sweden
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2007
Swedish young skankers Seizure City are a new outfit with the Clash and the Skatalites looming large in their pedigree. Reedy kickass singer Tanja knows her glottal stops and is an archaeologist's daughter. Let's hope the band takes off so she can have a proper career in the music business instead of sliding back into the seedy gloom of the contract excavations!
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2007
Friday last week I did some met-det for Thomas Englund and Bo Knarrström at the 1719 battlefield at Baggensstäket on Skogsö, of which I've blogged before. This time I was directed to a hillside that had seen heavy musket fire. I may not have had much balls when I came there, but I certainly did when the day's work was done, before I handed my finds over to the guys. Above is an intact 1719 musket ball, either dropped by a shaky soldier or fired into soft earth. Below is a ball that has hit a rock. Getting hit by one of those 15 mm lead spheres was not an enjoyable experience, but at least…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2007
Here are the fruits of my ten hours of metal detecting in Kaga while Immo and Per mucked around with the magnetometer Wednesday and Thursday.
Top left is a spool-shaped copper-alloy handle, cast around a slim iron rod that's broken off at the lower end. There's indistinct cast relief decoration on the handle, and its shape and size are identical to those of 11th century key handles. These keys are L-shaped with prongs toward the end of the horizontal rod.
The next thingie is also a handle, belonging to a key or an ear scoop. El Cheapo openwork decoration typical of the 10th century, where…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2007Originally posted 19 September from my handheld via the cell network and e-mail to my old site.
Drove to Linköping this morning listening to the Digital Planet podcast, M Coast's latest album and a Povel Ramel hits collection. On site in Kaga I was greeted by my friendly National Heritage Board colleages Immo Trinks and Per Karlsson. They were busy assembling Scandinavian archaeology's first motorised magnetometer setup, and informed me that my site would see the equipment's first non-trial run.
The setup consists of a long trailer made of aluminium and held together by bronze and plastic…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2007My friend Howard Williams of the University of Exeter touched down at Arlanda airport in Sweden a couple of hours ago. He's here for a few weeks of study and also giving talks at four archaeology departments. Good stuff for all friends of the Dark Ages!
Wednesday 19th September, 13.00
University of Stockholm
'Memories in Miniature: New Perspectives on Artefacts and Commemoration in Early Medieval Britain c. 450-850 AD'
Thursday 20th September, 10.15
University of Uppsala
'The Archaeology of Early Medieval Commemoration'
Wednesday 26th September, 15.00
University of Lund
'The Archaeology of…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2007
Up until a thousand years ago, almost all buildings in Scandinavia through the ages had roof-supporting posts dug into the ground. Postholes are lovely things: they're deep enough for at least the bottom end to survive heavy ploughing, they trap a lot of interesting stuff while a house is being built - lived in - torn down, and their layout across the site lets you reconstruct the building in great detail.
When you machine off the ploughsoil from a site and find a posthole building foundation, it is common to mark the postholes with coloured sticks, paper plates or shaving foam and…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2007
Olof Eriksson skotkonungr (c. 980-1021) is the first man of whom historical sources of adequate quality tell that he managed to get himself elected king of both the Götar and the Svear. These tribal groups had previously been organised separately, and thus Olof may fairly be seen as the first king of Sweden as we know it.
Olof's main power base was the town of Sigtuna between Stockholm and Uppsala, founded by his father King Erik as a Christian replacement for the pagan trading post on Björkö (Biaerkey, latinicised Birca). Sigtuna was the site of Sweden's first known mint, where English…
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2007
Last night's blogmeet was even better than the previous one: more people, some lady bloggers, some archaeologists and all presided over by Prof. Steve Steve. The professor was in a wild mood and immediately upon arriving did something indescribable with a large tabasco bottle, claiming that this was "good for his posture". Kind of disconcerting to have a conversation with a senior academic boasting that kind of... accommodation skills while he's... on the bottle.
Missing from the picture are myself (holding the camera) and Lars L of Arkland (who ended up outside the frame because it was too…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2007Hot on the heels of my paean to the Stockholm Sluice, here's something about the Hornsgatan street in Stockholm. Be warned, though: this work has been deemed substandard by the Swedish editor of Vice Magazine.
HORNSGATAN
By Martin Rundkvist, 19 March 2007
Hornsgatan, the Street of the Horn, used to be Stockholm's Wild West. It starts sedately enough at the 17th century South Town Hall but then ploughs straight through the churchyard of St. Mary, the bones of poets and burghers flying. Gathering speed, it passes Marijuana Square (as St. Mary's square was known in the 70s) and shoots off west…
aardvarchaeology | September 6, 2007My blog has so far landed me one paid writing assignment, and today I got a copy of the mag where it was published. Sort of.
Vice Magazine is a wannabe-controversial fashion mag. Its June issue has a glue-huffing teen boy on the cover and there are web-cam boob pics inside. You get the picture. They commissioned me to write two 700-word pieces on a three-day deadline back in March. The topic was polluted places in Stockholm. I spent about one day's work on the job and they paid me peanuts after I nagged them. But it was fun to do a bit of real journalism.
Only they threw one of the pieces out…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2007The Liberal Party in my home municipality of Nacka has started a blog and kindly put local bloggers on their blog roll. They've tagged Aard "Extreme Archaeologist". I'm taking that as a compliment -- I mean, they aren't calling me "Archaeological Extremist".
As mentioned here before, Sweden's political spectrum is much wider than the US one. The United States' entire bipartisan system maps onto the conservative half of Sweden's parliament. We're currently governed by a conservative coalition, a rare occurrence in Sweden, but polls show that they actually lost the majority support shortly…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2007My friend and colleague Jonathan Lindström is a talented man. He started out as a teen amateur astronomer and local historian of his dad's coastal Estonian heritage, became a field archaeologist, then an ad copy-writer, then a museum staff writer and artist, and now he's a freelance science writer and artist contracted by Sweden's largest publishing house.
Jonathan called me the other day and told me a new kids' book he's been telling me about had come from the printers. It's named Dödshuset. Mysteriet från stenåldern, "The House of Death: a Stone Age mystery", and it's all about a contract…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2007One of the brightest stars of Swedish literature is Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795). Much of his work is a kind of humorous beat poetry set to music, chronicling the lives of Stockholm drunkards and whores. Central themes are boozing, sex and death.
"You think the grave's too deep?
Well then, have a drink
Then have another two and another three
That way you'll die happier"
"A girl in the green grass and wine in green glasses
I feast on both, both gather me to their bosom
Let's have some more resin on the violin bow!"
But Bellman wasn't strictly speaking part of the underworld he wrote about…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2007
When someone dies their ID card and on-line banking code-dongle are destroyed to prevent identity theft. Their signature dies with them, so that's not a problem. In the past, people with a bit of money and influence had seal matrices filling the function of all these things. They "signed" documents by affixing wax seals to them, stamped with their unique design. And when the owner of a seal died, the matrix was generally destroyed and then molten for scrap or buried with him.
For this reason, Medieval seal matrices are rare finds, and when they do turn up they tend to be in pieces. But…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2007
Lund
Alsengems are little multilayered button-like discs of coloured glass with incised human stick-figures on one side. Archaeology became aware of them in 1871 when one was found on the Danish island of Als. These gems are pretty coarse and ugly compared to the exquisite agate and intaglio ones of Classical antiquity, but they nevertheless have their place in an archaeologist's heart.
Sigtuna
On the Continent, Alsengems are found as part of church art of the 11th through 13th centuries such as reliquaries, book covers and altar crosses. Their core area is the Netherlands, Lower Saxony and…
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2007
My dad tried out his new motorboat recently, going with my extra mom from Stockholm around Scania to Gothenburg and then across the country through the Göta Canal to Norrköping and back north to Stockholm again. Passing through Lake Roxen he sought out Sättuna in Kaga parish on the lake's SW shore and took the above picture for me of the Sättuna barrow from the water. Below is a pic I took myself in September 2006. I want to radiocarbon date that mutha before the resident badger trashes its innards completely!
I'm glad to have a picture of the site from the lake, as Sättuna means "the tuna…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2007The poet, philologist and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846) once wrote,
All bildning står på ofri grund till slutet
Blott barbariet var en gång fosterländskt
"All our learning must always stand on a slavish foundation
Barbarism is our single true heritage"
This was in the context of how nice Tegnér felt that the late-18th century reign of Gustaf III had been. This was somewhat controversial in the time of national romanticism, as the Gustavian era had been inescapably saturated by French cultural imperialism.
And Tegnér was right. As European countries go, Sweden was very late with all the…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2007
I've spent the day metal-detecting for a project called Vasakungarnas Djurhamn, that is, "Animal Harbour of the Sheaf Kings". This name may not make much sense to you, Dear Reader, so let me explain.
In the 1520s Gustaf Eriksson, the most successful of many ambitious young noblemen at the time who tended to end up decapitated, wrested Swedish royal power from the Danes with the aid of Lubeck. He soon implemented Reformation and used the riches of the church and monasteries to repay his debts and reorganise Sweden from the bottom up. A very good 2002 biography of the man has the subtitle "…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2007[More blog entries about photography, geocaching, Sweden, sightseeing; nacka, foto, sightseeing, geocaching.]
After my daughter went to bed I took GPS navigator and camera and rode my bike out past the golf course and into the woods to look for a new geocache only 1.5 kms from my home. Took some pix for y'all -- and found the cache.
Above is shown the main street of Fisksätra at sundown. Lots of people from all around the world taking an evening walk, kids hanging around, and near the camera Eddie the goldsmith and his tall girlfriend on their way out for a barbecue dinner by the lake.
Lake…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Mesolithic, Sweden; arkeologi, mesolitikum, jägarstenåldern, Stockholm.]
My old buddy from undergrad days, hard-core Mesolithic scholar, painter and woodsman Mattias Pettersson, sent me a pair of wonderful breathless letters on 19 and 21 July about new high-end discoveries. This is all about ancient seal-hunting camps in an area with dramatic shore displacement, which is why Mattias is so happy to get high -- 75 meters above current sea level! High means early here, so early that the top sites are pushing the chronological limit set by the last Ice Age. (…