archaeology
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2007
The first type of megalithic tomb occuring in Scandinavia is the dolmen, a table-like structure built of huge stone slabs and covered with a barrow. They were built in the Early Neolithic, c. 3600-3300 cal BC, and then re-used for centuries afterwards as other megalithic tomb types came and went. Just the other day, the indefatigable Klaus Ebbesen published a hefty catalogue of 404 particularly well-preserved Danish dolmens and the finds made in them, lavishly illustrated with 19th century watercolours. Out of almost 400 pages, only about 50 are text, the rest being glorious data.
"Dolmen"…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2007
Dear Reader, let me tell you about my on-going research.
Written history begins late in Scandinavia. The 1st Millennium AD is an almost entirely prehistoric period here. Still, Scandinavian archaeologists have long had a pretty good general idea about late 1st Millennium political geography. The most affluent and powerful regions show up e.g. in hoard finds and expensively furnished graves. The distribution of Romanesque stone churches from the 11th and 12th centuries appears to correspond closely with the political heartlands of the preceding centuries, and with where there's good arable…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2006
Here's my reply to the reader's question about the effects of being harshly criticised by a colleague you respect.
I was a highly independent grad student. Some might say obstinate and unruly. This was due to a combination of my personality, my tender age and the science wars of the 1990s. I came to the university of Stockholm as a science major right about the time that Northern European archaeology fell into its belated infatuation with post-modernism and went badly anti-scientific for a while. At age eighteen, after fifty pages of Ian Hodder's turgid Reading the Past, I decided I would…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2006
Dear Reader, I'm really thrilled to be on Scienceblogs! You see, I'm the first second or third scholar from the Arts wing that Seed's let in here. Archaeology was long seen as an adjunct to historical research, which is why it's classed as a humanistic discipline and not a social science. We reconstruct societies lost in the mists of time. But our source material is concrete and hands-on: no parchment codices, no taped interviews or questionnaires. Historians dig through archives. Archaeologists dig stuff out of the ground and try to make sense of it. And we can only do that with the aid of…
retrospectacle | July 15, 2006So, according to this CNN story, some European scientists found 400,000 year old DNA in a bear tooth which was found in a cave in Northern Spain.
Apparantly, is not too uncommon to be able to extract DNA from fossils, but older than 100,000 years hasn't yet been done, until now.
He said the find "pushed back the frontier" concerning the age of DNA that scientists could work with. "It means that it will be possible to subject a large number of extinct animals to DNA analysis," he said.
And then sequence it and clone us some prehistoric bears riiiiight??? Perhaps we could have Ancient Bear Vs…
retrospectacle | July 11, 2006Its sad, but true: all the best that Michigan has to offer is found lying by the side of the road. And look what turned up this time.