archaeology
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2007
Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq is a 28-minute film from the Archaeology Channel which documents the plundering of Iraqi archaeological sites and looting and destruction of priceless artifacts.
This destruction of Iraq's heritage has been going on since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, and continues to this day. The looting of artifacts from the Iraq museum in Baghdad, which took place soon after the U.S. began its military action, was widely publicized, but the mass media now makes no mention of the subject.
In the last few years, many objects looted from various…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2007My friend and colleague Jonathan Lindström is a talented man. He started out as a teen amateur astronomer and local historian of his dad's coastal Estonian heritage, became a field archaeologist, then an ad copy-writer, then a museum staff writer and artist, and now he's a freelance science writer and artist contracted by Sweden's largest publishing house.
Jonathan called me the other day and told me a new kids' book he's been telling me about had come from the printers. It's named Dödshuset. Mysteriet från stenåldern, "The House of Death: a Stone Age mystery", and it's all about a contract…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2007The twenty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to send you spinning into space like a SPACE APE.
The next open hosting slot is on 24 October. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2007It is with mixed feelings that I note that Seed has recruited an archaeologist for its Seed Salon dialogue feature ("yesss!"), and that the one they've chosen is Mike Shanks ("nooo!").
Now, why would anyone dislike Mike Shanks? Well, because of, in one word, post-modernism. I read Shanks's dreadful 1987 co-authored book Social Theory and Archaeology, and nothing I've seen of his activities since has suggested that he has become any less of an obscurantist jargon-spewer, academic joker and opponent of rationalist science. He's archaeology's equivalent of Jacques Lacan, whom Noam Chomsky…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2007
Last Monday, we had a guest entry by my friend Howard Williams about his excavation of a Devon manor site abandoned in the 1580s. Here's his account of some other recent work of his, stuff many people may not recognise as archaeology, but nevertheless treating source material that very few non-archaeologist scholars pay much attention to.
Further Fieldwork in Devon in July 2007
By Dr Howard Williams
Churchyard Survey
In addition to the archaeological excavation, we conducted other forms of fieldwork. Very few historical churchyards in Devon have been recorded to a high archaeological…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2007Almost half of Aard's Dear Readers are based in the US, nearly a fourth are in Sweden, and the remaining fourth is dominated by people in the UK, Canada and Australia. Alas, the citizens of my Scandy neighbouring countries show very little interest in the blog, and so I don't know if I have any readers in the Norwegian city of Trondheim.
I'm going to be in Trondheim from 1 to 6 September for this year's Sachsensymposium. It's the main conference for archaeologists working with post-Roman, pre-Viking Northern Europe, and I will be accompanied by Professor Steve Steve. If you're in Trondheim…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2007
When someone dies their ID card and on-line banking code-dongle are destroyed to prevent identity theft. Their signature dies with them, so that's not a problem. In the past, people with a bit of money and influence had seal matrices filling the function of all these things. They "signed" documents by affixing wax seals to them, stamped with their unique design. And when the owner of a seal died, the matrix was generally destroyed and then molten for scrap or buried with him.
For this reason, Medieval seal matrices are rare finds, and when they do turn up they tend to be in pieces. But…
aardvarchaeology | August 21, 2007Like myself, Martin Carver at Antiquity wants good archaeopix. Unlike me, he's offering a cash prize and publication in a top-tier print journal.
Antiquity would like to announce the Antiquity Photography Prize. This will be a cash prize awarded for the best archaeological photograph published in the journal in that year. The first prize will be announced for the year 2008. As well as photographs published as part of articles in the journal, consideration for the prize will also include frontispiece photographs published in the editorial.
We would be very grateful if you could spread the word…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2007
My friend Howard Williams teaches archaeology at the University of Exeter, England. He's joined me in Sweden three times so far, once for a rural bike trip, twice for co-directed excavations, and he's soon returning for yet another jaunt around the country's sites, museums and archaeology departments. Attend his lectures there if you can!
Here's a guest entry by Howard about his fieldwork during the past summer. I would have been there too but for my paternal duties.
Stokenham Fieldwork, July 2007
By Dr Howard Williams
This summer I led the third season of fieldwork exploring the Medieval…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2007The twentyfirst Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeolog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to make you squeal and titter with delight.
There's an open hosting slot on 26 September 10 October and further ones later in the fall. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2007
Lund
Alsengems are little multilayered button-like discs of coloured glass with incised human stick-figures on one side. Archaeology became aware of them in 1871 when one was found on the Danish island of Als. These gems are pretty coarse and ugly compared to the exquisite agate and intaglio ones of Classical antiquity, but they nevertheless have their place in an archaeologist's heart.
Sigtuna
On the Continent, Alsengems are found as part of church art of the 11th through 13th centuries such as reliquaries, book covers and altar crosses. Their core area is the Netherlands, Lower Saxony and…
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2007
My dad tried out his new motorboat recently, going with my extra mom from Stockholm around Scania to Gothenburg and then across the country through the Göta Canal to Norrköping and back north to Stockholm again. Passing through Lake Roxen he sought out Sättuna in Kaga parish on the lake's SW shore and took the above picture for me of the Sättuna barrow from the water. Below is a pic I took myself in September 2006. I want to radiocarbon date that mutha before the resident badger trashes its innards completely!
I'm glad to have a picture of the site from the lake, as Sättuna means "the tuna…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2007Wednesday 15 August will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Archaeolog. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to one of the blog editors ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
There's an open hosting slot on 26 September and further ones later in the fall. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2007
Long-time Dear Readers may remember that I've written in the past about the wonderful Danish war booty sacrifices. Victorious defenders dunked the equipment of foreign armies they had beaten into sacred lakes, mainly during the Late Roman Iron Age c. AD 150-400. The lakes soon silted up into bogs, whose anaerobic conditions preserved the weaponry and other gear perfectly. Bee-youtiful stuff.
(Also, it's a very good blogging topic if you want heavy traffic, because any mention of booty, particulary Danish bog booty, will attract porn surfers like you wouldn't believe. Server logs show that a…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2007Here's a piece of news that hit uncomfortably close to home. A grave digger in Eslöv, southern Sweden, fell victim to a work-place accident yesterday. While the man was in the trench, the grave-side spoil dump collapsed onto him, killing him instantly. I am only somewhat reassured by the fact that this was the kind of grave digger who buries people, not my kind who excavates them again.
In other news. Mauretania has abolished slavery. Keep up the good work, guys! Let's see now, it's 1807, right? 1907? Huh?
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2007
I've spent the day metal-detecting for a project called Vasakungarnas Djurhamn, that is, "Animal Harbour of the Sheaf Kings". This name may not make much sense to you, Dear Reader, so let me explain.
In the 1520s Gustaf Eriksson, the most successful of many ambitious young noblemen at the time who tended to end up decapitated, wrested Swedish royal power from the Danes with the aid of Lubeck. He soon implemented Reformation and used the riches of the church and monasteries to repay his debts and reorganise Sweden from the bottom up. A very good 2002 biography of the man has the subtitle "…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2007On-line Open Access "journals" and e-text repositories are very nice, but archaeology doesn't have any big or commonly used ones yet. This may be about to change with the Italian site Journal of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Archaeology.
At the moment, much of the site is in Italian. Full-text repository searches for the words "Mesolithic", "Mycenaean" and "Merovingian" didn't turn up any hits. "Bronze" scored four hits, "Iron" six. Worse, the material published in the Journal doesn't seem to have been entered into the repository, and I could find no PDF files, only texts hacked up into…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2007The twentieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to put a spring in your step and a glint in your eye.
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2007Recent discoveries by my friend Lars got me thinking about New Age archaeology. The Mid-summer hippie/druid vs. police battles for Stonehenge are legendary. A few years ago I was given a guided tour of the Salisbury Plain's finest sites by my charming scholar friend Rebecca Montague. Entering the West Kennet long barrow's megalithic burial chamber, I felt a marked scent of joss sticks. Becca told me about Mid-summer nights at Silbury Hill, when she was posted to kindly ask hippies not to scale the vulnerable monument. Many agreed not to, but one greying lady became very irate. Before stomping…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Mesolithic, Sweden; arkeologi, mesolitikum, jägarstenåldern, Stockholm.]
My old buddy from undergrad days, hard-core Mesolithic scholar, painter and woodsman Mattias Pettersson, sent me a pair of wonderful breathless letters on 19 and 21 July about new high-end discoveries. This is all about ancient seal-hunting camps in an area with dramatic shore displacement, which is why Mattias is so happy to get high -- 75 meters above current sea level! High means early here, so early that the top sites are pushing the chronological limit set by the last Ice Age. (…