fieldwork
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2009Last September I directed two weeks of excavations at Sättuna in Kaga, an amazing metal detector site I've been working at since 2006. I was hoping to find building foundations from a late-6th century aristocratic manor indicated by the metalwork. But I couldn't get permission to dig the most promising bit of the site. Instead my team of Chester students and I dug off to one side and found no end of pits and hearths, but hardly any artefacts at all. Those bits that we did find are lithics, apparently belonging to a Late Mesolithic shore site.
Yesterday I got the radiocarbon results. They…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2009The Stockholm County Museum has just put my report on last summer's fieldwork at Djurhamn on-line (in Swedish). As you may remember, I blogged about it at the time (here, here and here). The results were actually a bit of a let-down after the sword I found in '07.
grrlscientist | November 22, 2008tags: Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History, fieldwork, education, science, streaming video
This streaming video is the third of a four-part series by the Smithsonian Institute. It features fieldwork that scientists engage in by trekking through the tropical rainforests and sending probes to the bottom of the sea at the National Museum of Natural History, aka, the Smithsonian. [2:31].
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2008
Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is usually two metal planes reflecting the detector's signal. They shrill like mad.
Above is a pic of two cartridges I picked up at Sättuna today. The left-hand one is the most common type in Swedish farmland, used mainly to hunt large mammals, but also I believe in standard-issue army rifles of the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2008We finished digging today. Tomorrow I'll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned.
A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand:
Scattered lithics, knapped and then abraded by wave action on a beach. Mainly quartz, some hälleflinta/leptite, a little flint, one chip off a ground greenstone axe. Also a complete greenstone adze that permits us to date the assemblage to the Middle Neolithic about 3000 cal BC, but more likely the…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2008My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second best result would be to find other cool things than the ones I had expected, say, something with quite…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2008
We finished machining away the ploughsoil today, and I reckon we've uncovered about 800 square meters. I have a permit for 1200 sqm, but I stopped here. The landowner doesn't want us to expand in the most interesting direction where we have more cool metal-detector finds. And the directions that remain to us are out of the metal-finds swarm and downhill.
Sunken features everywhere, and the team has been busy cleaning away remnants of the ploughsoil, finding the edges of features, sectioning many. None with any finds worth writing home about though. Pete/Fozz did find a seltzer bottle sherd:…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2008Adele and Laura joined us last night, and so we were thirteen people digging at Sättuna today plus Niklas the excavator virtuoso. We continued to strip away ploughsoil, uncovering lots and lots of dark splotches underneath, and the team sectioned and sieved about 25 such sunken features visible in the surface of the natural subsoil. Most are functionally indeterminate, some are hearths, one or two are postholes.
Very few finds in the features, a little bone and fired clay. One did give a fair number of find types including a piece of modern window glass, and as the demarcation between its…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2008
I've just sat down in a comfy chair on the top floor of our luxurious excavation headquarters at Tolefors. Phew! I am very happy after a first day of excavations at Sättuna where every little bit has fallen into place as planned. (Hope I don't hit a frickin' elk when I go to pick up stragglers an hour from now. [I didn't.])
After an uneventful two-hour drive this morning I came to Linköping and met up with my buddy and co-manager Petter. We loaded the County Museum's digging gear into his car, picked up our first British recruit Karen and drove to the site, where landowner Christer greeted…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008
Yesterday I did two hours of metal-detecting at a manor in Boo parish whose documentary evidence starts in the 13th century. Ancient monuments in the vicinity take it on down at least to the 10th. There are some nice 16th century small finds from the manor grounds, and my visit was intended to follow up on them. Lo & behold: I picked up one of Queen Christina's quarter öre copper coins from 1640. They are generally the oldest coins you'll find at any site, as in their day they were the largest issue yet in the history of Sweden: both as to the number of coins struck and as to the…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2008Today we dug and sieved our 33rd and last square-meter test pit at Djurhamn, and I took the gear back to the County Museum's stores. Unless a colleague with better early-modern pottery skillz than mine provides any surprises, it seems that we have not found any of the evidence for 16th/17th century harbour life that we sought. We do however have quite a bit of 18th/19th century household and tavern refuse. And it seems unlikely to be pure chance that the single pit that yielded any bones was the one nearest to the abandoned cemetery depicted on a 1630s map of the area. Osteology will tell.
I…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2008
I spent Thursday and Friday digging test pits with a group of energetic volunteers at Djurhamn, the first two of seven planned days in the field. The great Ehrsson brothers are now joined by an equally solid Ehrsson nephew, among other hard-working people. We're looking for archaeological evidence for historically attested land activity around a harbour whose seafloor is covered with 17th and 18th century refuse dumped from ships. Written sources collected by Katarina Schoerner mention "the big quay" and "the military camp" including an "ale hut", but we have no idea where they were, really…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2008
Back in February I showed you some pix of abandoned tree houses at Djurhamn. One of them had a computer, just like my son once reported visiting a tree house with a typewriter.
I've spent the past three days metal detecting in the same area, falsifying our working hypothesis that there would be easily accessible 16th and 17th century stuff there. But I did find more tree house ruins. And one had an interesting piece of furniture: a gynaecologist's examination chair!? Turned out that the tree house was built on the margin of a dump area where all kinds of strange stuff was sitting, and…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2008With my buddies Kjell Andersson and Lasse Winroth, and supported by the amazing Ehrsson brothers Rune & Tore, I've been back metal detecting around the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings for two days. Last summer I did some work along the current shores of the harbour site, covering available flat ground and finding nothing I could definitely date before the year 1800. Then I moved inland to the landlocked part of the one-time harbour basin, and immediately found a sword from the early 1500s.
We're currently concentrating on bits of flat ground around the landlocked basin, hoping to find traces…
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2008I've made two archaeological field interventions today. First I seeded a site with finds, then I got some finds out of another site.
Fieldwalking back in March, I found a grindstone and some knapped quartz at a Bronze Age site in Botkyrka parish. Taking their positions with GPS, I've filed a brief archive report on the finds to make sure that the data get into the sites-and-monuments register. But it turned out that the museum doesn't want to actually own that kind of low-end finds unless they're from a stratigraphic context. And I don't want to keep the stuff around either. So this morning I…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2008
Today I joined my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell for a day of digging on an Early Mesolithic seal hunting station in the landlocked former archipelago of Tyresta. The Urskogsstigen 4 site is currently on a wooded hilltop at about 77 meters above sea level, and thus likely to date from about 8000 cal BC, shortly after deglaciation. It's not in the area denuded by the 1999 forest fore. What's really striking about this particular site (Mattias & Roger have found hundreds) is that it's very early, it has enormous amounts of quartz débitage and it has a tent-sized cleared area…
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2008
Yesterday me and my buddy Per Vikstrand visited the third site in our little exploration program for fields with highly suggestive names on 18th century maps. We've already covered the Field of St. Olaf and the Hall of Odin. This time we went to the Field of Ullr near Gävle, an hour and a half's drive from Uppsala along the new shiny E4 motorway. (On the way we zipped across sites such as Sommaränge skog, excavated for the roadworks and previously covered in my blogging.)
Ullr is one of the old gods that were semi-forgotten in Snorri's day, and so doesn't figure prominently in extant…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2008
Yesterday I did 5.5 more man-hours of metal detecting at the "Hall of Odin" site in Västmanland with Per Vikstrand. No prehistoric finds: just a piece of a 15/16/17th century brass cooking pot.
Bob Lind's craziness is once more repeated uncritically by a local Scanian newspaper.
I had a nice chat with the panel of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast this morning. At 9 pm EST, i.e. 3 am local time. Which was not a very good idea, seeing as my wife was trying to sleep in the next room. But I think the show will be good. Hear Rebecca Watson say "Suckle the teat of the Mother Goddess"!…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2008
Had a beautiful day in the field with Per Vikstrand today. He has a new metal detector, a C-scope 1220R, and it seemed to work very well. Not that the stuff we found was terribly interesting: four man-hours in the Field of St. Olaf garnered us only a flint chip and a piece of slag apart from the perennial clay pipe stems and aluminium bottle tops.
4½ man-hours on a promising site near Sala got us only the above piece of an openwork strap mount. It does look like 3rd/4th/5th century to me, though. (As reconstructed, it would have measured 42 by 35 mm.) Our Sala site has great place names:…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2008
Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to be central locations in their districts, often lending their names to Medieval Christian parishes after the end of the pagan cult. Place-name scholars are uncertain about exactly what these sacred fields were used for, but it seems likely that they were the sites of seasonal rituals having to do with…