archaeology
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2007
Archaeologists love preciousss metals. Not for their monetary value, but because they keep so well. Take a fine damascened sword whose blade ripples like water, so well balanced that you hardly feel its weight, and bury it: it will look like crap after a few centuries. Bury a golden object, and it will in most cases remain unchanged for millennia. It's basically a question of information integrity. Materials like flint and gold allow us to see exactly what prehistoric people saw, and to understand that their material culture was no less skilfully made and eye-catching than ours.
Today…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2007
Back in September, I wrote a piece about that common type of archaeological site, the abandoned treehouse.
At these sites you'll see rotting boards and beams hanging from clumsily bent nails on a group of trees, gradually collapsing to the ground. Perhaps some old shag pile carpet decomposing on the forest floor. The woods strewn with an enigmatic collection of objects, haphazardly selected, mostly old household gear. When visiting these sites, I always have the feeling that the inhabitants didn't choose the objects they brought there: they took whatever they were given by someone more…
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2007
Inger Österholm died the night between Wednesday and Thursday after a long battle with illness. For over two decades, she was a driving force behind the Ajvide excavations on Gotland, where countless archaeology students from Stockholm and Visby received their first taste of fieldwork. Inger specialised in the Neolithic of Gotland, as seen in her seminal 1989 doctoral thesis, Bosättningsmönstret på Gotland under stenåldern. She was a tireless teacher, fieldworker and university administrator, and always very good to me during my post-grad work with Gotland's largest 1st Millennium cemetery.…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2007
I've written before about modern ruins. Here's a great Finnish site: Tuomas Romu's photographs. Beautiful work!
Thanks to Mustafa Mond for the link.
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2007My buddy Lars Lundqvist, long-time regular Dear Reader and contributor of excellent archaeopix, started a blog three weeks ago: Arkland. It's in Swedish, it's finely illustrated, and it's mainly about Swedish archaeology. Yes, this is the guy who did all those cool digs at Slöinge, Vittene and Saleby. Go have a look and write a comment or two!
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2007
Dear Reader, watch me toot my own horn (yes, I have a very supple spine).
Technorati doth heed prayer. Or at least it heeds "support tickets". So now this blog is visible again on the top-10 archaeology blogs (currently #3 with 187 linkers) and skepticism blogs (currently #9). Netwide.
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2007
An important skill in archaeology is what my friend and mentor Jan Peder Lamm calls fragmentology: the ability to identify objects when all you have is small pieces. The only way to learn this well is to look at a lot of objects. So here's a fragmentological exercise for you, Dear Reader: of what two objects have the fragments in the pictures been parts? And what parts? And even if you find them really easy, the most important question may be, which details guided your identification? The round thing measures about 14 cm across, the shiny thing about 2.5 cm.
I'd like to extend my standing…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007
It's a posthole! It's a rubbish pit! It's an elk-trapping pit with the remains of a wooden catch box at the bottom! No -- it's a hearth. A Four Stone Hearth! The eleventh carnival in the series, to be precise. And it's all about humans. As the poet put it,
"Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what's botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!"
This is where we all pretend to be human.
MC at Neurophilosophy digs into a racist neurology paper by…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2007
A new peer-reviewed intercontinental multidisciplinary journal has just been announced: Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). Apart from my discipline, JONA will also cover paleo-environmental reconstruction and modelling, historical ecology, anthropology, ecology of organisms important to humans, human/environment/climate interactions, climate history, ethnography, ethnohistory, historical analyses, discussions of cultural heritage, and place-name studies. Its offices are in Maine and the editorial board includes people based in the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2007
The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on the late-1st Millennium temple at Uppåkra, Scania, Sweden; on mid-to-late 1st Millennium research as historical archaeology; on the Viking Period towns and trade network around the Baltic; and (as illustrated above) on voluptuous Late Magdalenian female silhouettes knapped in flint and found at…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2007
Somebody once said to me, "You archaeologists don't really know anything, do you? I mean, it's just guesses, right?". Well, sometimes I do despair about archaeology as a science. Can we actually know anything about what life was like for people in the deep past? Are we doing science at all or just deluding ourselves? But I always pick myself up pretty quickly.
First, I remind myself that all science is a muddled process where we grope laboriously toward solid knowledge and often have to make detours. If archaeology isn't always very good science, then at least it's not alone in this.
Then…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2007 Gruff Rhys, front man of trippy Welsh popsters The Super Furry Animals, released his second solo album back in January, Candylion. (Here's the promo site.) Its mellow quirky tunes will appeal to fans of the Furries. I particularly like the title track, "Beacon in the Darkness" and the hummable "The Court of King Arthur".
I keep an eye open for pop lyrics having to do with archaeology. Here and here, for example, are two songs about bog bodies. And on Candylion we find the following fine example, indicating that Mr Rhys has been watching Time Team:
The Court of King Arthur
By Gruff Rhys…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007
I'm generally no fan of "contemporary archaeology", where 20th century sites are investigated and interpreted. If you want to know what those people did, ask them or read the local paper. But Claes Pettersson at the Jönköping County Museum has written a piece in this genre that I actually like a lot. (It's in Swedish.)
In recent decades, the Torsvik highway crossroads has been one of those marginal places on the outskirts of a town that are left over between car dealerships, parking lots and supermarkets. This particular place was also an Iron Age cemetery, and last year the time had come to…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007
One of my favourite Danes, Henrik Karll, offers this variation on an emblematic archaeological motif: a grinning skeleton looking up at the sky from a trench. Only this one's accompanied by a 1950s drain pipe that's sliced it lengthwise in half. As detailed on Henrik's blog, he had a snowy watching brief for some small-scale trenching at Holstebro church in western Jutland a few weeks ago. This is one of the dead people he ran into: dating from after the erection of the church c. AD 1100 but before the advent of careful churchyard planning c. AD 1900. It's an adult individual, sex unknown.…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2007Back in August, I blogged about a paper I'd written on the chronology and iconography of Migration Period gold bracteates. It was published around the New Year and is now also available on-line in English. Please tell me what you think!
Rundkvist, Martin. 2006. Notes on Axboe's and Malmer's gold bracteate chronologies. Fornvännen 2006:5. KVHAA. Stockholm.
[More blog entries about archaeology, migrationperiod, Sweden, Denmark; arkeologi, folkvandringstiden, Danmark.]
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2007Most of Sweden is still seeing continual land upheaval after the latest Ice Age. Where I live, the shoreline recedes half a meter per century, measured vertically. If you build a jetty around here when you're 20, it's pretty much useless when you're 80. This means that the Stockholm Archipelago is in constant flux: underwater rocks become islets, islands merge, and finally they become landlocked hills.
Here's a pop-sci essay in Swedish I published recently in the local historical society's bulletin. It's about the boating situation in my area, Nacka municipality east of Stockholm, a thousand…
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2007
Here's another underappreciated, undermarketed and eminently readable blog within the ambit of Aardvarchaeology: Chris O'Brien's Northstate Science. For more archaeology and skepticism, read Chris! He's been at it for a year now, he's only seeing 60 hits a day, and by his own admission,
"I have done almost no advertising about the blog, either locally or via other websites - anyone who has discovered Northstate Science has done so either via word of mouth or through searches and links to my posts (hell, most of my relatives, including my mother, don't know I actually have a blog!)"
C'mon…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2007
Lars Lundqvist promptly answered my call for archaeopix. Here's a recently discovered 1st Millennium BC stone setting on wooded outland belonging to the hamlet of Åby, Misterhult parish, Småland, Sweden.
The stone pavement, which is not scheduled for any excavation, is a grave superstructure, most likely covering scanty pyre remains similar to those found in Gothenburg Nasties. Such structures are very much ho-hum-yawn to disillusioned cynics like Lars and myself, but the man to the left was really happy to see it. Said this merry Gothenburg biologist: De ä ju änna fantasstisskt att sånna…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007Dear Reader, I like to publish good archaeological pix. If you have taken a really good photograph, drawn a find or done a nice plan or section that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, then feel free to email it to me, along with information about the subject and how you'd like it to be credited.
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007In its formative late-19th century decades, Swedish archaeology had three journals with a nationwide scope (sometimes also covering Norway with which Sweden shared a king at the time). All three were published in Stockholm by the same small group of people: the Royal Academy of Letters had the academic Antiqvarisk Tidskrift för Sverige (1864-1924) and the more pop-sci-orientated Vitterhetsakademiens Månadsblad (1872-1907), and the Swedish Antiquarian Society had Svenska Fornminnesföreningens Tidskrift (1871-1905).
The two latter merged in 1906 and took the name Fornvännen. This journal is…