archaeology
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2009The sixty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Wanna Be An Anthropologist. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 29 July 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
gregladen | June 17, 2009Last week, federal agents swooped in on 23 of the 24 people indicted on charges of stealing archaeological artifacts from public land and Indian reservations in the Southwest. But after a 60-year-old physician committed suicide over the weekend, Utah senators are saying the raid was overkill.
The arrests were made following a two-year operation codenamed "Cerberus Action," after the multi-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the underworld. The case involves 256 Native American artifacts including woven baskets, pots, sandals, and an ax, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation values…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2009I'm proud to announce that Fornvännen, Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, is now up to speed on the Open Access side. Our excellent librarian and information jockey Gun Larsson has just put the third and fourth issues for last year on-line. Fornvännen appears on-line for free with a six-month delay (due to concerns that the on-line version might otherwise undermine the print version). In the two most recent issues on-line, you can read new research on:
An Early Mesolithic settlement site in wooded Värmland.
A carved stone in a Bohuslän crofter's cellar that may be a Neolithic stele…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2009The 70th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Wanna Be An Anthropologist on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Paul. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
gregladen | June 15, 2009This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth's magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is…
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2009
A month ago news of a wreck found in Sweden's largest lake, Vänern, made the rounds of international media. The story gained traction by an early mention of Viking ships and weapons found alongside the wreck.
Finder Roland Peterson from the Väner Museum now explains that though the ship-building technique used in the wreck was available already in the Viking Period, it then survived for centuries even into the 19th century. He thus deems it possible but not certain that the vessel is very old.
I've taken some small part in the discussion. Though I know little of ship types, I have some…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2009Dear Reader CCBC disagrees with me regarding cultural evolution. Here's my thinking, briefly.
Cultures are different from each other and change over time.
New cultural traits seldom arise for well-thought-out adaptive reasons: most are just made up capriciously.
Not all cultural traits are adaptive, i.e. conducive to the long-term survival of a culture in a recognisable form. Most traits are adaptively irrelevant, but some are counteradaptive.
Cultures that accumulate enough counteradaptive traits will either dwindle and disappear, or change dramatically. In either case, the original culture…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2009A seminar in Stockholm tomorrow will treat the question, "What are the most important unanswered questions in the humanities and social sciences?". In my opinion, the most important ones are "How can peace, prosperity and democracy be established in countries where they are lacking?". And historian Arne Jarrick (whom I met last week at Alan Sokal's talk) agrees. In yesterday's Dagens Nyheter he's quoted as saying (and I translate),
To build a bridge you need technological knowledge. To bomb the bridge you need technological knowledge. But to understand why the bridge was bombed and how to…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2009The sixty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 29 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2009The 68th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Remote Central on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Tim before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2009A friendly Englishman who recently settled in southern Sweden wrote me to ask how a law-abiding metal detectorist should go about getting a permit to pursue their hobby in this country.
The first thing to understand is that the Swedish system makes it effectively impossible to metal detect on a whim while vacationing (unless you're a nighthawk). Paperwork, overburdened county officials and long waits are always part of the process. A sustained metal detector hobby is only really possible if you stick to one or two län counties and establish a good relationship with the County Archaeologist…
gregladen | May 26, 2009It is funny how people play with history. If we talk about an important "first" that is viewed in a positive light ... the origin of beer for instance ... the slightest evidence will be used by the people of a given region to claim primacy. Also, since Africa almost always gets the shaft in this regard, all else being equal, an early African occurrence of something good will be assumed as not definitive, but vague evidence of the non-African first occurrence will be taken more seriously. Seriously.
Now, we have an important finding with the opposite effect: Whence did Leprosy first come…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2009A headline caught my eye: "Archaeology in the Struggle for Jerusalem". As usual when archaeology is used for political ends, it is actually subservient to written history in this case.
In the Bustan neighbourhood of the Silwan precinct in East Jerusalem, the municipality of Jerusalem has ordered 88 buildings torn down. Most are inhabited by Palestinians, most were built without a permit, most can be expected to sit on top of interesting archaeology. But not just any cool anonymous Prehistoric stuff for us nerds: the municipality wants to make an national archaeological park of the area to…
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2009The sixty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 15 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2009On 16 April I wrote about an evaluation of archaeology programs offered at Swedish universities and colleges. Now Aard regular Ãsa reports at the Ting & Tankar blog on the results of in-depth evaluations of certain programs that were judged to be of iffy quality (source1, source2).
Three programs have been issued warnings by the National Agency for Higher Education:
The Mediterranean archaeology PhD program in Gothenburg
The osteology PhD program in Lund
The osteology MA program in Visby
All the warnings are due to inadequate quantity and quality of teaching staff per student. Two PhD…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2009The 67th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Get your submissions to Sam before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes! And hey, hey, hey -- have you considered wearing a bone through your nose?
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2009I just started investigating publishing options for my book manuscript and got my first rejection letter. That is, I apparently hadn't described the book very well, and the publisher rejected a manuscript I'm not in fact writing.
Said I, "The book's about elite settlements in late-1st Millennium Scandinavia and its working title is 'Mead-Halls of the Eastern Geats'".
Said they, "No thanks, we mainly publish prehistoric archaeology, not Medieval history, and not much about Scandinavia".
Replied I, "Err, actually, the 1st Millennium is Prehistory. In Scandinavia, that is. We don't have any…
gregladen | May 14, 2009Maria Reiche was an archaeologist and mathematician who worked on the Nazca lines in Peru. Originally, she worked with Paul Kosok, who discovered the remarkable drawings, and starting in the mid 1940s, Reiche mapped in the drawings. She believed that the lines represented a calendar and a sort of observatory. She is probably single handedly responsible for the preservation of these important archaeological features.
She died in Lima in 1998.
Several crackpots have suggested that the Nazca lines, since they can only be taken in visually from a height achievable only with flying machines…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2009Anglophones find it really funny that one of Sweden's oldest towns is named Sick Tuna -- spelled Sigtuna. However, -tuna has nothing to do with fish, being instead a cognate of Eng. town and Ge. Zaun. It has something to do with enclosed areas. As a reply to a question from my friend Per Vikstrand, here's a snippet about these place names from the Migration Period chapter of my book manuscript about political geography in 1st Millennium Ãstergötland.
Of the place-name categories in Ãstergötland suggested as indicating a status above the ordinary, only one is likely to have been productive…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2009The readers of popular archaeology magazines have a much more international and escapist view of the subject than most professionals. Indeed, in the popular perception, one of archaeology's defining characteristics is that its practitioners travel to exotic locales on a regular basis. In fact, professional archaeologists usually only work in one or two regions each, usually located near their offices. So if an archaeologist does travel abroad to do fieldwork, she is likely to go repeatedly to a single place for years and have little knowledge of other countries, let alone other continents.…