migration period
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2014Pompeii situations, where daily life at a settlement has suddenly and catastrophically been terminated and the site has then been abandoned, are extremely rare and extremely informative. As has recently been discovered, the Sandby fortified settlement on the island of Öland offers a Pompeii situation from about AD 500. The settlement has been attacked, its inhabitants killed or abducted, and then the aggressors just closed the doors and never came back, leaving their victims and all their considerable wealth still inside the houses.
So far the Kalmar County Museum's excavations at Sandby have…
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…