archaeology
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2007[More blog entries about swords, fencing, replica, weapons, reenactment, medieval; svärd, fäktning, vapen, medeltiden.]
Uppsala-based virtuoso weapon smith Peter Johnsson of Albion Swords Ltd has offered to make a replica of the Djurhamn sword. He also kindly allowed me to put some pix of his work on-line. Eye candy!
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2007The twenty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. Archaeology and anthropology, enough to turn you into a creature of the night, mad for love, with the fulfillment of your darkest desires your only goal in life.
The next open hosting slot is on 5 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. Come now!
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2007Here's a novel way of identifying the erstwhile contents of an ancient pottery vessel: never mind the chemical composition of the residue, the lipids, the proteins, the isotope ratios, the pollen, the phytholiths, the seeds or the leaf fragments. Just scrape some gunk off the inside of the sherds and check it for DNA snippets to identify the organisms that produced it!
The beauty of this approach is that you will easily see if the DNA you've grabbed is likely to belong to the substance originally kept in the vessel. If you come up with your own DNA or that of a soil microbe or earthworm, then…
gregladen | November 7, 2007[A repost from gregladen.com, unmodified]
There is a ceremonial burial in Britain .. ceremonial because it has some red stuff smeared on bone ... that has now bee dated to a few thousand years earlier than previously thought (to ca 25,000 years old).
Age of earliest human burial in Britain pinpointed from PhysOrg.com
The oldest known buried remains in Britain are 29,000 years old, archaeologists have found - 4,000 years older than previously thought. The findings show that ceremonial burials were taking place in western Europe much earlier than researchers had believed.
[...]
Some have…
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2007Jean François Revel once wrote, "Let there be no discussion about methods except by those who make discoveries".
As may have become apparent at one time or another on this blog, I don't share a number of the ideals prevalent in current academic archaeology in Sweden. Post-modernism has become unfashionable, so my resistance to that movement is no longer very controversial. But my disdain for "theoretical archaeology" is still something that sets me apart from many university-based colleagues. Now, most archaeologists are not university-based, so my opinions are in fact in tune with the…
neurophilosophy | November 4, 2007
Zahi Hawass (centre), director of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Antiquities, supervises the removal of Tutankhamun's mummy from his sarcophagus in the underground tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. (Image: Ben Curtis/ AP)
The face of Tutankhamun has been revealed to the public for the first time.
The boy king, who is believed to have been 19 years old when he died, is the best known of all the pharaohs. But he was in fact rather unremarkable. Far more interesting was his father Akhenaten, the inventor of monotheism.
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2007
Came to Luoyang in Henan province on the Yellow River by train yesterday morning, passing factories and quarries, fertile fields and homes cut into hillsides like hobbit homes. We were booked into the Yaxiang Jinling hotel, a high-rise in Luoyang's vast new area of airily spaced skyscrapers outside the old town. Such developments surround all major Chinese cities these days and give a strange impression, as if Manhattan had been stretched out to cover all of New York State, the intervals filled with car parks, lawns and expressways. The hotel has 23 floors, all decorated in a space-themed…
aardvarchaeology | October 26, 2007The twenty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Primate Diaries. Archaeology and anthropology to rusticate your masonry and bevel your edges until your mind dissolves in bliss.
The next open hosting slot is on 5 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.
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2007Yesterday I received a large package by mail from Dear Reader Twoflower in New York. He'd asked me for my address, and I was expecting a book or an off-print, but the minute I saw the box I realised I had been wrong. Guess what he sent me.
Apparently, I have pained Twoflower by publishing ugly pics of nice finds and fieldwork here. I believe that specifically, this pic and this pic hurt his sense of archaeological aesthetics: a lovely new find, shot first with a spade for scale and then with an ugly folding rule. Well, Twoflower, you kind and generous man, thanks to you I will no longer have…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2007
Mats P. Malmer in 1989, holding a miniature replica of a Bronze Age sword. Photograph by Dr Rune Edberg, published with kind permission.
Yesterday, 18 October, was Swedish archaeology professor Mats P. Malmer's 86th birthday. Sadly he passed away on 3 October. I wrote a brief appreciation when I heard the news. Here's a longer one by Anders Andrén and Evert Baudou, both professors of archaeology and members (like Malmer himself) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Andrén is the current holder of Malmer's chair in Stockholm, having succeeded the man's successor Åke Hyenstrand. I've…
aardvarchaeology | October 18, 2007I've just signed another one of Sage Publications' ridiculous publishing agreements, prompting Aard's first re-run of an entry from my old blog. Here's something from 29 September 2006.
I agreed to a really crappy business deal today.
For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2007
Per Widerström called me today and told me he'd just found a picture stone. This is breaking news, mainstream media not yet alerted. Photographs courtesy of the finder, and I hope to get some shots in horizontal lighting too where the relief scenes will be visible.
Scandinavian 1st Millennium art isn't very rich in figural scenes, focusing more on abstract or heavily stylised decorative motifs. But the picture stones of Gotland form an exception. Starting in the 5th century and surviving into the 12th, this tradition offers a rare peek into the mythology of eastern Scandinavia, far from the…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2007
My part-time employer, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has been publishing books for over two centuries and rents a huge storage space for books in central Stockholm. Most of the stock isn't moving very fast. In fact, a lot of it hasn't moved at all since Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.
Storage is expensive. The Academy now feels that a lot of the funds devoted to storing these old books would be better used in, for instance, scanning the books and putting them on-line for free.
On Saturday 27 October, the Academy's book store is opened to the public, and most of the books will be…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2007In the autumn issue of Antiquity is a fine debate piece (behind a pay wall) by William Meacham of Hong Kong about the Russian Baptist science fraudster Dimitri Kouznetsov. In 1989, 1996 and 2000, Kouznetsov managed to trick three peer-reviewed journals to publish papers full of faked data, references to non-existent journals and thanks at the end to fictional scholars. And all three papers are in different fields. Much of the information about the Russian's scams has been unearthed by Italian skeptic Gian Marco Rinaldi who published his findings in his mother tongue in 2002.
Kouznetsov's 1989…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2007
A letter sent to me on 8 October. I translate:
I write to you because of the sword find I had the opportunity to watch on ABC-nytt together with my mother. [...]
Please take the following for what it is worth. As it touches upon the sword you found, I write to you and leave it to you to handle the information.
My mother, N.N., has the second sight, reads cards and receives images out of the lives of people. Apart from the future, she also sees images from the past. [...] To a skeptic and academic, this may sound like complete nonsense. I am an academic myself [...] I must also emphasise that…
neurophilosophy | October 11, 2007
This wall painting was discovered by a team of French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara, a Neolithic site in Northern Syria.
The red, black and white painting measures 2 square meters, and has been dated to around 9,000 BC (making it the oldest known wall painting). Team leader Eric Coqueugniot says, "It looks like a modernist painting. Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee."
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2007The twenty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Tim is celebrating the carnival's first birthday, yay! Archaeology and anthropology to make you and take you for the ride of your life.
The next open hosting slot is on 5 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.
aardvarchaeology | October 9, 2007Yesterday by train to Gothenburg with the Djurhamn sword sitting in its package on the hat rack above my head. I spent much of the trip in the pleasant company of the Realm's Herald, numismatist Dr Henrik Klackenberg, who happened to be on his way to a church excavation near Skara where he was going to classify newfound coins.
In sunny Gothenburg I caught a ride with a soft-spoken Kurdish taxi driver to Gamlestaden, the site of a 15/16th century predecessor of Gothenburg, currently an industrial suburb, where Studio Västsvensk Konservering resides in a refurnished textile plant. Here I was…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2007
My number one archaeological hero, professor Mats Peterson Malmer, died on 3 October aged 86 minus 15 days. I knew him a little starting in the mid-90s, read most of what he ever wrote with avidity, sent him most of what I wrote, tweaked bits of some work of his in a paper published only months ago. When I was a green PhD student feeling miserable under the post-modernist orthodoxy at the Stockholm archaeology department, his 1984 Fornvännen paper "Arkeologisk positivism" came as a revelation to me.
Leif Gren took the above pic at Mats's 80th birthday party: Mats is showing myself and my…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2007Wednesday 10 October will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Remote Central. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Tim ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
There's an open hosting slot on 5 December and further ones closer to Christmas. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.