archaeology
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2009[More blog entries about archaeology, history, uppsala, Sweden; arkeologi, historia, idéhistoria, Uppsala.]
Magnus Alkarp defended his PhD thesis in Uppsala on 21 November. I just read the book, and my opinion is that Alkarp definitely deserves his PhD. In fact, I believe that he probably deserves two such degrees: one in the history of ideas for the present book, and one in archaeology for his as yet unpublished gazetteer of archaeological features and known interventions into the earth at Old Uppsala. But his book was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Department of Archaeology in Uppsala,…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2009The 81st Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Spider Monkey Tales tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to me or Michelle, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. It's a great way to get some traffic and visibility in the anthro/archaeo bloggyspheroid. The next open slot is on 30 December. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2009Current Archaeology's December issue offers one of the mag's signature feature write-ups of new books, this time The Complete Ice Age: how climate change shaped the world by Brian Fagan et al. Interesting stuff, where the following passage on the coming of our own species into Ice Age Europe struck me as particularly illuminating:
"In the past, climate change had either forced movement or engendered physical evolution [in the area's hominid population]. Homo sapiens, supremely intelligent, responded to new challenges through cultural evolution. The interaction between nature and humanity now…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2009Today's schedule was 5 hours on trains to Lund, 6 hours in Lund giving a talk, and 5 hours on trains home. In Lund I saw the outline of a very early church foundation picked out in the overlying street pavement near the Cathedral. And I was reminded of other archaeology I've seen thus outlined: the chancel apse of Stockholm Cathedral and the great stone ship at Stångebro near Linköping. It's a pretty cool way to show the many-layeredness of a spot that would otherwise just be asphalt.
Dear Reader, have you seen any interesting archaeology outlined in an overlying street pavement?
[More blog…
aardvarchaeology | November 25, 2009A few months ago I finished a book manuscript on elite settlement and political geography in Ãstergötland, one of Sweden's core provinces, in the period AD 375-1000. In countries that have experienced an infestation of Romans, this era is known as the Early Middle Ages. In Scandyland we call it the Late Iron Age. Researching and writing the book has been my main project for over four years, as reflected in many blog entries here about sites such as Skamby in Kuddby and Sättuna in Kaga.
On Thursday 26 November at 15:00 I will give a talk about these matters at the Dept of Archaeology at the…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2009
In Helsinki a few weeks back I made the acquaintance of my charming colleague Wesa Perttola. Now he has made excellent distribution maps for my forthcoming Ãstergötland book. Above is the scatter of 9th and 10th century elite indicators (big black dots) against a background of 6th-8th century indicators (smaller grey dots) and farms named Tegneby ("thane's farm", stars). Wesa tells me that he is currently available for more GIS and CAD work.
[More blog entries about gis, cad, maps, archaeology; gis, cad, kartor, arkeologi.]
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2009
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Ãrtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt lÃ¥nga perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I'll cover ways that information has survived from the distant past, and aspects of how data from archaeological sites and museum collections can be safeguarded for a long future.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The venue is at ForskningsgÃ¥ngen 6, square 2, floor 2, on the premises of IT…
aardvarchaeology | November 13, 2009
So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press.
Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman.
She's wearing a floor-length dress. And a shawl. And four finely sculpted bead strings. This is a standard depiction of an aristocratic lady of…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2009Aard enjoys complimentary subscriptions to a number of popular archaeology magazines from which I learn a lot before passing them on to the Fisksätra public library. Here are my favourite stories from three recent issues that have crossed my current-reading shelf.
Current Archaeology 234, Sept.
Figures cut into chalk hillsides in Britain, such as the Uffington horse (6 pp.).
Current Archaeology 236, Nov.
A huge 7th century gold and silver hoard found recently in Staffordshire. Excellent pix! I haven't blogged about this since it's been all over the mainstream news and I had little to add…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2009We know quite a bit more now about the archaeology of Sättuna in Kaga parish, Ãstergötland, than we did before me and my homies started fieldwork there in April of 2006. My blog readers have had news of the site as it appeared, pretty much in real time. But now it's time to put up a new signpost next to Christer's barn. Today I wrote some new text for the sign and sent it to the County Archaeologist's office. Here's the tiny English bit at the end.
The field with the barrow hides a 6500 year old Stone Age camp site and an aristocratic manor site of the 5th-9th centuries AD. Bronze jewellery…
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2009
In addition to the archive reports on my two seasons of fieldwork at the Late Medieval and Early Modern harbour of Djurhamn, I have now published a paper that discusses and interprets the results. It's in a symposium volume from the Royal Academy of Letters, edited by my friend Katarina Schoerner and bearing the name SkärgÃ¥rd och Ãrlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgÃ¥rds tidiga historia. ("Archipelago and naval warfare. Case studies in the early history of the Stockholm archipelago"). Other contributors are Jonathan Adams, Kajsa Althén, Jan Glete, Sven Lilja, Peter Norman, Mary Pousette,…
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2009The seventy-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology.net. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Colleen at Middle Savagery. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than four weeks, on 2 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2009
I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up.
In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a bibliographical essay in Fornvännen titled (and I translate), "Notes on the bibliography of Swedish numismatics and archaeological historiography". It covers writings about coins and the history of archaeology. And on page 285 we find mention of one G.H. Rundquist who had published a "Catalogue of the coin…
aardvarchaeology | November 3, 2009Finland has a lot of cairns, usually sitting on hill tops near the sea. Unlike a mound, the cairn consists only of stones, and so it lets rain water percolate through. This messes up the contents of the cairn. Bones and burial goods are rarely preserved, and it seems that the ancient Finns didn't stock their cairns with a lot of interesting stuff to begin with anyway. This makes individual cairns difficult to date, though seen as a class their chronology is fairly well understood.
Despite the fact that few Finnish cairns contain anything interesting or valuable to a layperson, a lot of them…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2009
Runologist James E. Knirk has published a report on the recently found Hogganvik rune stone. His transliteration is
[?]kelbaþewas:s(t)^ainaR:aaasrpkf
aarpaa:inanana(l/b/w)oR
eknaudigastiR
ekerafaR
His translation is
Skelba-þewaR's ["Shaking-servant's"] stone. (Alphabet magic: aaasrpkf aarpaa). ?Within/From within the ?wheel-nave/?cabin-corner. I NaudigastiR [="Need-guest"]. I, the Wolverine.
So there isn't actually an explicit lord-retainer relationship in the text, just a guy whose name includes the word for servant, thewar. It also occurs in two names inscribed on weaponry from Danish…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2009
I'm posting this from a Helsinki basement café after a day's excursion by bus and boat in the countryside west of town. We mainly looked at cairns of various form, date and function, including a group of very fine large mountaintop ones of the typical Bronze Age variety.
Toward the end of the day we saw a preserved little bit of an excavated cemetery to which had been added a memorial stone in the 1930s. On the plaque the site is dated to about AD 100 and proclaimed as burial place of the first Finns! The reasoning went like this.
"We have a gap in the archaeological record during the Last…
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2009The jaw-drop moment of the conference came for me when osteologist Lise Harvig off-handedly showed us pictures of what she is doing. She's a PhD student with Niels Lynnerup at the Dept of Forensic Medicine at Copenhagen. Remember the crumbling Neolithic amber bead hoard that the Danes ran through a CT scanner instead of excavating and stabilising the thing? Now Lise is putting entire Bronze Age urn burials through that scanner. She knows where every piece of bone and bronze is in those urns before she even cuts open the plaster they've been encased in since being lifted out of the ground. She…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2009Helsinki isn't far from Stockholm. It took me a bit more than four hours from home to my hotel here, and I could have shaved more than an hour off of that if I had taken the bullet train to the airport and a cab to the hotel instead of going by bus.
I'm at the 11th Nordic Bronze Age symposium, which for the first time includes a bunch of Baltic colleagues as wall. Everybody's very friendly and the atmosphere is informal. It's a pretty sizeable conference as these things go in my discipline: about 60 registered participants, of which I have made the acquaintance of at least half by now. For…
gregladen | October 26, 2009From his colleague, Eduardo Corona-M, via the Zooarch list server:
He was a great researcher at the Instituto Nacional de AntropologÃa e Historia and taught zoology at Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas in the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. In 2006 he received the Fryxel Award by the Society of American Archaeology. For many year he promotes the archaeozoological studies in Mexico and Latin America, he was part of ICAZ Comitee and one of the organizers of the 10th ICAZ Meeting in Mexico. Rest in peace Se comunica a ustedes el lamentable deceso del Profesor Ãscar J. Polaco,…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2009True to the rules of Open Access publishing, the April issue of Fornvännen has come on-line in all its full-text glory less than six months after paper publication.
Katharina Hammarstrand Dehman reports on the kind of hardcore wetland archaeology you can get to do when somebody wants to dig a huge tunnel under a coastal city.
Helena Günther launches a merciless attack on the shamanic model of interpretation that has coloured much Scandy rock-art research in recent years.
Maria Lingström reports on her fieldwork on a 1361 battlefield. Unusually early battlefield archaeology on a site where…