archaeology

I know that many readers of this blog are yearning to read a >900-page bok in German about the enigmatic inscriptions on Migration Period gold bracteates. Fret no more, Dear Reader! Svante Fischer just sent me a link to a 7.4 megabyte PDF file containing such a work: Sean Nowak's 2003 doctoral thesis Schrift auf den Goldbrakteaten der Völkerwanderungszeit, published by the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. Alu, lathu, laukaR!

I would recommend Jason Fox's blog simply for the weight of its name: Hominin Dental Anthropology. That is so heavy metal. But it's also tagged "atheism, Teeth, Anthropology, bones, Paleoanthropology, dentition, bioarchaeology, osteology, paleopathology" on Technorati. And it's a readable mix of these subjects along with linguistics and more whimsical and personal pieces. So check him out and comment away! The only things Jason seems not to have learned yet is to use pics and to market his blog. Jason, I want to see your skinny ass on the next Four Stone Hearth. And I want you to host one…

The Department of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg recently published a nice little book written in Swedish by the seasoned contract archaeologist Marianne Lönn: Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning, "contract archaeology and research". Lönn's main theses are: Archaeologists look at old things to find out what it was like to live a long time ago. Contract archaeology is research. This research has its own agenda and needn't pay any attention to what university scholars are doing unless their work is clearly relevant to contract archaeology. Contract archaeologists should be proud of…

As detailed before (here and here) I did a trial dig with friends in an undated great barrow near Sjögestad church in Östergötland last September. We secured samples that allowed radiocarbon dating to the Early Viking Period (9th century) and the identification of several plant species in small hearths that had been lit on the barrow as it was being erected. I filed the excavation report the other day, and it is now available on-line in Swedish for all to read. Check it out! If anything's hard to understand, don't be afraid to ask. [More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, vikings,…

The great Birger Nerman used to say that the best archaeological finds are made in museum stores. Here's an example. I just got home from two days at the County Museum in Linköping, where I've pursued my studies of late 1st Millennium central places. Helped by Marie Ohlsén and my other friendly colleagues there, I've checked out their collections of archaeological metalwork and their excavation report archives. Today they fed me semla (a big wheat bun with whipped cream and marzipan) not once, but twice -- that's how friendly they are. (Many thanks for having me, guys!) Above are pictures of…

My buddy Niklas Ytterberg recently sent me an impressive excavation report in Swedish. Constrained by the field-archaeological paradox, he dug a really nondescript Neolithic settlement site at Djurstugan near Tierp, Uppland in 2003. Then he somehow found funding to subject the measly finds to a battery of innovative scientific analyses, extracting loads of interesting information. For one thing, Niklas got the province's earliest ever radiocarbon dates for grain: 2400-2200 cal BC (barley) and 2470-2340 cal BC (wheat). The Funnel Beaker ("TRB") culture, known for its farming, arrives in…

How about paying to participate in a Roman Period dig in Bulgaria this summer? I've been asked to help promote the Bulgarian Archaeological Association's 2007 Field School. This really takes me back. I paid for food and board on my first dig, on Tel Hazor in the Galilee, in 1990. I was an 18-year-old grunt and shifted a lot of topsoil. That autumn I enrolled at the University of Stockholm to study Scandinavian archaeology, and look at me now.

Repatriation and reburial are large concerns these days for museums with a colonial past. Human remains looted from Aboriginal Australian cemeteries were for instance recently repatriated from a Swedish museum. But not only indigenous peoples in the usual sense of the word are making demands. The Guardian reports that British neo-Pagans are increasingly starting to demand reburial of prehistoric human remains. These adherents of newly constructed paganesque belief systems claim a special affinity with, and thus right to, the remains of selected ancestors. I don't think neo-paganism is any…

Readers of my blogging over the past 14 months will have come across many references to, and tidbits from, the work with the archive report for 2005's Viking Period boat grave excavation at Skamby in Östergötland. Howard Williams and myself directed the excavations of the first boat inhumation in that county and the third Pre-Roman Iron Age bronze casting site identified in all of Scandinavia. I am very happy to announce that the report is now complete, on-line and available for free in English with lots of pics! Get it here, tell me what you think, ask me if anything is hard to understand.…

The incomparable net-head archaeologist Ulf Bodin directs the highly successful work to put the collections of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm (Statens Historiska Museum) on-line. Off and on over the past year, I've worked through the scanned catalogues of two centuries, searching for source material relevant to my work with Late 1st Millennium elite manors in Östergötland. To do this, I only needed to visit the museum once, looking in the flesh at some early acquisitions that weren't described well in the catalogue. So I could have done almost all of the work from anywhere in…

The other day, I collected the larger finds from 2005's boat grave excavations at the conservator's studio. Among them are 23 amber gaming pieces, of which I have now taken nice photographs. The pieces' median dimensions are about 35 by 24 mm. If it weren't for these gaming pieces, the boat grave dig myself and Howard Williams directed at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, would have been quite a disappointment for me. The other grave furnishings were few and understated, consisting mainly of a symbolic (indeed, incomplete) set of horse and driving gear. But these gaming pieces are…

A buddy of mine sent me a reminder today of why I am happy to not be a contract archaeologist. It's twelve below zero centigrade around here, and still a number of unfortunate Linköping colleagues are out digging. And they're not digging Tut-ankh-amen's tomb today either: apparently they've been assigned the task of excavating and documenting an ancient ploughsoil. Yes, an expanse of clayey soil churned by the ard or plough a long, long time ago. Poor bastards! See those fuzzy blotches in the pic? They're snowflakes. Update 8 February: Says my Linköping colleague Katarina Österström: "The…

In recent years I've been involved in some archaeological fieldwork at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, Sweden. I like to get a handle on the names of places where I work, what they mean, how they used to be pronounced in the Middle Ages. I was particularly interested in learning about Skamby, because read in modern Swedish, this very uncommon name means "Shame Village". There are two explanations for the name: a less entertaining one supported by linguistic scholarship, and a funny folk-etymology of recent centuries. I'll give you the scholarly interpretation first. Names ending in "-…

Many people who excel at something do so by concentrating on a few tightly defined areas of interest. A colleague of mine once explained to me that she has a narrow-gauge mind (Sw. smalspårig). I like that expression a lot: this woman hasn't got a one-track mind (Sw. enkelspårig), nor a narrow mind, it's just narrow gauge. In her case, it seems that the tracks of her mind lead either to Iron Age small finds or to reading mystery novels. Another colleague once conversed with me for the first time when I was between marriages and pretty one-tracked on the subject of women. This friendly…

Sun Spurge My friend Dr Jens Heimdahl is a Renaissance man. He's a quaternary geologist, an urban archaeologist, a palaeobotanist, a talented painter and a writer of essays on weird literature. He's co-translated Lovecraft's novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath into Swedish and illustrated it. Jens recently studied the plant macrofossils me, Howard and Libby got out of a barrow in Sjögestad parish we test-trenched back in September. According to radiocarbon, the barrow was most likely built in the late 8th or the 9th century AD, that is, the Early Viking Period. With a diameter of 35 m…

The excellent Markus Andersson has made a cemetery map out of the field measurements me and Howard Williams and our collaborators took at Skamby in Kuddby parish the summer before last. This is the prettiest of Östergötland's three boat inhumation cemeteries. We excavated grave 15, as I have blogged about repeatedly, and found it to contain a burial of the 9th century with unusual furnishings. Now that the plan is done, all that remains is snapping pics of the finds post-conservation, and then I can stick all the report materials into one big PDF file for the delectation of the world's boat…

Mike Parker Pearson and team have excavated part of a huge Neolithic settlement at Durrington Walls above the Salisbury plain, not far from Stonehenge. Finds are abundant and suggest that the place was a seasonal ceremonial feasting site. Says MPP, "We're talking Britain's first free festival. It's part of attracting a labour force - throwing a big party". And you know what that labour force did? Yep, among other tasks they pulled massive blocks of rock on sledges from Wales to Wiltshire and built something that still stands after several millennia. I wish the Neolithic record in the Lake…

Marika Mägi, my old co-student from grad school, is head of the archaeology department at Tallinn university in Estonia. She's organising a conference titled Rank, Gender and Society around the Baltic 400-1400 AD on 23-27 May in Kuressaare on the island of Saaremaa. Interested scholars are welcome to present papers, and Marika tells me that the registration deadline has been extended to 1 March. Here's a flier with registration details. I'm tempted to go. Saaremaa is sort of Gotland's twin sister and it's the kind of place I'd most likely never visit unless prompted by a conference. And the…

On Thursday 1 February at 18:30 I'm giving a talk at the Town Museum of Norrköping. The subject is my ongoing research into the political geography of late 1st Millennium Östergötland, or simply put, My Quest for the Ancient Kings. Entry is SEK 60. Hope to meet blog readers there! [More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi, Östergötland, Norrköping.]

Most archaeologists work with rescue excavations for land development, "contract archaeology". And because of the Field-Archaeological Paradox, operative in all Western countries with strong legal protection for archaeological sites, they get to dig a lot of really nondescript things. It's not Tut-ankh-amen's tomb every day, kids. This is one of the reasons that I do my best to stay out of contract archaeology. One of the types of ancient monument that Swedish contract archaeologists get to dig quite a lot, but which is seen by many pretty much with heartfelt loathing, is colloquially known…