archaeology
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2016In April of 2007 I directed a week of metal detecting at sites in Östergötland where there was a potential for an elite presence in the period AD 400-1000. These investigations were part of a project that I published in my 2011 book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats.
One site that proved a dud for the project's exact purposes was Tuna in Östra Husby parish. But my friend and long-time collaborator (and these days, colleague) Dr. Tim Schröder found something pretty damn cool anyway: a gold finger ring from AD 310–375, the last phase of the Roman Iron Age. It had been twisted up and thrown into a…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2016Last Saturday I attended a rare event: a Swedish metal detector rally. At their worst, in some countries these are like pick-your-own strawberry plantations: pay to loot. But Swedish heritage law is uniquely restrictive around metal detectors, and Swedish daylight detectorists oppose looting, so this rally was an event where any archaeologist could feel at home. It was organised by the Swedish Metal Detector Association (SMF; founded in 2012) in collaboration with the Östergötland County Archaeologist's office. The latter has issued me many a research fieldwork permit involving volunteer…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2016Myself, Ethan Aines and Mats G. Eriksson are proud to present our report on last year's fieldwork at Landsjö Castle, Kimstad parish, Östergötland. Lots of goodies there! Construction on the castle seems to have begun between 1250 and 1275, and the site was abandoned halfway through an extension project some 50-75 years later. We also found a Middle Neolithic fishing site and an Early Modern smallholding among the ruins.
Here on Sb: Landsjo 2015 Report (single-sided print-web, high res)
And on archive.org.
See also the report for 2014, the first documented excavations at the site.
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2016 Torben Thomsen's tattoo
Torben Thomsen found this relief-decorated and gilded pendant in Hjørring municipality, northernmost Jutland. It was his first really old piece. Knight Ink Tattoo in Frederikshavn did the tattoo work on Torben's lower left leg. Torben's pendant is missing its loop, but his workmate Daniel Bach Morville has found the complete piece below at a nearby site.
The motif is a pair of antithetical sea horses. To date them, let's look at the animal art -- the two objects, not the tattoo. The tattoo artist has classicised the motif and gotten rid of a lot of specifically…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2016 14th century pilgrim's badge of St. Bridget found in the River Fyris at Uppsala.
Fornvännen 2015:3 is now on-line on Open Access.
Lars Larsson on an unusual Late Neolithic burial monument at the record-breaking 1st millennium site of Uppåkra.
Christina Fredengren on deposition of human and animal bodies in the waters of inland Uppland.
Lars Liedgren and Ingela Bergman on a previously unpublished 1921 excavation of a Late Medieval farmstead near Luleå.
Birgit Maixner on the confusing and counterproductive results of Norwegian counties interpreting heritage law regarding metal detector…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2016 Two strap ends from the eponymous Borre ship grave. Image from Oluf Rygh's 1885 Norske Oldsager.
Metal detectorist Steffen Hansen has kindly given me permission to show you his tattoo sleeve. He found the strap-end at Øvre Eiker in Buskerud fylke, Norway, and had it tattooed along with other Norwegian examples of the Borre style. I haven't got a picture of his find, but you can see what they look like in the accompanying picture of a piece from the eponymous find at Borre in nearby Vestfold fylke. The tattoo was done by Mikael "Kula" Jensen of Radich Tattoo in Mjøndalen.
The Borre style is…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2016Yesterday I learned about a cool new tradition among metal detectorists. They're having images of their favourite finds tattooed, often on the arm with which they hold the detector! Note that in Scandinavia these are generally objects that the finders have handed in to museums – they keep them only as tattoos. This is in line with the Danish way of regulating metal detectors: there the submitters of each year's ten best finds are invited to the Finds Oscars in Copenhagen and are publicly honoured by my colleagues.
Hugo Falck found this beautiful brooch in 2014 while collaborating with a…
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2016Metal detectorist Dennis Fabricius Holm made a pretty sweet find yesterday: the third known Birka crucifix.
These little wonders of 10th century goldsmith work are named for the first find, made in 1879 when Hjalmar Stolpe excavated in the cemeteries of Birka near Stockholm. In addition to the crucifix grave 660 contained, among other things, two other fine silver filigree pendants and a bronze-capped iron wand that may have served pagan religious purposes.
Crucifix from grave 660 at Birka, Uppland, Sweden.
In 2012 Silke Eisenschmidt identified fragments of a second Birka crucifix among…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2016As with the bones from the 2014 fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Rudolf Gustavsson of SAU in Uppsala has again analysed the bones we found this year (report in Swedish here). And as expected, there are no human bones: this too is mostly food waste. The body parts represented indicate that trench D just inside the perimeter wall contained meal remains while trench F inside the south tower contained more butchery refuse.
The material is dominated by youngish pigs, a tell-tale marker of aristocratic housekeeping, followed by cattle and finally sheep/goat to a lesser proportion than in the 2014…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2016 One of four grotesque male faces on a 17th century object in the Tre Kronor castle museum. The piece looks like a little baptismal font, but the label says "possibly a kitchen mortar". Neither function seems likely.
Had some quality fun this past weekend.
Dinner at Tbilisis Hörna, a Georgian + Greek + Italian restaurant. Service was slow and unsynched but the food was great. The deep green tarragon soda in a bottle with almost exclusively Georgian script on the labels added to the sense of not being anywhere near Stockholm.
Gig at the Globe Arena's annexe with psychedelic Australian…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2016Sweden's bedrock has been entirely abraded by the inland ice. It sanded down the country like a big wood planer, leaving smooth lovely outcrops known as hällar all over the place. This is the main natural prerequisite of Sweden's rich rock art tradition. Most of it dates from the Bronze Age, 1700–500 BC.
Denmark hardly has any visible bedrock, so they don't have much rock art over there, and what they do have tends to be on boulders. It is thus hardly surprising that when you do find figurative art on boulders in Sweden, it tends to be in the provinces closest to Denmark.
Near Asige church in…
aardvarchaeology | January 12, 2016Fornvännen 2015:2 is now on-line on Open Access. A reminder: the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters who publish the journal decided on a six-month delay in order to protect the viability of the journal's paper version.
Evert Baudou & Ingmar Jansson on Leo Klejn’s opinions of Mats Malmer’s work. Legends talking about legend talking about legend.
Per Nilsson & Anna Sörman on a new Bronze Age metalworking find from Östergötland.
Ole Stilborg & Claes Pettersson on the poor quality of Early Modern fortifications at Jönköping.
Göran Tagesson & Annika Jeppson on Early Modern tiled…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2015 Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England
This is the definitive study of English cruciform brooches. Now and then a study comes along that is so comprehensive, and so well argued, that nobody will ever be likely to even try to eclipse it. It is my firm belief that future work on English cruciform brooches will strictly be footnotes to Toby Martin. He has collected and presented a huge material, asked interesting questions of it, and dealt with it competently using state-of-the-art methods. I'd be happy to hand this book as a model to any archaeologist anywhere who…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2015Together with Dorthe Wille-Jørgensen, Curator at the Danish Castle Centre in Vordingborg, I'm organising a paper session on Medieval castles at the 22nd annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. This is in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, 31 August to 4 September 2016. Here’s our session abstract:
Lifestyles At Medieval Castles: Current Methodological Approaches
This session gather researchers working with the way people lived in Medieval castles. It aims to showcase the best current methodology to excavate, sample and study the culture layers in and around castles. This…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2015Today I proof-read the annual index for Fornvännen, the archaeology journal I co-edit. And I took the opportunity to look at our gender stats for full-length papers. There are 16 of these in this year's four issues. Only 31% have female first authors. An additional 31% have a male first author and at least one female author. So women are involved as authors in 62% of this year's full-length papers. That seems reasonably fair since several papers have only one author, so it would be impossible for each gender to be involved in all of them.
But you might wonder what a female author does to the…
aardvarchaeology | November 13, 2015A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a 2004 publication that it was for a Viking Period tortoise brooch. I've never seen the find live, but I could tell from the pictures that the pattern was certainly not from the Viking Period. I wrote in my 2011 book about the area (p. 119), “the object in question has a shape and a geometrical…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2015In countries with a big metal detector hobby, the stereotypical participant is an anorak-wearing, rural, poorly educated, underemployed male. I don't know how true this cliché image is. But apart from the anorak, it's certainly an accurate description of the core voter demographic behind the rise of racist right-wing populist parties. These people have trouble finding jobs, and they have trouble seeing through the racist propaganda that tells them they would have jobs and girlfriends if it weren't for the bloody furriners.
I'm known as a detectorist-friendly archaeologist. I've made many…
aardvarchaeology | October 28, 2015 The new version of a slab from the Kivik cairn.
Fornvännen 2015:1 is now on-line on Open Access.
Sven Sandström on fake Paleolithic art in France.
Andreas Toreld and Tommy Andersson on sensational new discoveries on the carved slabs of the Kivik burial cairn. They've been endlessly discussed for over 200 years, and now the whole game just changes.
Birgit Maixner on a new Late 1st Millennium elite site at Missingen/Åkeberg in Norway.
Inger Jans et al. on the last users of runes in the unbroken tradition from the Iron Age on – around 1910!
Anders Söderberg on one of these lovely little…
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2015Sweden’s largest and oldest contract archaeology organisation with five units spread across the country is known as ”UV”. This is an old in-house abbreviation that means either uppdragsverksamheten or undersökningsverksamheten, “the contract section” or “the investigation section”. After more than half a century as part of the National Heritage Board, UV was recently severed from that organisation and grafted onto the Swedish History Museum’s org chart. The reason for this change is that the National Heritage Board is responsible for evaluating the quality of Swedish contract archaeology, and…
gregladen | September 18, 2015There is a new paper in Science linking genetic variation in people living in Greenland with long term selection for managing a marine-oriented diet, affecting stature, weight, and probably, physiological processing of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs).
The vast majority of the variation we seen in stature (height) among humans is not genetic. That is a fact hard to swallow by so many of us who were told in biology class that "height is a complex genetic trait with many genes affecting it." It also seems wrong because the classic examples of variation in stature, the Pygmies of…