archaeology
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2009The sixty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub. 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 6 May. 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 | March 24, 2009Denmark has an excellent system in place to enable and govern a responsible and constructive metal detector hobby. While the UK's ploughsoil heritage is largely being trashed by nighthawks (despite the valuable efforts of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and Sweden's is left to corrode untouched out in the fields, the Danes organise metal detector festivals, inviting skilled amateurs and professionals alike! One is taking place at Halsted on Lolland between 3 and 5 April. The public is welcome to watch on Saturday the 4th. Rest assured that the international crew of 70 detector-wielding…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2009Last September I directed two weeks of excavations at Sättuna in Kaga, an amazing metal detector site I've been working at since 2006. I was hoping to find building foundations from a late-6th century aristocratic manor indicated by the metalwork. But I couldn't get permission to dig the most promising bit of the site. Instead my team of Chester students and I dug off to one side and found no end of pits and hearths, but hardly any artefacts at all. Those bits that we did find are lithics, apparently belonging to a Late Mesolithic shore site.
Yesterday I got the radiocarbon results. They…
gregladen | March 18, 2009Police officers in northern Scotland have been accused of vandalising a Bronze Age site through ignorance after they removed bones and textiles from the 4,000-year-old burial chamber, apparently because they thought they were investigating a crime scene.
The burial chamber, or cist, was discovered intact, in a field near Oykel Bridge in Sutherland. The area is rich in Bronze Age remains, but this find was of huge importance to archaeologists. Unlike the vast chambered cairns of the earlier Neolithic period, burials from the metal-working people of the Bronze Age are modest affairs with…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2009The Swedish Heritage Board (or, more specifically, my friends Lars and Johan who work there), has begun putting historical photographs whose copyright has expired onto Flickr Commons. Well done! Check it out!
The Board is a lot like the Museum of National Antiquities: even though some of its projects just make me want to weep, it also has excellent world-class stuff going on. This is of course an effect of the individual people behind each project. And the, shall we say, wide-open-mindedness of their superiors.
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2009Since a bit more than a year, Fornvännen's first 100 years (1906-2005) have been freely available and searchable on-line. It's a quarterly multi-language research journal mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and Medieval art, and I'm proud to be its managing editor. Now we've gone one step further and made the thing into an Open Access journal. The site's run of the journal is complete up to 6 months ago, and every issue will henceforth appear on-line half a year after it was distributed on paper. Here, for instance, is an excellent paper in English by my buddy Svante Fischer from last…
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2009The sixty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the The Swedish Osteological Society's Blog. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology from a bony point of view!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 22 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2009
A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny.
As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an ice cream stick, dating from the '00s. Its context is unusually unclear in the on-line info, but it appears to have been donated during an outreach project where kids were invited to give the museum stuff and speculate about how people in the future will one day interpret it.
I don't think curating,…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2009Current Archaeology, "the UK's best selling archaeology magazine", has kindly given me a complimentary subscription. I recently received my first issue, #228 (March '09), and I found it an enjoyable read.
Best of all, I liked James Barrett's and Adam Slater's piece on their recent fieldwork at the Brough of Deerness, Mainland, Orkney. This scenic and Scandy-flavoured site would have interested me anyway, but now I also happened to have visited it last June in the company of Barrett and the Brough's 1970s excavator Chris Morris. That visit took place as part of a conference excursion, and…
gregladen | March 12, 2009The following post has been slightly revised in response to commentary below and elsewhere. I thank all those who commented for the helpful critique.
The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often written by bench scientists, for bench scientists, and about bench scientists. Which makes sense because most scientists probably are bench scientists.
But a lot of scientists are fieldworkers, and the problems, challenges and…
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2009
Here's a little archaeological riddle I've been thinking about. From about 1350 to 1700, three-legged brass cooking pots were common in Sweden. When metal detecting in ploughsoil, you often find bits of them. They're easily found as the fragments tend to be large and heavy: they make the detector sing loud & clear. But here's the thing: you almost only find the feet and legs of the pots, hardly ever the wall or rim. Why is that? I think I've come up with an answer.
These pots weren't used out in the fields. The reason that we find the feet there must be that household refuse was thrown…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2009
How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in PhotoShop and Windows Paint. Here's an example of my handiwork, and a snippet of the paper I made it for, submitted last week.
The first decisive step in the formation of the Medieval state of Sweden appears to have been taken about AD 1000 when two ethnic groups, the Svear and the Götar, elected a…
gregladen | March 4, 2009And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It's like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2009The sixty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Moore Group Blog. 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 25 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2009
Now and then I blog about abandoned tree houses. But of course, real large houses are even more fascinating in their extended boundary state between dwelling and archaeological site (as I wrote about in January '06).
I recently read a new book (in Swedish) about abandoned houses: Svenska ödehus, finely written by Sven Olov Karlsson and illustrated with exquisite photographs by Philip Pereira dos Reis. Every abandoned house has its story, and the two have sought them out. Highly recommended! Order it here.
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2009My favourite stories in Archaeology Magazine's spring issue:
J.T. Milanich on the practicalities, and the unforeseen hassle, of re-burying a collection of Native American skeletons he excavated in the 1980s before his recent retirement.
E.A. Powell on some fake "Atlantean" ruins built into a Dubai luxury hotel that will one day make a very strange meta-ruin.
North European content:
Two half-page pieces on glaciers in Switzerland and Greenland.
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2009Bohuslän province on the west coast of Sweden is known internationally for its many and varied Bronze Age rock art sites. But its archaeology is rich regardless of what period you look at. My maternal great-granddad's people came from Tanum and Kville parishes, so I'm sort of a Bohuslän aborigine.
The discovery of a Medieval shipwreck off the Bohuslän coast was recently announced. Or rather, the wreck has been known for centuries, and local tradition held it to date from the grim early-18th century reign of warrior king Carolus XII. Now maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin from the…
gregladen | February 12, 2009... and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped by accident.
That would be the way it would happen if two chimps walked into a bar. Or imagine two chimps, and each finds a nice juicy bit of fruit out in the forest. And instead of eating the fruit, because they are not hungry, they carry it around for a while (this would never happen, but pretend) and then accidentally run…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2009
A central theme in post-modernist archaeology of the more science-friendly, not radically relativist kind for the past 20 years has been the study of the after-life of monuments, or "the past in the past". Archaeologists are of course keenly interested in the archaeological record, and I think there's a reasonable argument for studies of how the people we study engaged with the remains around them in their era. Mind you, I think this should be treated as a side issue and a bit of a novelty. I've heard Mesolithic scholars proclaim that a lithics scatter in a river bank was as significant to…