archaeology
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2008
I've just sat down in a comfy chair on the top floor of our luxurious excavation headquarters at Tolefors. Phew! I am very happy after a first day of excavations at Sättuna where every little bit has fallen into place as planned. (Hope I don't hit a frickin' elk when I go to pick up stragglers an hour from now. [I didn't.])
After an uneventful two-hour drive this morning I came to Linköping and met up with my buddy and co-manager Petter. We loaded the County Museum's digging gear into his car, picked up our first British recruit Karen and drove to the site, where landowner Christer greeted…
gregladen | September 12, 2008Life Science Teachers: Take special note!
This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run into a wackaloon creationist waving their arms around and screaming "Carbon dating does not work! It's been proven." This story also has a Global Warming Denialism component.
What I'm going to do here is give you the basic facts, then the misinterpreted text.
We start with the basic…
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2008The Journal of the North Atlantic is a new on-line archaeology and environmental-history journal published in Maine. You can apply for a login and read it for free until the end of the year. So far, they have three papers up, and they offer some really cool stuff. One is an apparently nature-deterministic GIS study of Medieval property demarcation in the Reykholt area of Iceland where Snorri Sturluson lived. Another one explores the ethno-political situation in Medieval Greenland, where two different eskimo cultures coexisted with Norse settlers.
My favourite is an unbelievably exotic paper…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2008The forty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology, and all intended to recreate the lost 1921 short drama film The Great Day!
Cast
Arthur Bourchier - Sir John Borstwick
Mary Palfrey - Lady Borstwick
Marjorie Hume - Clara Borstwick
Bertram Burleigh - Frank Beresford
Adeline Hayden Coffin - Mrs. Beresford (as Mrs. Hayden Coffin)
Percy Standing - Paul Nikola
Meggie Albanesi - Lillian Leeson
Geoffrey Kerr - Dave Leeson
Lewis Dayton - Lord Medway
Mrs. L. Thomas - Lord Medway's Mother
L.C. Carelli - Semki
Submissions for the next carnival…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 200820 years ago, radiocarbon dating was transformed by the widespread adoption of AMS analysis, accelerator mass spectroscopy. Willard Libby's original scintillation-counting method demanded large sample sizes and a lot of time per sample. The sample size meant that many interesting things couldn't be dated at all, and that once you had gotten a large enough chunk of organic material together, chances were that it would be heavily contaminated with later stuff. The time demands meant that prices were high.
Radiocarbon technology continues to advance. A few years back, I learned that a method had…
gregladen | September 8, 2008George Bush's Army has been in Afghanistan for years looking for one guy, Osama Bin Laden (no relation). They have not found him het. Meanwhile, archaeologists working in Afghanistan have found a 19 meter (62 feet) tall statue of Buddha.
This is in the vicinity of the Bamiyan Buddhas which were destroyed by the Taleban a few years ago.
There is a fourth giant Buddha, estimated to be about 300 meters long, still hiding in the vicinity, according to reports.
Perhaps the archaeologists should be asked to help find Osama.
More here at the BBC
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2008
The 1640 coin I found the other day came to light at an opportune moment. For some time, my wife and I had planned a trip to Falun for the weekend just passed, and that's where the coin is from.
The great copper mine of Falun was an important part of Sweden's economic backbone during the country's century as a major player on the European scene 1611-1718. The mine's origins are lost in prehistory, but paleobotany suggests that some small-scale ore extraction took place already in the 8th century, and the written record starts in the 13th century. Falun boomed in the 16th and 17th century,…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2008
To compensate for our inadequacies, us boy archaeologists like to search for large phallic objects and measure them. The most extreme case I've heard of was a couple of colleagues who went looking for the crash site of a mismanoeuvred 14-meter V2 rocket. In my case it's the 16th-century Djurhamn sword. All 93 centimetres of it.
I checked it out yesterday, taking a lot of measurements (of course including length and diameter), taking pix. My report on this summer's digging at Djurhamn is nearly finished now, and I plan to write a paper on the past two years' fieldwork for some annual…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008
Yesterday I did two hours of metal-detecting at a manor in Boo parish whose documentary evidence starts in the 13th century. Ancient monuments in the vicinity take it on down at least to the 10th. There are some nice 16th century small finds from the manor grounds, and my visit was intended to follow up on them. Lo & behold: I picked up one of Queen Christina's quarter öre copper coins from 1640. They are generally the oldest coins you'll find at any site, as in their day they were the largest issue yet in the history of Sweden: both as to the number of coins struck and as to the…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2008
A few weeks ago, Kai gave me an interesting book on a subject of which I am almost entirely ignorant: recent military history. Auf den Spuren des "Elbe-Kommandos" Rammjäger by Dietrich Alsdorf (2001) deals with an episode toward the end of the Second World War, the so-called "Sonderkommando Elbe".
Things were grim in the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. Germany had effectively lost control of her own airspace, allowing Allied bomber fleets to operate with murderous efficiency far into Eastern Europe. The Germans had ample numbers of fighter planes and pilots, but hardly any aeroplane fuel…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2008The forty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Tangled Up In Blue Guy. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about various aspects of Hrodgaud of Friuli!
Hrodgaud or Rodgand was Duke of Friuli from 774 to 776. Probably he was already duke under Desiderius, even if some Frankish sources, such as the Einhardis annales, say that Charlemagne put him in power after the Siege of Pavia.
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Brutha Carl at A Hot Cup Of Joe, not to the old submissions address. The next open hosting slot is on 22 October. All bloggers with an interest in the…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2008
For many years, the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm was strictly a custodian and exhibitor of archaeological finds, performing no excavations of its own. Recently, however, its staff has resumed excavations on a small scale. The unusual nature of this fieldwork identifies it as inspired by post-modernist trends in museology.
I have already blogged a bit about the museum's reverse excavations, an "incavation". But my colleagues there are excavating as well. They started with their own back yard a few years back. The museum grounds are on the erstwhile site of a cavalry regiment in…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2008
I get a small amount of crank e-mail, and I usually don't blog about it. In the case of Miroslav Provod, however, I've been mildly mailbombed for some time, and today he attached the above enigmatic image (titled "Kondenzátry 1"). Since his brand of whack physics is so whacky and also archaeology-related, I have now decided to inflict some excerpts from Mr. Provod's latest boilerplate missive on you, Dear Reader.
I gradually found in further research that the phenomenon that I describe as "Cosmic energy" is actually static electricity.
...
The imbalance of surface charge shows that objects…
gregladen | August 16, 2008Watching (collecting data for the boycott) men's Olympic water polo, it occurred to me that the little tiny bathing suits the men wear were absurd. Why not just skip the bathing suit and get on with it? As I was thinking this, the commentators on the TV were learnin' me something new closely related to these thoughts ... regarding Terry Schroeder's body. Schroeder is the team coach, and I'll tell you about his body below the fold.
For some reason this all made me think of the National Anthem. You see, today, part of the Olympic scene is the often forced voyeurism of nationalistic pride re…
gregladen | August 14, 2008A remarkable find in North Africa is reported in PLoS. Information has just been released on this new archaeological site in a formerly much greener Sahara. This will provide an interesting physical unerpinning for the recent work on a "Genetic Map of Europe" (see this summary by Razib) and a new perspective on the movement of humans in and around North Africa and adjoining areas. Here I am passing on the press release and photos without comment, so that you can have the information right away.
TWO SKULLS. (Dark Skull, left) Radiocarbon dated at 9,500 years old, the skull of this mature…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2008The forty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Almost Diamonds. Archaeology and anthropology, and all dedicated to a future merger of the Vaishnava Center for Enlightenment with the Backyard Bard!
The Vaishnava Center for Enlightenment (founded 1994) is an organization based in East Lansing, Michigan. It is a signatory to a wide range of public resolutions and petitions and works towards creating awareness on certain issues, such as promoting harmony and dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. The Backyard Bard is a Christian theatre company based in Melbourne, Australia. It…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2008The forty-fifth and forty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnivals are on-line at Remote Central and Testimony of the Spade. Archaeology and anthropology, two entire carnivals about the ancient uses of buergerite!
Buergerite, you will remember, is a mineral species belonging to the tourmaline group. It was first described for an occurrence in rhyolitic cavities near Mexquitic, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It was approved as a mineral by the King-Emperor of Pannonia-Scythia-Transbalkania in 1966.
Submissions will henceforth be sent to my personal email address, not to the old submissions address.…
gregladen | August 5, 2008
Its all about selection for flight distance. (Oh, for plants, that's dispersal distance!)
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2008Back in November of 2006 I blogged about new research into the Antikythera device, a Greek 1st century BC astronomical simulator. The news at the time was that:
... computer-aided X-ray tomography ... has allowed a team of scholars to understand better how the thing worked and to decipher more of its many inscriptions. Using a large number of cogged wheels and gears, the mechanism was designed to simulate and predict the movements and interrelationships of the more important heavenly bodies.
Now, a new paper in Nature presents further insights: the device
... unites abstruse astronomical…
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2008Affärs- och Kapitalnytt reports that the Scanian bank Sparbanken Syd has given an $8300 grant (SEK 50,000) for archaeological fieldwork and research: "a first instalment for excavations" at a cemetery in Ravlunda parish. Well done!
Unfortunately, the bank has chosen to give the money to our old friend Bob Lind, a homeopath and amateur archaeoastronomer with really wigged-out ideas. Bob has neither formal qualifications nor any excavation experience. On the contrary, he was recently reprimanded by the County Archaeologist for unauthorised de-turfing and addition of stones to the cemetery in…