sweden
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2007
Here's something for the gearheads.
At home, we've got a permanent Comhem broadband fiber connection offering 10 Mb/s down & up. Its actual performance is about 9 down and 10 up, which is OK. I like to have a swift uplink since I send a lot of large files and keep my data on a DAV server for easy access from the four computers I work with. This, to the majority who have never heard of a DAV server, means that with a slow uplink, it would take a lot of time for me to save my work when I press CTRL-S.
(A funny thing about permanent internet cabling in Swedish apartment houses is that its…
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2007Two pieces of news to illustrate the state of the academic labour market in Swedish archaeology.
The good news is that an old coursemate of mine has secured a teaching job. He's 46, he completed his PhD in 1999, he's got a decent publication record, he has solid teaching experience and he has unusually ample formal training in university pedagogics.
The bad news is that the job he has been given is 30% of full time ... limited to a period of four months ... in a city located 580 km from where he lives with his wife.
Dear Reader, are you by any chance a professional academic? Would somebody…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2007
Yet another piece of news about Bob Lind's most recent archaeoastronomical caper (previously covered here and here).
The Scania County Archaeologist has had an independent contractor assess and document the damage done to an Early Iron Age cemetery by Lind and former geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The men's interventions will be repaired and the site's protected area will be enlarged, but no charges will be pressed. It's an unusual case as Lind made his unauthorised interference with the site known through a press release!
Here are a few choice quotations from contract archaeologist…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2007
Responding to my call for archaeopix, Dear Reader Kristi offers us two pages out of her June 2005 travel journal, recording a visit to Björkö / Birka, site of Sweden's first town c. AD 770-970. Explains Kristi:
"I sketched the things that made an impression on me, from the island and the Birkamuseet. [...] Art journaling, such as that in my scan, is very popular as a means of documenting amateur archaelogical, historical, and biological interests"
News to me, though I'd heard of scrapbooking which seems to be somewhat similar. Any more art journalers or scrapbookers around here? Somebody…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2007Yesterday myself & Junior met up with Paddy K. Sr. & Jr. and went to Cybertown, a laser-game place in central Stockholm. Here we paid SEK 60 ($11) per head and donned vests with laser sensors and attached laser guns, forming Team Blue. Teams Red and Yellow each consisted of five ten-year-olds, and Team Green was a dad and his daughter. Then we entered a blacklit dry-ice-smoking dark labyrinth and spent 20 adrenaline-soaked minutes happily sniping at teams Red, Yellow and Green. We won! Not very surprising, given that our team was the only one with two dads. Individually, though, Green…
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2007This is really great. Everybody else has realised that Bob Lind's new "discovery" was a canard. But today, local paper Ystad Allehanda's credulous reporter nevertheless conveys the man's ideas that
Standing stones are unlikely to mark cemeteries. (They are in fact enormously common in early-to-mid-1st Millennium AD cemeteries in Sweden.)
Many of the stones in the new cemetery Lind has been spinning his astronomical yarns about hardly protrude above the turf. The reason, he says, is that the ground level in the meadow has somehow risen 80 cm since the stones were put in place, and nearly…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2007
The Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm has recently completed a new permanent exhibition about Swedish prehistory. It was planned under the stewardship of the controversial Kristian Berg, a non-archaeologist whose attitude to the museum placed in his care may be summarised as politically expedient, instrumental and post-modernist.
I haven't seen the new exhibition, and so can't have any opinion of my own about it. But I am not surprised to find that it is getting some very bad press, and with a recurring theme. This exhibition is asking questions and not providing any answers.
"...…
aardvarchaeology | December 11, 2007Here's another snippet from my on-going book project. Context: I've surveyed the central-place indicators of the Late Roman Period (AD 150-400) in Östergötland, and now I'm moving into the book's main period of study from AD 400 onward, starting with an evaluation of the Migration Period hillforts. Are they useful for my present king-chasing purposes?
A somewhat relevant site type in the search for Migration Period elite settlements is the hillfort, of which Östergötland has many. They appear to have about the same date distribution as the field walls (Late Roman and Migration Periods), but…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2007
An album I can really recommend is LA quartet OK Go's 2005 disc Oh No. It's catchy, glammy rock with swagger and brains and decadence, recorded in Sweden and beautifully produced by Tore Johansson and the mighty Lindgård/Mopeds brothers. In addition to them kicking ass musically, the band's lyrics (by Damian Kulash) are unusually poetic and literate. Dear Reader, I bring you the lyrics to the delicious "Oh Lately It's So Quiet", which are sung in a bedroom falsetto by the hugely talented Mr Kulash.
Oh Lately It's So Quiet
By Damian Kulash of OK Go
Oh, lately it's so quiet in this place
You'…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2007
Bob Lind chalking some apparently quite genuine cupmarks, a ubiquitous type of Bronze Age rock art.
Alternative archaeoastronomer Bob Lind (note that I do not call him an unhinged man with crackpot theories) felt himself vindicated this past summer by the Swedish Heritage Board. On a set of new visitors' signs, the Board didn't actually endorse Lind's alternative interpretation of the stone ship of Ales stenar, but the signs recounted his ideas alongside the scholarly consensus interpretation without taking a stand on the issue. This was enough to make Lind a very happy man.
Now, local…
aardvarchaeology | December 7, 2007This 88-page booklet by Åsa Virdi Kroik is named "You'd rather lose your head than turn in your drum". The title refers to shamanic drums among the Saami. The book is based on an MA thesis in the history of religion defended at the University of Stockholm in 2006. Reading it, I soon realised that it can't simply be evaluated from a scholarly point of view: this is at heart also an ethno-political tract. I'll comment on the political aspects first and then on the scholarly ones.
For the non-Scandy reader, I should explain that the Saami are a sub-Arctic indigenous minority in Norway, Sweden,…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2007
A long-time friend of my parents wrote me a letter recently, telling me that she'd found something unusual in her late mother's jewellery box. Today I visited her and had a look.
It's a small cast copper-alloy crucifix, darkly patinated, with a semi-obliterated image of the crucified Christ incised onto the front surface. The piece is made like a box, hollow on the back side, with loops at the top and bottom as if it had originally been joined to a back piece. Its dimensions are 82 by 45 by 5 mm, length 70 mm if you disregard the loops.
The crucifix has no provenance, and its owner can only…
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2007Today, the Swedish Skeptics Society celebrated its 25th anniversary with an afternoon seminar in Stockholm. I've been a member since 1997, a co-editor of the society's journal Folkvett since 2002 and a board member since 2004. The >2000-member society is Sweden's nearest equivalent of CSI (formerly CSICOP), but it has certain unusual traits. For one thing, its Swedish name, Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning, says nothing about either skepticism nor the paranormal. It simply means "The Society for Science and Popular Enlightenment". (Folkbildning, a word first documented in 1805, is…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2007Professor Åke Hyenstrand, chair of archaeology at the University of Stockholm from 1988 to 20013, died on Wednesday 28 November, aged 68. He was mainly known for his large-scale analyses of the Swedish sites and monuments register and for studies of late-1st Millennium political organisation. A characteristic piece of his work is the 1978 opinion paper "Fornminnesinventering, kulturminnesvård och arkeologisk samhällsforskning" ("Site surveying, heritage management and archaeological social science", with an abstract in English).
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, obit,…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2007Back in June I posted a translation of a remarkable opinion piece written by two senior psychiatrists, commenting on their examination of a mentally ill man who had just committed his second murder. Today the papers report that Socialstyrelsens Rättsliga råd ("The judicial council of the social directorate") has found the man insufficiently crazy to qualify for forced psychiatric treatment. This is bad news, because it means that he will likely be sentenced to jail, and Swedish jail terms for murder being surprisingly brief, he will probably be out again before long.
As I've written before,…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2007From about 1845 to 1930, Sweden saw massive emigration to the United States. According to one estimate, about a third of the country's population left. In 1900, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Gothenburg. Many factors conspired to send people on their way: population expansion, a lack of agricultural land, failed crops, economic recession, and the simple pull of the virtual population vacuum beyond the American frontier, the pull of enormous opportunity, as industrialised Europeans encountered the Stone Age societies of the native Americans.
The emigration left its share of…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2007
The other day, I started writing my Östergötland book in earnest, and I'm really enjoying myself. Here's a snippet of today's work.
The oldest known territorial unit in Östergötland is the härad district (etymologically, "army council"), of which the province originally had eighteen. This division is generally taken to have been established at a single event in the Viking Period. There is little evidence to allow us to date that event closer, and it may have taken place after AD 1000 [the end-point of the period under study]. Most likely the härad division event had something to do with the…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia's main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it's been issued quarterly. I've been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal's editors since 1999.
I'm very proud to announce that the first 100 volumes of Fornvännen are now available freely on the web! Roughly 3000 PDF files including complete scans, illustrations and all, and searchable text! The site has an excellent search & browse engine.
Most papers in the journal are in Scandinavian…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks that nobody ever opens. Impressive work!
The excavation of the Trädgårdsmästaren block in Sigtuna 1988-90 hasn't yet been published, but the dig is of tremendous archaeological value since it covered 1100 square meters and spans about 270 years, from the founding of the town in the late 10th centiry…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007Maritime archaeologists have found what may be the first Viking ship, or at least some wreckage, in the Lake Mälaren area. A T-sectioned multi-meter timber looking a lot like a keel lies half-buried in the culture layer on the lakefloor just off the proto-town of Birka on Björkö.
Thanks to Hans of Du är vad du läser for the heads-up.
Update 17 November: More details here.