvännen's October issue, 2009:3, has come on-line thanks to our excellent cyber cowgirl Gun Larsson. Joakim Goldhahn (the guy heading the project where they found the sun chariot carving last week) shows that one of the carved slabs at Kivik, in Sweden's most famous Bronze Age burial, actually made a temporary reappearance on site in the 19th century before getting lost again. Johnny Karlsson interprets what the 11th/12th century settlement under the modern town of Södertälje was like from the cuts and species of animal bones found there. Anders Huggert discusses…

Tom Christensen, who heads excavations at storied Lejre on Zealand, Denmark, has a paper about the lovely Lejre figurine in ROMU 2009 (full text on-line) and another one in the new issue of Skalk. Here he offers some well-chosen comparative material and presents his arguments for the figurine's gender and identity. Everybody agrees that the figurine's throne, with its wolf heads and pair of ravens, must depict Odin's high seat Hlidskjalf. Everybody also agrees that the piece dates from the 10th century. But Denmark's foremost experts on 1st Millennium dress (and myself) classify the person…

Bronze Age Scandinavians believed that the sun was pulled across the sky in a chariot by a horse. They built models depicting this out of cast bronze. A well-preserved one has been found at Trundholm on Zealand, and fragments remain of one from TÃ¥gaborg in Scania. They also depicted the motif on burial razors and, rarely, rock-carvings. The other day (when I found some humble cupmarks), my friends Roger Wikell and Sven Gunnar Broström found the first sun-chariot carving on Sweden's east coast: at Casimirsborg in SmÃ¥land. They are working there with fellow rock-art authorities Joakim…

In front, a boulder upon which I found cupmarks. Behind, a Bronze Age burnt mound consisting of fire-cracked stones. In order to study the landscape situation of something you need to know precisely where it is. This poses a problem when it comes to Bronze Age sacrificial finds, because they are almost never made by someone who can document the find spot. They used to be found by farmers and workers before anybody owned a map and before there was a national grid, and they are no longer found much at all. Sacrificial finds, or "deposits", are defined by two negatives: they are not in graves…

Spent the day metal-detecting a lovely high-profile site in Uppland for a colleague. It's turf-covered and a popular haunt of campers and picnic parties. My next detector is definitely going to be one that can differentiate between aluminium and precious metals. I hate aluminium. I took up 111 objects and almost all of them were made of that accursed metal: mainly pull tabs, bottle tops and crumbly nasty wads of foil, but also a tent peg and sundry other things. The oldest find was a 1934 coin. I was a little touched to find a 1980s scout badge, just like the ones I used to wear. And even…

As mentioned here before, dendrochronology has a problem with confidential data. European dendro labs tend to keep their data as in-house trade secrets in order to be able to charge for their services. This means that the labs function as black boxes: you pay a fee, stick a piece of wood into the box, a date comes out the other end, and you have no way to evaluate the process taking place inside. This is poor science. For reasons of climate skepticism, a London banker named Douglas Keenan has now probably managed to liberate a 7000 year base curve for Irish oak from Queen's University Belfast…

Three cool pieces of science have been retrieved from the depths. In the L'Atalante basin, one of the Mediterranean sea's deep hypersaline anoxic basins, anoxic metazoans have been discovered. That means multicellular beings like you, Dear Reader, who live without oxygen. They're loriciferans, Sw. korsettdjur, each less than a millimetre long. Instead of breathing like you, aided by endosymbiotic mitochondria, these beasties have another kind of power plant inside their cells similar to hydrogenosomes, that is, they're chemotrophic. In a bog on the high wooded hills of temperate Hanveden…

Various environmental organizations have been using imagery of dead baby birds with toothbrushes in their guts and solid floating masses of garbage to describe and raise alarm about what has become known as the North Pacific Central Garbage Patch. Yet, the small but important amount of research that has been done there shows that the NPCGP consists of many (alarmingly many) pieces of plastic that are very small, the largest being "about the size of the fingernail on your pinkey." Albatross may or may not be affected by garbage, but it is not likely that the garbage shown in the guts of…

Skalk's February issue was not up to the Danish pop-arch journal's usual excellent standard. I am always keen to read interesting news from Jelling and Lejre, the country's proto-historic centres. But in this case the editors have devoted 17 of the issue's 30 pages to articles about Harold Bluetooth's Jelling despite the fact that nothing of interest has come up there recently. One reports on humdrum trial excavations and the other on the state of erosion on the hamlet's rune stones. Denmark's archaeology is extremely rich and there's no reason to go on and on about early royal sites just…