archaeology
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2007Professor Åke Hyenstrand, chair of archaeology at the University of Stockholm from 1988 to 20013, died on Wednesday 28 November, aged 68. He was mainly known for his large-scale analyses of the Swedish sites and monuments register and for studies of late-1st Millennium political organisation. A characteristic piece of his work is the 1978 opinion paper "Fornminnesinventering, kulturminnesvård och arkeologisk samhällsforskning" ("Site surveying, heritage management and archaeological social science", with an abstract in English).
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, obit,…
gregladen | November 30, 2007
Hot off the presses from PNAS, we have a paper on ancient jade exchange in Southeast Asia. From the abstract:
We have used electron probe microanalysis to examine Southeast Asian nephrite (jade) artifacts, many archeologically excavated, dating from 3000 B.C. through the first millennium A.D. The research has revealed the existence of one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world. Green nephrite from a source in eastern Taiwan was used to make two very specific forms of ear pendant that were distributed, between 500 B.C. and 500…
gregladen | November 28, 2007The origin and early history of Native American people has always been an issue of debate and contention. There has never been a moment when all, or even most, interested parties agreed on anything close to a single story. New research published in the Open-Access journal PLoS Genetics tends to support a very traditional (among archaeologists) view of a single relatively simple migration from Siberia across the New World, more or less from north to south.
Studies of genetic variation have the potential to provide information about the initial peopling of the Americas and the more recent…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2007From about 1845 to 1930, Sweden saw massive emigration to the United States. According to one estimate, about a third of the country's population left. In 1900, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Gothenburg. Many factors conspired to send people on their way: population expansion, a lack of agricultural land, failed crops, economic recession, and the simple pull of the virtual population vacuum beyond the American frontier, the pull of enormous opportunity, as industrialised Europeans encountered the Stone Age societies of the native Americans.
The emigration left its share of…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2007Reading a good paper by Sten Tesch (in Situne Dei 2007) about porphyrite tiles scavenged from Roman ruins and re-used as portable altar slabs in 11th century Scandinavia, I was reminded of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. It's a really good story about relics, up there with the cross of Jesus being tens of meters tall if all its alleged fragments were actually genuine.
St. Ursula is most likely a fictional character, but according to legend she was a Christian British princess who went on a pilgrimage to Rome before her planned marriage to the pagan Roman governor of Armorica. Early…
aardvarchaeology | November 23, 2007Yay, for once somebody at Sb except me is writing about European archaeology! SciBling Chris at Highly Allochthonous offers a long thoughtful writeup of a recent geology paper on the post-glacial flooding of the Black Sea basin and its possible effect on neolithisation. With a beautiful colour map of the European neolithisation wave!
Note that all the radiocarbon dates in Chris's entry are uncalibrated ones. 8300 BP is the raw radiocarbon date for the flood event, but that isn't equivalent to 6300 BC, it's more like 7400 cal BC. (The Maglemose era, for you Scandies.) Free on-line radiocarbon…
aardvarchaeology | November 23, 2007A royally furnished inhumation cemetery of the 7th century has been excavated at Loftus in Teesside, north-eastern England. The finds are sensational as they hail from the "final phase" of furnished burial, when England had already been re-Christianised and grave wealth was in steep decline. Among the remarkable finds are gold-and-garnet jewellery in a southern English style. The cemetery centred on a bed burial, which is exceptionally rare. Historical sources suggest an explanation:
"The speculation is that the royals buried on Teesside are linked to the Kentish princess Ethelburga, who…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2007
The other day, I started writing my Östergötland book in earnest, and I'm really enjoying myself. Here's a snippet of today's work.
The oldest known territorial unit in Östergötland is the härad district (etymologically, "army council"), of which the province originally had eighteen. This division is generally taken to have been established at a single event in the Viking Period. There is little evidence to allow us to date that event closer, and it may have taken place after AD 1000 [the end-point of the period under study]. Most likely the härad division event had something to do with the…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2007Blog carnivals!
The twenty-eighth Four Stone Hearth is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology to a most awe-inspiring extent.
The next open 4SH hosting slot is already on 5 29 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are. And do it NOW.
A very fine Skeptics' Circle may be found at Med Journal Watch. So fine, in fact, that I am on it despite forgetting to submit! Thanks Chris!
And all you biology types, check out the latest Tangled Bank at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia's main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it's been issued quarterly. I've been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal's editors since 1999.
I'm very proud to announce that the first 100 volumes of Fornvännen are now available freely on the web! Roughly 3000 PDF files including complete scans, illustrations and all, and searchable text! The site has an excellent search & browse engine.
Most papers in the journal are in Scandinavian…
gregladen | November 18, 2007Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring ... and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily living) people?
In my opinion, the answer is, of course they interbred. There are many reasons to believe this if almost no way to prove it. Indeed, the evidence of this interbreeding is virtually nil. With every additional test of the interbreeding hypothesis using DNA, the null hypothesis of no…
aardvarchaeology | November 17, 2007Archaeologists have an extremely strange worldview. We never simply see what's going on around us right now: we keep thinking about what a place would have looked like hundreds of years ago, or what it will look like in the far future. The Onion has a great piece on-line about just that: "Crime Scene Investigators Find Arrowhead".
"Their bodies showed signs of blunt force trauma to the head, as well as several postmortem stab wounds, although no indications of sexual abuse were present. A steel pipe bearing human blood and tissue matter was found at the scene but did not appear to be related…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks that nobody ever opens. Impressive work!
The excavation of the Trädgårdsmästaren block in Sigtuna 1988-90 hasn't yet been published, but the dig is of tremendous archaeological value since it covered 1100 square meters and spans about 270 years, from the founding of the town in the late 10th centiry…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007Maritime archaeologists have found what may be the first Viking ship, or at least some wreckage, in the Lake Mälaren area. A T-sectioned multi-meter timber looking a lot like a keel lies half-buried in the culture layer on the lakefloor just off the proto-town of Birka on Björkö.
Thanks to Hans of Du är vad du läser for the heads-up.
Update 17 November: More details here.
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2007My friendly colleague Claes Pettersson heads excavations in Jönköping, a town in Småland. His team is working with 17th-century urban layers in a part of town that was laid out and settled by royal decree starting in the 1620s. Here are his pics of a few cool finds.
A shard from a painted window.
Part of a sword hilt, decorated with sweet non-sword-wielding little putti. (This piece is going to be sooo pretty after conservation.)
A baker's mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. In modern times, there has arisen a tradition to eat cake bearing the king's image on the anniversary of his…
aardvarchaeology | November 13, 2007A press release for you archaeoheads:
An award of $2000 is made to honor outstanding efforts to enhance public understanding of archaeology, in memory of Gene S. Stuart, a writer and managing editor of National Geographic Society books. The Award is given to the most interesting and responsible original story or series about any archaeological topic published in a newspaper or magazine with a circulation of at least 25,000. The award will be presented at the 2008 Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 28, 2008.
Past winners have included…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2007Need archaeological illustrations? Need someone to design your excavation report, PhD dissertation, tourist folder? Then check out my buddy Göran Werthwein's web site!
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2007
As discussed here repeatedly before, the eastern coast of Sweden is in continual flux because of post-glacial shoreline displacement. Since the inland ice melted away and relieved its pressure on the land over 10 000 years ago, the dent made by the ice has been rebounding: first very quickly, then slower and slower. This land upheaval is however only half the explanation for where the shoreline has been at a certain time: the water level in the Baltic basin has also varied. This means that while the general trend has been for the shoreline to recede, there have been periods when it has stood…
gregladen | November 11, 2007A mural-decorated temple that may date to 4,000 years old is being reported from the coastal desert region of Northern Peru.
Some of the walls of the 27,000-square-foot site - almost half the size of a football field - were painted, and a white and red mural depicts a deer being hunted with a net.
Alva said the temple was apparently constructed by an "advanced civilization" because it was built with mud bricks made from sediment found in local rivers, instead of rocks.
"This discovery shows an architectural and iconographic tradition different from what has been known until now," said…
gregladen | November 9, 2007
Hierakonpolis is a site famous for its many "firsts," so many, in fact, it is not easy to keep track of them all. So we are grateful(?) to Max Brooks for bringing to our attention that the site can also claim the title to the earliest recorded zombie attack in history
....
Recent work at Hierakonpolis has, however, revealed compelling evidence that zombies may have been problematic already in Predynastic Egypt (ca. 3500 B.C.).
This zombie work has been going on for some time but mostly very hush hush. Finally, we have a detailed report to sink our teeth into, over at Archaeology.org.
Click…