archaeology
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007I've checked the literature and found out what really happened in the Goldhahn vs. Berntsson fight about barrow-building. Of course, whatever the result, it would have left the Lund Archaeological Review editors looking bad.
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007The fine British journal Antiquity is soliciting material for the Open Access section of its web site. Specifically, Martin Carver and his crew want a) the abstracts of recent doctoral theses with relevance for archaeology, b) obituaries of recently deceased archaeologists. Submit thesis abstracts here, obits here. In either case, you should of course also erect a commemorative rune stone near a ford or assembly site and bury a large silver hoard.
Oh, and they also want really good archaeopix dor the editorial section of the paper edition! E-mail yours with some contextual info and photo-tech…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2007
Longtime Dear Readers may remember me blogging about the excavations in my friend Jan Peder's garden last summer. Beside his house is a ruin mound full of heavily burnt and vitrified Medieval-style bricks, and he's gotten funds together to do some excavations there. The original idea was that the feature might be the remains of a defensive tower or other aristocratic building. Last year's work established that it was in fact the remains of a brick kiln, which is also evidence of somebody powerful in the vicinity. 16th century pottery found inside the kiln gives the latest possible date for…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2007Here's an idea for bloggers with an archaeological bent. I'm thinking of putting together a one-off carnival about people's nearest archaeological sites. You go to the nearest site you're aware of, snap a picture of it and explain (in as many or few words you like) the site's significance and life-history in a blog entry. Then you send me the link, and when I've got a fair number, I put them together in a link-fest, plug it on Reddit & Co, everybody votes for it and we all get a traffic spike. You don't need any formal qualifications to contribute.
Sound like fun? Please leave a comment…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2007It's been a while since I ran any reader-submitted archaeopix. C'mon everybody, I'm sure you have some good snaps sitting on your disk! Please e-mail them to me with a bit of contextual info.
aardvarchaeology | June 21, 2007
Yesterday I met a Slovakian colleague, the amiable Matej Ruttkay of the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. We had an animated conversation in broken German about 1st Millennium graves and he showed me loads of find pix. Matej's own excavations are absolutely ace, with some really weird Style II metalwork, not actually very far from the Scandinavian prototypes yet clearly of local make. But what blew my mind was the pix and news of the Poprad-Matejovce chamber grave, excavated by Matej's colleagues last summer and not yet widely publicised. It's an extremely well-…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2007The seventeenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. I love that blog's name. Check it out! Archaeology anna anthropology anna boom shakalaka.
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007Wednesday 20 June will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Hominin Dental Anthropology. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Jason ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line):
"Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…
purepedantry | June 18, 2007Fundamental to the questions of human evolution is the question: when did human beings start doing human-like things? Human-like things include tool making, having a home base, using language, and possessing an aesthetic sense. Unfortunately, figuring out when humans started using behaviors that we would call modern is a troublesome business because we can't very well ask the people involved. We have to look at the remnants such people left behind and from these remnants attempt to infer the psychological world in which they lived.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence used to…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2007
Most rock carvings have very little archaeological context: people who search for them tend to remove hastily any layers on top of them, and they quit digging when they reach the edge of the carved panel. But in recent decades, there has been a trend among Bronze Age scholars to dig beside the panels and try to find ones that are still covered by culture layers. Such digs tend to turn up carving tools of stone, pottery, enigmatic clay marbles and above all lots of evidence of burning. Cultic fires illuminating the carvings as drunk fertility cultists cavorted and copulated in Mycenaean…
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2007As an undergrad and PhD student in the 90s I heard a lot of rumours about the 1988-93 excavation of Gullhögen, a barrow in Husby-Långhundra parish between Stockholm and Uppsala. These rumours held that the barrow was pretty weird: built out of charcoal (!), unusually rich, and sitting on top of unusually rich Roman Period graves. Supposedly, someone was out here re-sieving spoil dumps to collect individual gold filigree grains.
Few really knew much about Gullhögen. In a 2001 Fornvännen paper, Kent Andersson could make only the briefest of mentions of some Roman glass and a gold ring found at…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2007Antiquity is the world's most respected and widely read academic journal in archaeology, our equivalent of Nature or Science. Its summer issue reached me last Friday and yesterday I brought it to the beach. On the first page of his editorial (entertaining, anti-po-mo, available on-line behind a paywall), Martin Carver attacks creationism and quotes a blog entry from March last year by Aard regular Chris O'Brien of the Northstate Science blog! After quoting Turkish creationist Harun Yahya and describing his propaganda efforts, Carver continues:
Here is Christopher O'Brien, a Forest…
vhughes | June 8, 2007Say hello to Google Ancient Earth? Today's high-resolution satellites are now snapping photos of millennia-old archaeological sites, and may be the key to their preservation.
Every year, tourists flock to Egypt to see the Great Pyramids and the Temple of Luxor. But experts estimate that more than 99 percent of the region's archaeological sites are still buried, leaving them at risk of being lost to looting and urban sprawl.
Using images taken by satellites—and commercially available on the internet—a research team led by archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2007
An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck's interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and quite impossible to ignore for anyone working in that field.
Writes Hagen Keller (and I translate):
"On 8 May Karl Hauck died, aged 90. He was the founder of the Institute for Early Medieval Studies and former…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2007The sixteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology beyond your wildest dreams.
"Give yourself over to absolute pleasure
Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh
Erotic madness beyond any measure
And sensual daydreams to treasure forever"
Richard O'Brien
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007A recurring theme in my blogging is my frustration at completing a PhD at 31 and finding myself completely supernumerary. A few unwise policy decisions of the government's has allowed a generation of middle-class Swedes like myself to specialise in academic subjects for which there is no market whatsoever. Two cases indicative of what the academic labour market for archaeologists is like in Sweden reached my ears yesterday.
In competition with several doctoral students and recent PhDs, a highly qualified colleague who completed his PhD in 1998 has just landed a one-day-a-week job as a…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007A team headed by Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith of the University of Auckland has analysed the DNA of archaeological chicken bones from Chile and found that the fowl belonged to a Polynesian breed. Now comes the cool bit: the bones date from the 14th century. We've known since the 60s that Scandinavians beat the Spaniards to North America. Now we find that Polynesians beat them to South America. Columbus's travels just mark the start of a continued non-native presence in the Americas.
Via the LA Times. Thanks to Hans Persson of Du är vad du läser for the heads-up. Did you know that his blog's…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007Wednesday 6 June will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Testimony of the Spade. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Magnus ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, ethnicity, saami, minorities, indigenouspeople; arkeologi, etnicitet, samer, minoriteter, urbefolkningar]
I got an inspiring question from Z at Enkla bloggen.
"Who made the rock carvings, hällristningar? Was it the Saami people?
Is this a sensitive matter? I've already asked several archaeologists but they haven't answered me."
Archaeology is fundamentally incapable of answering the question "who did this?" without the aid of written history. This is because everything we put into that question when we pose it is non-material, and the…