sweden
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2007As an undergrad and PhD student in the 90s I heard a lot of rumours about the 1988-93 excavation of Gullhögen, a barrow in Husby-Långhundra parish between Stockholm and Uppsala. These rumours held that the barrow was pretty weird: built out of charcoal (!), unusually rich, and sitting on top of unusually rich Roman Period graves. Supposedly, someone was out here re-sieving spoil dumps to collect individual gold filigree grains.
Few really knew much about Gullhögen. In a 2001 Fornvännen paper, Kent Andersson could make only the briefest of mentions of some Roman glass and a gold ring found at…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2007
An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck's interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and quite impossible to ignore for anyone working in that field.
Writes Hagen Keller (and I translate):
"On 8 May Karl Hauck died, aged 90. He was the founder of the Institute for Early Medieval Studies and former…
zooillogix | June 7, 2007Sweden has won the first ever European Bombina Song Contest, in what is surely Europe's most sparsely attended Idol spinoff. Indigenous to the lowlands of Northern Europe, the fire-bellied toad or Bombina bombina is an endangered species that has attracted a small but fanatically loyal fan club of zoologists and ecologists. To bring attention to their conservation efforts, the German organization Stiftung Naturshutz, roughly translated as 'Give Us Money for Nature,' organized a bombina song contest. The heated contest between Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Latvia was fraught with centuries old…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007
Dear Reader -- let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to the Strawberry Parking Lot.
For the past century and a half, the naming of Swedish places has largely been taken out of the people's hands and regulated by the authorities. New names of big important places are no longer negotiated organically among those who talk about them. Instead, county and municipal planners tell people what to call a certain place. Thus a number of new names in my home area: Saltsjöbaden, Solsidan, Jarlaberg. Fine names handed down from on high, meaning "Salt Sea Bathing Resort", "Sunny Side" and "Earl's…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007Two fine crittergraphs from Felicia Gilljam, a prominent Swedish Secular Humanist. Both snapped in recent years in Grödinge parish near Stockholm.
Top, a slow worm (Anguis fragilis, Sw. kopparödla). Below, a Southern Hawker dragonfly (Aeshna cyanea, Sw. blågrön mosaikslända).
aardvarchaeology | June 5, 2007David Nessle is a Swedish comic artist, author, editor, translator, sf fan and blogger. His blog is without any serious competition the wittiest one I've encountered in the Swedish language, and I read it religiously. Recent themes of his blogging have been a Saami version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", an ongoing tiff among Swedish poets, amateurish 60s comics, small-town Swedish food packaging, what to do with all one's books, his collection of plastic action figures and classic dinosaur artist Zdenek Burian. Go read!
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007Since the last time we checked in with Kurtz back in March, those blackhearted deviants have released nine new songs on their web site. That's more than an LP's worth of original material in less than three months. Their sound has developed through the adoption of Garageband software. Fans of the Sisters, Joy Division and J&MC, get thee there for sordid kicks and ugly memories.
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007
Sweden has been going through a process of secularisation and de-Christianisation for more than half a century. In the same period, rural population figures have dwindled as people move to towns and cities to study and find jobs. One result of all this is that rural churches, of which there are thousands, see very few visitors these days. The non-conformist 20th century wooden ones are steadily becoming converted into summer houses or torn down in most parts of Sweden. However, of the parish churches belonging to what was until recently the Protestant State Church of Sweden, only two were…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, ethnicity, saami, minorities, indigenouspeople; arkeologi, etnicitet, samer, minoriteter, urbefolkningar]
I got an inspiring question from Z at Enkla bloggen.
"Who made the rock carvings, hällristningar? Was it the Saami people?
Is this a sensitive matter? I've already asked several archaeologists but they haven't answered me."
Archaeology is fundamentally incapable of answering the question "who did this?" without the aid of written history. This is because everything we put into that question when we pose it is non-material, and the…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007Here's something cool. Google is attacking proposed Swedish wiretapping legislation.
"We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden's borders if the proposal goes through."
Good thing someone outside the country is reacting!
I don't know much about this issue, but I think Google may have misunderstood the situation. It may actually just be a question of how the Swedish authorities operate. Because all governments spy to some extent on their citizens. Only in Sweden and a few other countries…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007Two months ago my metal detecting team and I were visited in the field by the Swedish State Broadcasting company's TV science show for kids, Hjärnkontoret. They tell me they're running the story tonight, somewhere between 1830 and 1900 hours Swedish time. For those who choose to watch, it may be entertaining to know that minutes before the TV crew appeared on site, we found a 4th century ring made of a material we don't talk to the media about. So in the footage, everybody's quietly euphoric yet clamming up, while the TV people are being really thrilled to get to try out a metal detector and…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2007This year's issue of the Lund Archaeological Review reached me last week. It's the volume for 2005-2006, and most of the papers are dated 2005. Such a delay is no big deal in archaeology: our knowledge growth doesn't progress at the rate typical of the natural sciences.
What caught my attention in the new issue was three polemic pieces at the back of the volume. First there's another salvo in the war between my buddy Påvel Nicklasson and his erstwhile colleagues at the Jönköping County Museum. To the extent that I understand the conflict, what seems to have happened is that Dr. Nicklasson, a…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2007
The Swedish State Board of National Antiquities, Riksantikvarieämbetet, has been putting more and more useful things on-line in the past few years. The most recent addition is a blog in Swedish, K-bloggen, where a number of Aard readers and buddies of mine are writing some interesting stuff. Go, see, comment, learn the Swedish word for cultural resource management! Say after me please: "cull-TOUR-mil-yur-VOARD".
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007
Photograph from Per Dahlberg's blog.
Woah, I don't like the attrition rate among my colleagues right now. Magnus at Testimony of the Spade informs me that professor emerita Ebba During died on Tuesday 15 May after a battle with illness. Ebba was an osteologist, which means that like all Swedish bone people she combined the specialities of physical anthropology and animal osteology.
For years and years, Ebba taught osteology on the snug premises in Ulriksdal outside Stockholm made available by the archaeologist-king Gustavus VI Adolphus. Her manner was kindly and unassuming. Yet her published…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2007
One of the most recent additions to the on-line catalogue of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm is deliciously enigmatic. It's a little sandstone tablet (SHM 18011:100) measuring 73 by 60 mm, covered on both sides with vaguely script-like and architectonic graffitti. The edges are neatly notched, prompting a museum curator to suggest in the inventory notes that the tablet may have been intended as a yarn spool, nystvända. But no-one really knows.
The tablet was found by Sigurd Curman's team in 1919 during excavations among the ruins of the nunnery of Vreta in Östergötland. The…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2007I'm proof-reading pdf files of Fornvännen's summer issue, including a note I've written about the Kaga foil-figure die. It's full of ugly hyphenations, but contentwise it's OK. So I've put the file on-line here for all you guldgubbar fans.
Update 21 April '08: And here's the final printed version.
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, darkages, vendelperiod; arkeologi, vendeltiden, Östergötland, Linköping.]
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2007
Samian ware is beautiful reddish amber-coloured pottery, made in moulds and often decorated with figural reliefs. In recent times it has been given the Latin moniker terra sigillata. It was made in peripheral parts of the Roman Empire and rarely moved far beyond its borders. The Swedish finds can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Each find is alone in its respective province: Scania, Västergötland, Östergötland, Gotland...
Last Saturday, Pierre Petersson of the AHIMKAR blog led a guided tour of a 1st Millennium cemetery in Söderåkra parish, Småland, the province between Scania and…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, religion, vikings, vikingperiod, Scandinavia; arkeologi, religion, vikingar, vikingatiden.]
Thursday morning I stopped by the Royal Library in Stockholm and read a paper by Johan Callmer in the great big symposium volume concluding the Vägar till Midgård project ("Roads to Middle-earth"). I was mainly there to check what he had said about the above 8th century brooch from Åland, apparently depicting a headless quadruped. But I also found a couple of really good paragraphs on another issue toward the end. Unfortunately the camera in my handheld computer…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2007As I've mentioned before, quartz is a tricky material to make tools of. Quartz-tool production waste is very common on prehistoric sites in most of Sweden where flint is rare.
I just thought I should share one of the least attractive entries in the inventory of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm. This material was collected in 1971. I love it in all its absurdity.
31110. Botkyrka parish, Fittja farmstead 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, registered site 280
Workshop find? Quartz quarry? C. 70 kg collected quartz, of which some may be worked.
Seventy kilograms!
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2007
Using my friend Stefan's home-made illuminated drawing pulpit (tried & true), I've traced a photograph of the new-found Kaga foil-figure die to make it easier to understand the motif. The drawing will appear in a short paper in the summer issue of Fornvännen.