sweden
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2007In today's paper issue of main Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter is a news item headlined "Hobby Researcher Gives New Signs to Stones" (currently not available on-line, but here's another relevant piece). It relays a few statements from museologist Ewa Bergdahl of the Swedish National Heritage Board regarding the Ales stenar visitor's sign debacle. Bergdahl is head of the Heritage Tourism unit.
--There isn't just one single truth. This place is so incredibly more complex than previously believed, says Ewa Bergdahl, unit director at the National Heritage Board.
[...]
The Heritage Board has long…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2007
As discussed here in a recent entry, there has long been a conflict over Ales stenar, a prehistoric stone ship monument in Scania, southern Sweden. Scholarship has argued that like all other large stone ships in southern Scandinavia with ample space between the standing stones, Ales stenar was built as a grave marker (or perhaps assembly site) in the late 1st Millennium AD. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed the date. On the other hand, amateur archaeo-astronomer Bob Lind has led a vociferous campaign asserting that the ship is several thousand years older than that and originally built as a…
aardvarchaeology | July 19, 2007
For years and years, there has been an on-going conflict over Ales stenar, a prehistoric stone ship monument in Scania, southern Sweden. Scholarship has argued that like all other large stone ships in southern Scandinavia with ample space between the standing stones, Ales stenar was built as a grave marker in the late 1st Millennium AD. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed the date. On the other hand, amateur archaeo-astronomer Bob Lind has led a vociferous campaign asserting that the ship is several thousand years older than that and originally built as a calendarical observatory. People have…
aardvarchaeology | July 16, 2007
Without much fanfare, the Department of Archaeology in Lund continues its excavations at the insanely large and wealthy 1st Millennium settlement at Uppåkra parish church outside Lund. This place was clearly a royal seat and the finds are unbelievably rich both in number and quality. A week-by-week fieldwork diary in Swedish is available here, and that's where I've nicked the photographs of gold finds from recent weeks: one of two gold bracteates and a gold filigree cross pendant, all dating from c. AD 500. The two new bracteates are identical to each other and to one found at the site and…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2007
Last night to Tantogården in Stockholm, an outdoor concert venue a stone's throw from the hospital where my son was born, to hear Pugh Rogefeldt. As the long-term Dear Reader may remember, Mr Rogefeldt released Ja dä ä dä, one of the first and still among the very best Swedish psychedelic rock albums ever, back in 1969 when he was 22. The evening promised not only songs from Ja dä ä dä, but those songs played by the same band as on the record, with Jojje Wadenius on solo guitar and Jan Carlsson on drums, with the addition of Ulf Jansson on bass. Pugh played rhythm guitar and sang.
With two…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2007Starting in 2004, the Department for Zionist Activities of the World Zionist Organization has given the annual Herzl Awards to "outstanding young men and women in recognition of their exceptional efforts on behalf of Israel and the Zionist cause". One of the prize-winners for 2006 is Swedish 26-y-o Ted Ekeroth, who was rewarded for his activities in Fidim, the Society for Israel and Democracy in the Middle East.
After giving the award to Ekeroth, the WZO realised that their net had caught a somewhat unusual breed of young political activist. Ekeroth turned out to be a core member of…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2007As mentioned here before, Stockholm osteology professor Ebba During died in May. Her colleagues have now sent me an appreciation as a guest entry.
[More blog entries about archaeology, obit, obituary, Sweden, osteology, ebbaduring; arkeologi, dödsruna, osteologi, ebbaduring]
In Loving Memory of Professor Ebba During, 21.8 1937 - 15.05 2007
By Anna Kjellström and colleagues
Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory
University of Stockholm
Colleagues and friends at the department of Archaeology and Classical studies at the University of Stockholm are saddened by Ebba During's death on the 15th…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2007Here's something for my fellow burial aficionados to ponder. The news item's headline is overstated ("Woman Grieved for Seven Years at Empty Grave"), but the actual occurrence is kind of interesting.
A Gothenburg woman grieved for seven years at her mother's grave, but the urn with the mother's remains had never left the crematory.
"This shouldn't be allowed to happen. That's why you turn to an undertaker's, otherwise I could have done the work myself", says the woman to Swedish Radio Gothenburg.
An urn should by rights be buried within the year. At crematories, urns occasionally remain for…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2007[More blog entries about hiking, Sweden, Norway, mountains; fjällvandra, Sverige, Norge, Dalarna.]
Spent Monday through Wednesday on a trip to Lake Grövelsjön in the mountainous northwesternmost corner of Dalecarlia province. The lake is sausage-shaped with one end in Sweden and the other in Norway. On Tuesday my wife and I hiked around it, a walk of 25-30 km involving the ascent and descent of 250 m heights -- twice, as we touched down to the valley floor at the far end of the lake. Most of the time we were above the treeline at about 980 m over sea level.
The area is right in the middle…
aardvarchaeology | July 3, 2007[More blog entries about architecture, history, Sweden, Victorian; arkitektur, historia, oscariansk, Wallenberg, Saltsjöbaden.]
The area where I grew up once belonged to the village of Neglinge, a group of small holdings on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago. The nearby inlet was briefly used as a harbour by a foreign fleet in the High Middle ages, but apart from that, Neglinge didn't really make the news until the 1890s. A Stockholm banker, Knut Agaton Wallenberg (whose family still rules the Swedish economy), bought the area in 1891 and turned it into a summer resort for his…
aardvarchaeology | July 2, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Mesolithic, forestfire; arkeologi, mesolitikum, Tyresta, skogsbrand.]
Spent Friday working for my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell, digging on one of their Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve south of Stockholm. It's an incredible place. Imagine:
An archipelago with lots of little rocky islands, located far from the coast of the mainland and teeming with seals. Mesolithic people go there in kayaks to hunt at certain times of the year, bringing chunks of rock for toolmaking. At their camps, they knap it into arrowheads,…
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2007Last week a mentally ill man shot one policeman to death and hurt three other people when they came to apprehend him in his home in the Swedish town of Nyköping. This is a very rare and shocking occurrence in Sweden, where gun control is such that most people have never seen a handgun. Wednesday, an opinion piece about the case appeared in the main Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. It was written by two senior psychiatrists, Henrik Belfrage and Göran Fransson, both of whom have examined the killer in the past. What they had to say is quite remarkable, and so I decided to translate a few bits…
aardvarchaeology | June 27, 2007
My friend Lars at Arkland always comes through with ace photographs when I ask for them. Here's a pic he took in 1995 when a landowner at Vittene in Västergötland had come forth with an Early Iron Age gold torque he had kept in a closet for many years. In this picture, our late colleague Ulf Viking is wearing a makeshift rain coat made of a black plastic garbage bag, ready to search for more parts of the hoard. Read more here!
Dear Reader, feel free to follow Lars example and send me archaeopix! Just tell me a few words about what's in the pic to aid my dull understanding.
aardvarchaeology | June 26, 2007Here's some geology for a change.
At Slättemossa in the province of Småland, southern Sweden, are found ice-polished outcrops of orbicular diorite ("Napoleonite"). This rock consists of granite balls covered with hornblende and other minerals and then encased in a granite matrix. When the inland ice ground the rock down, a smooth grey surface covered in darker circles resulted. Pretty striking, as seen in the photographs by Anders Möller! Anders and Inger are badass geocachers, having found nearly 1400 caches and hidden more than 200.
Visit the site at N57° 22.930 E15° 36.100. It's not far…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007I've checked the literature and found out what really happened in the Goldhahn vs. Berntsson fight about barrow-building. Of course, whatever the result, it would have left the Lund Archaeological Review editors looking bad.
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2007
Longtime Dear Readers may remember me blogging about the excavations in my friend Jan Peder's garden last summer. Beside his house is a ruin mound full of heavily burnt and vitrified Medieval-style bricks, and he's gotten funds together to do some excavations there. The original idea was that the feature might be the remains of a defensive tower or other aristocratic building. Last year's work established that it was in fact the remains of a brick kiln, which is also evidence of somebody powerful in the vicinity. 16th century pottery found inside the kiln gives the latest possible date for…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2007Me and my Internet Service Provider go way back. I got my account with algonet.se in early 1995 and put up my still current web site there after a few months. I've been using my e-mail address there as my main one ever since, publishing it indiscriminately all over the web and UseNet, and still I don't get too much spam.
Algonet is a legacy domain. There is no longer an ISP by that name: the domain and its user accounts have passed from ISP to ISP and are currently handled by an outfit called Glocalnet. Since new Algonet accounts haven't been issued for years, I guess us users are a dwindling…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line):
"Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2007Here's a translation of one of my first brushes with absurdism, Swedish rocker Eddie Meduza's 70s song "Va den grön så får du en ny" (original lyrics here with ugly popups).
If It Was Green, Then I'll Replace It
By Eddie Meduza
I'd bought myself a vacuum flask
In a store down in Målilla
It was real pretty until I poured coffee into it
But then it broke into pieces
So I called Mr. Chin
He's the man with the store
(You see, he's got a really big chin)
And I told him, my flask is busted
Do they come with a guarantee?
Yeah, said Mr. Chin, gravelly and really slowly
He was speaking really slowly…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2007[More blog entries about psychedelic, fairground, carousel, zoo, Sweden; psykedelia, Eskilstuna, parkenzoo, karusell, zoo.]
Invited by my wife's employers we spent the day at Parken Zoo, a highly original amusement park outside Eskilstuna, an hour and a half by car from my country seat. Originally a Folkets Park (People's Park) established by the victorious early 20th century Labour movement, it has a great big stage, two dance halls, much greenery and loads of bronze sculpture, including a bust of Hjalmar Branting right at the entrance. Since that time, it has also acquired a full…