archaeology
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2008At the request of Aard regular and archaeologist Mathias Blobel in Freiburg, Germany, here's a summary of a recent paper in Swedish.
In Fornvännen 2007:3, husband & wife historians of archaeology Drs Ãsa Gillberg and Ola W. Jensen note that there are currently ongoing attempts to train dogs to sniff out archaeology, much like they have proved capable of finding illegal drugs, recently buried murder victims, even cancerous tumours. Results so far are inconclusive. The point of Gillberg & Jensen's note is instead to draw attention to an obscure Swedish antiquarian, Johan Lindman, who…
aardvarchaeology | June 5, 2008The forty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Neuroanthropology. Archaeology and anthropology, and all related to the song "If You Should Try To Kiss Her" by Dressy Bessy.
The next open hosting slot is on 16 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must have "If You Should Try To Kiss Her" playing in your head, like me.
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2008After yesterday's paper session and civic reception in the church hall, I've had an amazing bus excursion today. The weather's been perfect, sunny and with little wind, and I've been shown great sites by some very knowledgeable people. And the landscape... Unbelievable.
Brough/broch is a Norse loan word around here, corresponding to Swedish borg. As in older Swedish, this word has two meanings in Orcadian place names: either a high headland or promontory on the coast, or ancient fortifications -- perhaps on a high headland. And today I've visited three such sites, the Broughs of Deerness,…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2008Began the day with a solid English breakfast, then a walk to the conference venue, heard ten paper presentations, did one myself, had dinner with colleagues, walked up the hill west of Kirkwall, logged a geocache, walked back to B&B. Phew!
Of today's papers I found particularly interesting the one by con organiser James Barrett, on what caused the nearly three centuries of Viking raids. Eminently sensibly argued, for instance, that anything causing those events must be shown to have existed at or before the first raid. Also, anything that had existed long before the period started cannot…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2008
In 2005, a team led by myself and Howard Williams excavated a 9th century boat inhumation burial at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Ãstergötland, Sweden. The finest finds we made in the grave were a collection of 23 amber gaming pieces. These are extremely rare, the previous Swedish set having surfaced in the 1870s when Hjalmar Stolpe dug at Birka.
Now the County Museum in Linköping has incorporated the Skamby gaming set into its new permanent exhibition! The official opening takes place on Tuesday evening 3 June, at 6 pm.
I am very proud that our finds will be seen by so many museum visitors.…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2008[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Gotland, religion, feminism, ; arkeologi, Gotland, religion, feminism.]
Some time ago I received a gift from my aunt, bought at the County Museum of Gotland, a limestone island in the Baltic with an extremely rich archaeological record. The gift was a sponge-fabric dish rag, and I found its decoration slightly astonishing.
In the 5th through the 12th centuries, Gotland was home to a unique tradition of commemorative picture stones, comparable only to those of Pictland, with which they do not appear to have had any actual connection. The early…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2008
Today I joined my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell for a day of digging on an Early Mesolithic seal hunting station in the landlocked former archipelago of Tyresta. The Urskogsstigen 4 site is currently on a wooded hilltop at about 77 meters above sea level, and thus likely to date from about 8000 cal BC, shortly after deglaciation. It's not in the area denuded by the 1999 forest fore. What's really striking about this particular site (Mattias & Roger have found hundreds) is that it's very early, it has enormous amounts of quartz débitage and it has a tent-sized cleared area…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2008
Bengt Nordqvist has published a preliminary account in Offa of his amazing finds from the Finnestorp war booty site. Check it out (in German)! I hope to contribute to the Finnestorp project in some way or another in the future. For more about war booty finds, se an earlier post of mine.
Indirectly, Finnestorp has had a decisive influence on my own work for the past five years. Bengt has long been working at the site with the Gothenburg metal detectorists. One day in the early 00s when I was a grad student with an office at the Museum of National Antiquities, Tim Olsson came along to check…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2008
Ulf Bodin and his team at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm have built a really, really sweet database and search interface for Hjalmar Stolpe's Birka graves. Between 1871 and 1895, Stolpe dug about 1100 graves in the cemeteries surrounding the Viking Period town of Birka on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. His painstaking fieldwork and documentation ensured that the Birka record will always be one of the standard databases for Viking studies. And now it's all on-line and searchable! A massively useful research tool.
This morning I attended Anna Linderholm's viva/…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2008The forty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Nswazwi. It's a village in the Central District of Botswana, located close to the border with Zimbabwe. The village has primary and secondary schools and a clinic. The population was 1,741 in the 2001 census.
The next open hosting slot is on 16 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must not have any trouble pronouncing "Nswazwi", just like I haven't.
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2008Local newspaper Skånskan recently published a highly credulous account of amateur archaeologist Bob Lind's outlandish interpretations of an Early Iron Age cemetery in Ravlunda parish. I wrote them to complain, and staff writer Karsten Bringmark asked me for a statement. Which made it onto the paper's web site, and possibly into print as well?
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2008
Yesterday me and my buddy Per Vikstrand visited the third site in our little exploration program for fields with highly suggestive names on 18th century maps. We've already covered the Field of St. Olaf and the Hall of Odin. This time we went to the Field of Ullr near Gävle, an hour and a half's drive from Uppsala along the new shiny E4 motorway. (On the way we zipped across sites such as Sommaränge skog, excavated for the roadworks and previously covered in my blogging.)
Ullr is one of the old gods that were semi-forgotten in Snorri's day, and so doesn't figure prominently in extant…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2008
With its extremely late urbanisation, Sweden doesn't have much of an archaeological record compared to Italy or China or Peru. But we keep really good track of the stuff we have: active organised surveying for ancient monuments has been going on for over 70 years, aided by the fact that Sweden has no trespassing laws and affords land owners no ownership to archaeological remains.
Sweden's National Heritage Board has been placing its sites and monuments register on-line gradually over a period of years. At first, it was only accessible to professionals, offering a crappy map and working only…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2008
Yesterday I did 5.5 more man-hours of metal detecting at the "Hall of Odin" site in Västmanland with Per Vikstrand. No prehistoric finds: just a piece of a 15/16/17th century brass cooking pot.
Bob Lind's craziness is once more repeated uncritically by a local Scanian newspaper.
I had a nice chat with the panel of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast this morning. At 9 pm EST, i.e. 3 am local time. Which was not a very good idea, seeing as my wife was trying to sleep in the next room. But I think the show will be good. Hear Rebecca Watson say "Suckle the teat of the Mother Goddess"!…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2008
Members of the Manx Detectorists Society have found fragments of the hilt of a Viking Period display sword. It's cast in bronze with rich Borre Style decoration (c. AD 850-1000) and silver wire frills. Though settled by the Norsemen from about AD 800 onward, the island has not previously produced very many any of their swords.
Via BBC, 24HourMuseum and Manx National Heritage. Thanks to Greenman Tim of Walking the Berkshires and Dear Reader Eleanora for the tipoff.
[More blog entries about archaeology, vikings, vikingperiod, swords, isleofman; arkeologi, vikingar, vikingatiden, svärd.]
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2008
Had a beautiful day in the field with Per Vikstrand today. He has a new metal detector, a C-scope 1220R, and it seemed to work very well. Not that the stuff we found was terribly interesting: four man-hours in the Field of St. Olaf garnered us only a flint chip and a piece of slag apart from the perennial clay pipe stems and aluminium bottle tops.
4½ man-hours on a promising site near Sala got us only the above piece of an openwork strap mount. It does look like 3rd/4th/5th century to me, though. (As reconstructed, it would have measured 42 by 35 mm.) Our Sala site has great place names:…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2008
The fortieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology, and all relating to the Plzen Plaza!
The Plzen Plaza is a new large (20,000 square meters) shopping mall and entertainment center in PlzeÅ, Czech Republic. The facility built by Plaza Centers was opened on December 5, 2007, on the former land of Ex PlzeÅ, gastronomical exhibitions located very near the center of the city, more precisely 250 meters from the central Square of the Republic.
The next open hosting slot is on 18 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2008
Tobias Bondesson treats us to the tale of a recent find that blew his mind.
Oh, mercy mercenary me!
Being a detectorist is damn hard work! I get out of bed at the crack of dawn on my day off from work to perform the ritual of "sweep, beep, dig deep" for as many hours as I can before I really, really, have to head back home, lest I want my detecting privileges revoked by a higher power (i.e. girlfriend). And what do I have to show for it? A bum knee, sore shoulders and a mild case of tinnitus are some of my more prominent achievements. On the other hand, metal detecting is the best hobby ever…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2008For readers with an interest in Scandy archaeology and academic gossip, here and here are two brand new evaluation reports (in Scandy) on the applicants to an assistant professor job (forskarassistent) in Stockholm. According to the evaluation verdict, the job is likely to be given either to a 43-y-o theoretician or a 39-y-o Mayanist. Both are older than me and far more in tune than myself with the ideals of the post-processual generation of scholars to which the evaluators belong.
As for myself, the evaluators gave me a pretty low grade. Both correctly describe me as strongly empiricist,…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2008
Monastic archaeology is enjoying a boom right now in Sweden. Elisabet Regner has written up and analysed Frödin's many years of fieldwork at Alvastra (founded in 1143), Lars ErsgÃ¥rd & Marie Holmström have published the results of their 90s project around that same monastery, Marie Ohlsén is doing fieldwork at Krokek (founded in the 1430s), Gunhild Eriksdotter has reevaluated Dalby (founded before 1066), Maria Vretemark & Tony Axelsson are finding amazing things at Varnhem (founded c. 1150) and Göran Tagesson is digging at Vretakloster (founded c. 1110 and mentioned here before).…