archaeology
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2013Skalk 2013:6 (December) has a nice piece about shell middens and Mesolithic oyster cooking, recalling a few points I made back on my first blog. You can't open a fresh oyster without a steel knife. But if you heat the oyster even just slightly, it opens. I was also interested to learn about a harbour in a volcano crater off Iceland's coast, containing the wreck of a Dutch trading ship that foundered there in 1659. And they've found another 8th century jewellery grave at the classic cemetery of Nørre Sandegård on Bornholm, with three of the domed oval brooches I wrote a big paper about in the…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2013The Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslersämbetet) has evaluated our basic university programmes in a long series of subjects. The results for archaeology were published yesterday, based on the status 2012. There were 21 BA (3 yrs), Mag.Phil. (4 yrs) and MA (5 yrs) programmes at the country's archaeology departments. The median grade they've received is "high quality", which translates to a pass here. Let's look at the eleven programmes that flunked or passed with distinction.
Gothenburg. Mag.phil. in Mediterranean archaeology. Very high quality.
Gothenburg. BA in…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2013Fornvännen 2013:1, last spring's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access.
Joy Boutrup et al. on openwork braids of silk and metal thread that decorated 15th century elite fashion garments.
Påvel Nicklasson on zoologist and archaeological trailblazer Sven Nilsson's travels in England and France in 1836.
Nils Harnesk on High Medieval log canoes from a farming frontier site in Norrbotten.
Soon-to-be-Doctor Ny Björn Gustafsson on Viking Period bronze and silver craft sites on Gotland (in English).
Mats G. Larsson on geophys in the Meadow of Mora where Medieval Swedish royal…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2013I read something annoying; always a good impetus for a blog entry. The offender this time is Nick Saunders of the University of Bristol, writing in Current World Archaeology #62 (Dec/Jan, available on Academia.edu). And the theme is what he calls ”the birth of Modern Conflict Archaeology”. This birth, he explains, began with a 1998 grant of his to study World War 1 trench art, stuff that soldiers made during and after the war. He has since gone on to do fieldwork on the ”Italian Front” along the border between Italy and Slovenia.
Battlefield archaeology is a long-established field of research…
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2013I should blog about the recently announced finds of Romano-Celtic era cult images and Vendel Period gold foil figures at Västra Vång in Blekinge, but I find it kind of boring to act as an archaeological news purveyor. I'll just refer you to this paper about the first find from the site and say that Västra Vång is an instant classic in Scandy Iron Age studies. I'll be happy to answer any questions in the comments section.
It's a busy month for me, seeing as I am employed at >100% counting two universities at air commute distance and my steady Fornvännen gig. Also I'm copy-editing a lot of…
aardvarchaeology | October 28, 2013In Current Archaeology #284 (November), Rob Collins has an insightful piece on an intriguing little metal-detector find documented through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It's a cast copper-alloy erotic miniature sculptural group, apt to excite both a person's scholarly and prurient interest.
At first glance, frankly, it just looks like a threesome. Once you've untangled the participants though, you find a man and a woman back to back (as on Yvonne Gilbert's sleeve image for Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 1983 single ”Relax”), emphatically not getting it on together for anatomical reasons, and…
aardvarchaeology | October 18, 2013Fornvännen's web site has become subsumed into the general document repository of the National Heritage Board. I am not happy about this. But still, we can now offer two new issues on-line for free! So much good research here!
Autumn 2012 (no 3):
Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay on the first farmers of Öland.
Martin Hansson on a Medieval execution cemetery in Småland.
Michaela Helmbrecht on a 10th century sword chape depicting Wayland the Smith from Uppåkra in Scania.
Hanna Källström on the Medieval local cult of Saint Holmger in Uppland.
Tobias Bondesson & Lennart Bondeson on a Migration Period…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2013About the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Greek writers started to offer lists of Seven Wonders that the well-read traveller should see. In the 2nd century BC the Hanging Gardens of Babylon began to show up on such lists. The location of Babylon is well known: on the River Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia. But no ruins of the Hanging Gardens have been convincingly identified there. This is because the gardens were actually in another city in another country, according to Stephanie Dalley's new book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon. The Greeks got the city…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 201323 years ago I started my undergraduate studies, and my hugely inspiring main teacher was Göran Burenhult, who had written our main textbook. Now I'm teaching a very similar freshman archaeology course for the first time, and the main textbook is again one written by Göran Burenhult. This two-volume work is titled Arkeologi i Norden and appeared in 1999. At Göran's invitation I contributed an article for the second volume about aristocratic culture in the 5th through the 8th centuries.
I haven't re-read my article in a long time. But very timely, my friend Kristina – who is writing a book…
gregladen | August 30, 2013From Time Team America:
Fort James, South Dakota
In 1865, a unit of cavalry soldiers thought they had volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Instead, they found themselves sent west to keep the peace between incoming pioneer settlers and the Sioux Indians in what is now South Dakota. Upon their arrival, the soldiers built Fort James, one of the few stone forts on the American frontier. The fort's quartzite walls still peek out from under a grassy field that seems to have somehow survived intact. The site has never been excavated but experts believe that the fort's remains hold a time capsule…
gregladen | August 30, 2013The National Park Service (NPS) and the Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA) excavated nine archaeological sites along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon during three years of fieldwork. The NPS/MNA excavation project was the first major archaeological excavation to occur along the river corridor in Grand Canyon in nearly 40 years. The NPS has a "preservation-in-place" mandate, and excavates archaeological sites only when they cannot be stabilized and preserved in place. These sites were disappearing due to erosion; artifacts were literally washing into the river. Because these sites were…
gregladen | August 29, 2013Europe's Oldest Town?
Bulgarian archaeologists led by Professor Doctor Vasil Nikolov, from the National Archaeology Institute and Museum, claim to have discovered one of the oldest towns in Europe, in north-east Bulgaria.
Dr. Nikolov, who has been studying the area for many years, located the town near the salt pans in the vicinity of Provadia in the Varna Region, the same locale as the first salt factory in Europe.
[Dr. Vasil Nikolov, National Archaeology Institute and Museum]:
"We can now say that the Provadia salt pans are in the oldest town in Europe, existing between 4,700 to 4,200 BC,…
gregladen | August 29, 2013Using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) sample collection demonstrated and explained by Darrin Lowery:
gregladen | August 29, 2013This is a bit of the excellent documentary "The Human Spark" featuring my friend John Shea teaching Alan Alda how to be a good hominid. No actual animals were speared during this video.
gregladen | August 29, 2013A bit of documentary on the Donner Party:
Donner Party Archaeology and Forensic Science
Donald L Hardesty discusses the archaeology and forensic science used at the Donner Party camp sites in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
This is a good video, but I can't embed it, but go have a look.
gregladen | August 14, 2013You know about the Hobbit. Not The Hobbit (TM) but the hominid from Flores, Indonesia. Mike Morwood was a key investigator in that research (though he did lots of other research as well).
He was born ...
... in Auckland, New Zealand, studied archaeology at the University of Auckland and gained his PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. From a position in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement – the public service body with responsibility at that time for Aboriginal cultural heritage – he joined the University of New England (UNE), in Armidale, New…
jhalper | August 14, 2013Last month we reported on the first people who, around twelve thousand years ago, were lining their loved ones’ graves with flowers. This month, we have a piece on the “extinct” frog that was “resurrected” and then discovered to be a living fossil.
Both of these studies were led by Israeli researchers from other institutions. The Weizmann contributions were what you might call technical: precise radiocarbon dating and x-ray micro-tomography. While the findings, themselves, were publicized in many scientific and popular publications, the technological advances that make these findings possible…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2013After a languid summer of reading, swimming and some work I'm gearing up for an intense time with a lot of fun stuff during September and October.
Accompany Junior's class to Sevenoaks and London for music camp.
For the second time, review grant applications for the main science funding body of a country in southern Europe, possibly with travel involved.
Go to the Lake Vänern Museum in Lidköping to look at the finds from the Sunnerby barrow that I've been contracted to write about.
The 15th European Skeptics Congress of which I am a co-organiser.
Teach Scandy Archaeology 101 in Umeå one day…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2013The people who owned my mom's summer house in the 60s and 70s threw household waste into the sea from the main dock. And they methodically filled their empty wine bottles with water and sank them there. (If you toss an empty bottle into the sea it floats away.) The water's only about 2.5 m deep at the dock, so when we took over in '82 we could see the junk covering the sea floor clearly. Hundreds of bottles. For a few years in the mid-80s me, my brother and our friends did a lot of diving and took most of the stuff ashore. But a few empties have still been visible in favourable lighting,…