archaeology
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2008
Raine Borg has an amazing web site about locks and keys through history. And it so happens that he's made reconstruction drawings of how keys identical to the one me and Per Vikstrand found in Torstuna recently were used. It's not a padlock key: it's most likely for a lock mounted permanently inside the lid of a chest or a door.
Lena Thunmark-Nylén's Die Wikingerzeit Gotlands informs me that the key type dates from the 11th and 12th centuries. Thus, alas, a bit too late to tell us much about pagan activities in the Field of Thor.
Thanks to Raine for permission to reproduce his drawings and…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2008In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is convoluted and, in my opinion, quite fascinating.
Gotland is a large limestone island in the Baltic and a province of Sweden. Its first organised Christian congregations came together in the early 11th century, and they had some rather unusual burial customs. They had already practiced inhumation as…
gregladen | April 26, 2008One of the most important evolutionary transitions in human prehistory was the rise of modern humans (Homo sapiens) from earlier hominids. A newly reported fossil from Tanzania provides an important new data point necessary to understand this transition.
Homo erectus/ergaster probably gave rise to Homo sapiens (modern humans) somewhere in Africa. It is very likely that earlier hominids (H. erectus/ergaster) and later hominids (some sort of archaic H. sapiens) co-existed, and it is also the case that during this transitional period there would be individuals with either a mixture of traits…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2008The thirty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Archaeology and anthropology in honour of Maximiliano Gómez. He was the leader of the Maoist Movimiento Popular Dominicano (MPD), a militant organization opposed to the JoaquÃn Balaguer government and to U.S. presence in the Dominican Republic. Commended by some, repudiated by others, the controversial figure of Maximiliano Gomez is part of the political heritage of the Dominican Republic.
The next open hosting slot is on 18 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2008
The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639.
My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is StorgÃ¥rdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-TÃ¥kernomrÃ¥det under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-TÃ¥kern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2008Restrictions on the use of metal detectors vary from country to country. In England, they are too lax. In Sweden, they are too strict. In Denmark, they are pretty much just right. As I've written before, I think everybody would stand to gain if the Swedish restrictions were eased. My idea is that we should treat metal detectors as hunting weapons: anybody who can demonstrate sufficient knowledge of rules and best practice should be licenced by the county authorities to use the instrument, and then allowed to continue doing so until they prove unfit. (Currently, all amateurs are considered…
terrasig | April 20, 2008I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.
- Woody Guthrie, Ludlow Massacre (1944)
US Senator Ken Salazar (D-Colo) has commemorated today's 94th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre by introducing a bill (PDF) to designate the coalminers tent colony as a National Historic Landmark. Unless you…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2008
Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to be central locations in their districts, often lending their names to Medieval Christian parishes after the end of the pagan cult. Place-name scholars are uncertain about exactly what these sacred fields were used for, but it seems likely that they were the sites of seasonal rituals having to do with…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2008
Here's a funny little guy from our site in Kaga. It's a crumpled-up disc-brooch, about 75% complete, original diameter 71 mm, copper-alloy pin extant and folded into the brooch, pin-catch extant on back, apparently soldered on.
On the surface of the brooch are a central large boss with mock-filigree, surrounded by five identical ones, and outside those five are another five smaller bosses. All in all eleven bosses. The surface of the brooch is divided into petal-like fields by lines of tiny bumps. All decoration is visible on the back side too: most of the piece is just 0.6 mm thick.
I…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2008Tobias Bondesson has kindly sent me photographs of several interesting finds, taken during our recent fieldwork with the heavy dudes of the Gothenburg Historical Society. With his permission, I've inserted them into the relevant blog entries:
Fieldwork in Hov and Vretakloster
Fieldwork in Tingstad and Ãstra Husby
Fieldwork in Kimstad and Kaga
Tobias has also opened my eyes to Nordisk Detektorforum, an on-line discussion forum and image database for (mainly Danish) detectorists. These guys are responsible, keen and hugely knowledgeable. One user, for instance, identified a coin we found as…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008
The thirty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Archaeology and anthropology, and all seen in relation to the the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium in Houston, Texas.
The next open hosting slot is on 4 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a trustee of the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium, like me.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2008
Frag of a brooch decorated with embossed silver foil. 5th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Our site in Kimstad parish looked even better than I'd thought. This was one of many cases where I've come swooping in to sites that I've never visited before and directed metal detecting. In Kimstad, I had been attracted by Ãstergötland's only (probable) Viking Period wetland weapon sacrifice, a fine sword found during drainage work. But I didn't want more swords. They're too expensive to conserve, and my project is about the settlements of people who could afford to sacrifice that sort of thing…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2008
Frag of a lion-shaped badge with a rivet used to fix it to some surface. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Another day of fruitful fieldwork, with friendly landowners and pretty good weather. We started out with 20 man-hours in the fields around a fortified hilltop settlement in Tingstad parish. The hillfort was trial-trenched in 1903, yielding the richest finds known to date from a 3rd and 4th century settlement in Ãstergötland. I was hoping that we might run into something interesting of 5th century date. No such luck: our oldest datable find all day was a piece of a 9th century copper-alloy…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2008
Polyhedrical weight. 9/10th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
(Martin here, posting from the hostel of Norsholm on the Göta canal, using my handheld and the cell phone network. To get the post on-line, my dear scibling Janet has kindly agreed to act as go-between.)
Coin struck for Heinrich II, King of Germany. Mainz 1002-1014. Dbg 785. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
This is the third April in as many years that I'm reporting from a week of fieldwork in Ãstergötland with my metal detector buddies. I intend this to be the final expedition before I complete my book about late-1st…
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2008Here's something cool. Norway spruce trees sprout from subterranean root systems, and though the actual trees come and go, the roots are extremely long-lived. In this they're actually a lot like mushrooms.
New research by Leif Kullman at the University of UmeÃ¥ is just being reported on by the media. His team has studied spruce trees on the treeline of Mount Härjehogna in Dalecarlia, central Sweden, and found no standing trees older than 600 years when wood samples were dated. But below ground, the living roots of three trees gave radiocarbon dates at 5,000, 6,000 and 8,000 years BP! The…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question "Why did our furry elephant go extinct?"
What caused the woolly mammoth's (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting that the more-plausible cause was human expansion.
The woolly mammoth went extinct less than four thousand years ago. The bones of miniaturized woolly mammoths have been found in Siberia dating to about 3,600 years ago. Indeed,…
revere | April 7, 2008What's the surest signs that animals of the human species have been somewhere? They always seem to leave their shit lying around. Literally:
Exploring Paisley Caves in the Cascade Range of Oregon, archaeologists have found a scattering of human coprolites, or fossil feces. The specimens preserved 14,000-year-old human protein and DNA, which the discoverers said was the strongest evidence yet of the earliest people living in North America.
Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008Reading some US job ads I came across the terms "early career", "mid career" and "late career" applied to academics. As some of you may remember, I decided about this time last year that I had become officially middle-aged (defined as "closer to 50 than 20"). Now it's struck me that I am also mid-career.
Think about it. I've been doing archaeology for a living since I was 20. Standard retirement age is 65 in Sweden. (This is likely to change as medicine improves and the demography morphs.) Currently, society expects me to have a 45-year career, all in all. And I've entered the middle third of…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2008Viking Period Scandinavians had a funny custom where they would bury silver hoards and not dig them out again. On Gotland, the hoards are so common that the local paper has been known to note tersely that "this year's hoard has been found". But not all Swedish provinces are similarly endowed. My native area around Lake Mälaren has far fewer hoards.
Most silver hoards are found by farmers when they till their fields. Once in a very long while, archaeologists get lucky and find a hoard in situ. Of course, they tend to find the commonest kind of hoard, i.e., pretty small ones. This happened at…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2008I'm trainblogging again, somewhere between Norrköping and Nyköping, and the sun is shining. I am pretty pleased with things, not least with how my project about elite sites in Ãstergötland is working out.
Yesterday I received the Kaga parish landowner's permission to excavate in his field after the harvest, that is, in mid- and late September. This is where a gold-foil figure die turned up a year ago.
Then I received information that the Royal Academy of Sciences has given me the largest grant so far in my career, meaning that I wouldn't have to worry about my livelihood before Christmas…