sweden
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2007My friendly colleague Claes Pettersson heads excavations in Jönköping, a town in Småland. His team is working with 17th-century urban layers in a part of town that was laid out and settled by royal decree starting in the 1620s. Here are his pics of a few cool finds.
A shard from a painted window.
Part of a sword hilt, decorated with sweet non-sword-wielding little putti. (This piece is going to be sooo pretty after conservation.)
A baker's mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. In modern times, there has arisen a tradition to eat cake bearing the king's image on the anniversary of his…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2007Need archaeological illustrations? Need someone to design your excavation report, PhD dissertation, tourist folder? Then check out my buddy Göran Werthwein's web site!
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2007
As discussed here repeatedly before, the eastern coast of Sweden is in continual flux because of post-glacial shoreline displacement. Since the inland ice melted away and relieved its pressure on the land over 10 000 years ago, the dent made by the ice has been rebounding: first very quickly, then slower and slower. This land upheaval is however only half the explanation for where the shoreline has been at a certain time: the water level in the Baltic basin has also varied. This means that while the general trend has been for the shoreline to recede, there have been periods when it has stood…
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2007Jean François Revel once wrote, "Let there be no discussion about methods except by those who make discoveries".
As may have become apparent at one time or another on this blog, I don't share a number of the ideals prevalent in current academic archaeology in Sweden. Post-modernism has become unfashionable, so my resistance to that movement is no longer very controversial. But my disdain for "theoretical archaeology" is still something that sets me apart from many university-based colleagues. Now, most archaeologists are not university-based, so my opinions are in fact in tune with the…
aardvarchaeology | October 23, 2007
I've never understood the point of bars or night life. Most people seem to go to bars and night clubs to meet their friends, get drunk and possibly get laid. I don't drink, from a very early age I've been in steady relationships with vigorous women, I see my friends on-line or at our respective kitchen tables, and I get really sleepy around midnight. So night life has nothing to offer me.
I was once single for eight months, which meant that I did have to do something to get laid. But what took care of that certainly wasn't my exploration of clubs: I hooked up with women everywhere except in…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2007
Mats P. Malmer in 1989, holding a miniature replica of a Bronze Age sword. Photograph by Dr Rune Edberg, published with kind permission.
Yesterday, 18 October, was Swedish archaeology professor Mats P. Malmer's 86th birthday. Sadly he passed away on 3 October. I wrote a brief appreciation when I heard the news. Here's a longer one by Anders Andrén and Evert Baudou, both professors of archaeology and members (like Malmer himself) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Andrén is the current holder of Malmer's chair in Stockholm, having succeeded the man's successor Åke Hyenstrand. I've…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2007
Per Widerström called me today and told me he'd just found a picture stone. This is breaking news, mainstream media not yet alerted. Photographs courtesy of the finder, and I hope to get some shots in horizontal lighting too where the relief scenes will be visible.
Scandinavian 1st Millennium art isn't very rich in figural scenes, focusing more on abstract or heavily stylised decorative motifs. But the picture stones of Gotland form an exception. Starting in the 5th century and surviving into the 12th, this tradition offers a rare peek into the mythology of eastern Scandinavia, far from the…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2007Freedom of religion wasn't formally codified in Sweden until 1952, but for decades Swedish law has forbidden religious teachings in schools. Children are required to attend a government-approved school, and one of the criteria for approval is no religion. This of course refers to the teaching of religion, not teaching about religion: comparative religion studies replaced the subject "Christianity" on the syllabi of Swedish primary schools and high schools in 1969 and still remains. In recent years, however, privately run schools have proliferated in Sweden, many of them backed by religious…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2007
My part-time employer, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has been publishing books for over two centuries and rents a huge storage space for books in central Stockholm. Most of the stock isn't moving very fast. In fact, a lot of it hasn't moved at all since Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.
Storage is expensive. The Academy now feels that a lot of the funds devoted to storing these old books would be better used in, for instance, scanning the books and putting them on-line for free.
On Saturday 27 October, the Academy's book store is opened to the public, and most of the books will be…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2007
A letter sent to me on 8 October. I translate:
I write to you because of the sword find I had the opportunity to watch on ABC-nytt together with my mother. [...]
Please take the following for what it is worth. As it touches upon the sword you found, I write to you and leave it to you to handle the information.
My mother, N.N., has the second sight, reads cards and receives images out of the lives of people. Apart from the future, she also sees images from the past. [...] To a skeptic and academic, this may sound like complete nonsense. I am an academic myself [...] I must also emphasise that…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2007
Peps Persson is both one of Sweden's heaviest blues men and the single most authoritative reggae artist the country's produced. The sleeve of his 1975 hit album Hög standard parodies the sleeve from a likewise excellent ABBA album released earlier the same year. Yet the music is intricate studio-built stuff, far from the lo-fi live aesthetic popular with Swedish lefties at the time (who hated ABBA as a matter of political principle).
The album is sung entirely in a broad Scanian dialect, including a charming cover of Bob Marley's "Stir It Up". That song's Scanian lyrics are cheerfully lewd…
aardvarchaeology | October 9, 2007Yesterday by train to Gothenburg with the Djurhamn sword sitting in its package on the hat rack above my head. I spent much of the trip in the pleasant company of the Realm's Herald, numismatist Dr Henrik Klackenberg, who happened to be on his way to a church excavation near Skara where he was going to classify newfound coins.
In sunny Gothenburg I caught a ride with a soft-spoken Kurdish taxi driver to Gamlestaden, the site of a 15/16th century predecessor of Gothenburg, currently an industrial suburb, where Studio Västsvensk Konservering resides in a refurnished textile plant. Here I was…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2007
My number one archaeological hero, professor Mats Peterson Malmer, died on 3 October aged 86 minus 15 days. I knew him a little starting in the mid-90s, read most of what he ever wrote with avidity, sent him most of what I wrote, tweaked bits of some work of his in a paper published only months ago. When I was a green PhD student feeling miserable under the post-modernist orthodoxy at the Stockholm archaeology department, his 1984 Fornvännen paper "Arkeologisk positivism" came as a revelation to me.
Leif Gren took the above pic at Mats's 80th birthday party: Mats is showing myself and my…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2007Monday's entry about the Djurhamn sword rocketed up the lists at the social bookmarking sites, and so Wednesday became the best day for traffic ever here at Aard. On an average day in the third quarter of this year, the blog saw about 650 unique visitors. For Wednesday, the number was 52,200. Someone to whom I owe thanks submitted the entry to Digg -- under the heading "Offbeat News", the section for entertainingly shaped carrots and blurry phonecam clips of poor dear Britney Spears' genitalia.
Looking at sites that linked to the entry, I soon found with some amusement that the whole thing…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2007
Today we finished fieldwork at the find spot of the sword I wrote about yesterday. Sieved 5 sqm without a single non-recent find, but the only way to know is to sieve. My dad came out with a pulley and removed the hazel stump that had been sitting on the sword, so we're pretty damn sure there wasn't anything else of interest within the confines of that trench.
Immediately outside the trench, though, began a quay foundation, taking the form of a straight c. 20 m long stensträng, a line of stone blocks, at a right angle to the incline. You can see it as a diagonal from top left to bottom…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2007
Happy Djurhamn project co-directors Katarina Schoerner and August Boj.
Aided by many volunteers and using tools borrowed from my dad and the Stockholm County Museum, I've spent the day getting the Djurhamn sword out of the ground.
I found the sword on 30 August while metal detecting around the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings. Today we marked out a 2.5 by 2.0 metre trench around the sword, got rid of a lot of vegetation, dug and sieved 2.5 square metres and got the sword out. Its point was wedged between the roots of a large hazel bush, so I only got it out in one piece thanks to its excellent…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2007
Two weeks ago when I worked for Thomas Englund and Bo Knarrström at the 1719 battlefield on Skogsö, I came across a variant on a type of archaeological site that I've blogged about before. A site where children have built and abandoned something, but this time it wasn't a tree house ruin: to me it looks more like the remains of an outdoor gym built by the cub scouts who periodically camp in a nearby house. You know, chin-ups and stuff.
To this end, the kids nailed and tied horizontal spires to trees, clumsily and with very little regard for the trees' well-being. While they were at it, they…
aardvarchaeology | September 27, 2007From today's issue of free subway paper Metro, I translate:
Hey there...
... Martin Rundkvist, 35, the archaeologist who has found a unique 16th century sword in the woods.
How did you make the find -- through cutting-edge methods?
-- I sat down in the lotus position and took in the vibrations with my astral antennae.
Astral antennae?
-- You've got to have long hair to take in the vibes. All hair dressers are paid by the government to cut off the astral antennae. They've got a hidden agenda, them hair dressers.
Really? So, how many lives do you think the sword has taken?
-- Well, it really…
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2007
Found an early-16th century officer's sword at the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings. I tried to keep it quiet, but now the mainstream media want my ass. I'm seeing the County Archaeologist about an excavation permit this afternoon. More anon.
Media coverage: Metro, Radio Skaraborg, SVT, ABC-nytt, Radio Stockholm, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Östgöta Correspondenten, Jönköpingsposten, you tell me what else please.
[More blog entries about archaeology, history, Sweden, swords, 16thcentury; arkeologi, historia, Djurö, Värmdö, svärd, 1500-talet.]
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2007The excruciatingly witty and multi-talented David Nessle has been alerted by his erudite father to a long enthusiastic article about cannabis in the classic Swedish 1909 dictionary Nordisk Familjebok (uggleupplagan). This dictionary was in every home with any pretentions to literacy and social respectability. A stoner among the dictionary's contributors, pharmacology professor Oskar Teodor Sandahl (1829-1894), has clearly done a lot of pot to be able to report the way he does (note that he mentions the munchies), and the editorial board has then felt it proper to devote an entire page to the…