sweden
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2007
Stone architecture took off in Sweden from about AD 1100 onward, and we have quite a number of Romanesque-style churches preserved to various degrees. Many have been dated with dendrochronology.
I'm no friend of the Church, but I do like churches. And so I'm saddened to learn that Östergötland, the Swedish province subject to my on-going research, just lost one. Älvestad church caught fire Thursday afternoon and the fire left very little combustible material unburnt. Rural churches are a huge deal to their parishioners, and brave locals got hurt while trying to salvage stuff from the fire.…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2007
Dan, Kai, Thinker, Martin R, Paddy K, Tor, Martin C, Harald, Johnny.
Last night's blogmeet at Wirström's pub in Stockholm was a great success. Counting myself and Paddy K, we were nine guys eating and talking and drinking for hours. After a while we recruited three lovely daycare ladies who took our picture and entertained us.
Martin C had trouble finding our group at first because he was looking for a "great big cluster of geeks". I wonder if he meant that our cluster was too small or that we didn't look geeky enough. Our conversation was geeky though, covering endogenous retroviruses,…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2007A recent addition to the excellent Runeberg Project e-text repository is the 1931 re-issue of Sven Petter Bexell's 1819 work Hallands historia och beskrivning. It's a patriotic history and description of the province of Halland, a part of Sweden's southwest coast that belonged to Denmark for many centuries. Below is a fine example of just how fanciful early 19th century place-name scholarship and historical writing could be. Source-criticism hadn't really become a formalised set of techniques yet at this point.
"Already in the latter half of the ninth century, the Vikings of Halland,…
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2007
Inger Österholm died the night between Wednesday and Thursday after a long battle with illness. For over two decades, she was a driving force behind the Ajvide excavations on Gotland, where countless archaeology students from Stockholm and Visby received their first taste of fieldwork. Inger specialised in the Neolithic of Gotland, as seen in her seminal 1989 doctoral thesis, Bosättningsmönstret på Gotland under stenåldern. She was a tireless teacher, fieldworker and university administrator, and always very good to me during my post-grad work with Gotland's largest 1st Millennium cemetery.…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2007My buddy Lars Lundqvist, long-time regular Dear Reader and contributor of excellent archaeopix, started a blog three weeks ago: Arkland. It's in Swedish, it's finely illustrated, and it's mainly about Swedish archaeology. Yes, this is the guy who did all those cool digs at Slöinge, Vittene and Saleby. Go have a look and write a comment or two!
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2007
Dagens Nyheter reports that the Stockholm University Library has seen some pretty bad vandalism. Yesterday morning it was discovered that someone had disconnected the drain-pipe from an upstairs washbasin and opened the taps to the max. Several cubic meters of water flooded out during the night and drenched three floors. Luckily, few books were damaged, but the place will have to close while everything is dried out and the carpeting replaced.
Vandalising libraries is of course on a par with organising book bonfires or bringing down internet hubs, a particularly ugly crime. I hope whoever did…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007Scandinavians are unusually cool about nudity in certain well-defined situations. The Finnish sauna is a well-known example. Within Swedish families, nudity is also commonplace, while many other nations feel that allowing your kids to see you starkers is tantamount to sexual molestation. (Which is a hot topic here at Scienceblogs at the moment.)
My wife and I once had dinner with a young couple down the street, where the man was a Chilean. His parents also had an apartment on the same street. He told us, chuckling, that his ma & pa could never draw the blinds in their kitchen, because…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2007
Dear Reader, are you at heart a shady character? Have you seen the seamy side of things? Is your outlook bleak? Is your appearance disreputable, your gaze shifty, your shirt unwashed, your hair style bedraggled? Are you familiar with spleen, anomie and ennui? Is your mother worried about you?
I mean, Dear Reader, do you miss Joy Division, early Sisters of Mercy, early Jesus & Mary Chain? Don't. Listen to Kurtz instead -- while reading Poe, Huysmans and Baudelaire.
The members of this unsigned Uppsala trio of decadents are all regular customers in the district misdemeanor court. Their…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2007
The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on the late-1st Millennium temple at Uppåkra, Scania, Sweden; on mid-to-late 1st Millennium research as historical archaeology; on the Viking Period towns and trade network around the Baltic; and (as illustrated above) on voluptuous Late Magdalenian female silhouettes knapped in flint and found at…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007Here's a pretty far-out news item from Dagens Nyheter.
"A 58-year-old Dutchman had one ear and his nose bitten off by another man and a school had a power outage due to a brawl in Växjö on the morning of Thursday.
Shortly before three in the morning police were called to break up a fight in Växjö. They found two seriously wounded men and a long-haul truck full of flowers that had been driven straight into an electrical transformer station. Also, they found a severed ear and nose on the scene that were taken to the hospital and reattached to their owner.
Both men came to Växjö in the Dutch…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007I just realised that the lyrics of this traditional Swedish children's song read just like the recounting of a hallucinogen experience or a psychotic episode. Imagine a goggle-eyed grizzled old hippie buttonholing you at a vegetarian restaurant and forcing you, giggling, to listen to the story of his life-changing episode back in '68.
It was really funny
I've gotta laugh
This triangular old man came in
He wore wooden clogs and a birch-bark jacket
And a hat trimmed with sausage skin
He sat down on a stool in the kitchen
And pulled a harmonica out of his pocket
And started playing so everything…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007
I'm generally no fan of "contemporary archaeology", where 20th century sites are investigated and interpreted. If you want to know what those people did, ask them or read the local paper. But Claes Pettersson at the Jönköping County Museum has written a piece in this genre that I actually like a lot. (It's in Swedish.)
In recent decades, the Torsvik highway crossroads has been one of those marginal places on the outskirts of a town that are left over between car dealerships, parking lots and supermarkets. This particular place was also an Iron Age cemetery, and last year the time had come to…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2007Back in August, I blogged about a paper I'd written on the chronology and iconography of Migration Period gold bracteates. It was published around the New Year and is now also available on-line in English. Please tell me what you think!
Rundkvist, Martin. 2006. Notes on Axboe's and Malmer's gold bracteate chronologies. Fornvännen 2006:5. KVHAA. Stockholm.
[More blog entries about archaeology, migrationperiod, Sweden, Denmark; arkeologi, folkvandringstiden, Danmark.]
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2007Most of Sweden is still seeing continual land upheaval after the latest Ice Age. Where I live, the shoreline recedes half a meter per century, measured vertically. If you build a jetty around here when you're 20, it's pretty much useless when you're 80. This means that the Stockholm Archipelago is in constant flux: underwater rocks become islets, islands merge, and finally they become landlocked hills.
Here's a pop-sci essay in Swedish I published recently in the local historical society's bulletin. It's about the boating situation in my area, Nacka municipality east of Stockholm, a thousand…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2007
My excellent brother-in-law Peter Köhler is an artist of the well-educated, hip, productive and non-starving kind. He teaches and exhibits his work internationally, and now he's got something coming up at a gallery on Broadway in New York.
VERUS PAINTERS
Works by John Aslanidis, Susann Brännström, Peter Köhler, Karen Schifano, Lorraine Williams
March 8 - April 28, 2007
Opening reception Thursday, March 8, 6 to 8 pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11 am to 6 pm
Tobey Fine Arts is proud to present an exhibition of works by the international group of artists calling themselves the Verus…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2007My friend Jesper Jerkert has edited a volume of skeptical essays, most culled from Folkvett, the Swedish skeptic quarterly we both help co-edit. This handsome book is just out from the Stockholm publishing house Leopard, whose head hombre Dan Israel is an officer of Vetenskap och Folkbildning, the Swedish Skeptic Society, just like Jesper and myself. Don't say we're not doing our bit for the Skeptical Conspiracy for World Domination!
The book's 21 contributions cover themes such as humanistic psychology, Freudianism, parapsychology, stage magic, alternative medicine, computer screen rash,…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2007
Lars Lundqvist promptly answered my call for archaeopix. Here's a recently discovered 1st Millennium BC stone setting on wooded outland belonging to the hamlet of Åby, Misterhult parish, Småland, Sweden.
The stone pavement, which is not scheduled for any excavation, is a grave superstructure, most likely covering scanty pyre remains similar to those found in Gothenburg Nasties. Such structures are very much ho-hum-yawn to disillusioned cynics like Lars and myself, but the man to the left was really happy to see it. Said this merry Gothenburg biologist: De ä ju änna fantasstisskt att sånna…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007Dear Reader, you no doubt have a skewed and seasick perspective on Stockholm, Sweden, from too much of my blogging. What you need is a blog written from Stockholm by a humorous, skeptical Irishman.
This genre is of course quite the jungle, with more blogs than anyone can reasonably attempt to evaluate. But take it from me: the one you want to read is Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza. Another really good blogger who just needs to learn to illustrate and market his writing.
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007In its formative late-19th century decades, Swedish archaeology had three journals with a nationwide scope (sometimes also covering Norway with which Sweden shared a king at the time). All three were published in Stockholm by the same small group of people: the Royal Academy of Letters had the academic Antiqvarisk Tidskrift för Sverige (1864-1924) and the more pop-sci-orientated Vitterhetsakademiens Månadsblad (1872-1907), and the Swedish Antiquarian Society had Svenska Fornminnesföreningens Tidskrift (1871-1905).
The two latter merged in 1906 and took the name Fornvännen. This journal is…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2007The Department of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg recently published a nice little book written in Swedish by the seasoned contract archaeologist Marianne Lönn: Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning, "contract archaeology and research". Lönn's main theses are:
Archaeologists look at old things to find out what it was like to live a long time ago.
Contract archaeology is research.
This research has its own agenda and needn't pay any attention to what university scholars are doing unless their work is clearly relevant to contract archaeology.
Contract archaeologists should be proud of…