sweden
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2007
As detailed before (here and here) I did a trial dig with friends in an undated great barrow near Sjögestad church in Östergötland last September. We secured samples that allowed radiocarbon dating to the Early Viking Period (9th century) and the identification of several plant species in small hearths that had been lit on the barrow as it was being erected.
I filed the excavation report the other day, and it is now available on-line in Swedish for all to read. Check it out! If anything's hard to understand, don't be afraid to ask.
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, vikings,…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2007
The great Birger Nerman used to say that the best archaeological finds are made in museum stores. Here's an example.
I just got home from two days at the County Museum in Linköping, where I've pursued my studies of late 1st Millennium central places. Helped by Marie Ohlsén and my other friendly colleagues there, I've checked out their collections of archaeological metalwork and their excavation report archives. Today they fed me semla (a big wheat bun with whipped cream and marzipan) not once, but twice -- that's how friendly they are. (Many thanks for having me, guys!)
Above are pictures of…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2007My buddy Niklas Ytterberg recently sent me an impressive excavation report in Swedish. Constrained by the field-archaeological paradox, he dug a really nondescript Neolithic settlement site at Djurstugan near Tierp, Uppland in 2003. Then he somehow found funding to subject the measly finds to a battery of innovative scientific analyses, extracting loads of interesting information.
For one thing, Niklas got the province's earliest ever radiocarbon dates for grain: 2400-2200 cal BC (barley) and 2470-2340 cal BC (wheat). The Funnel Beaker ("TRB") culture, known for its farming, arrives in…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2007Just a brief note to tell you that Sweden's a decent place to live apart from the paucity of daylight in the winters. I suggest that everybody move here.
I knew before that Sweden's the world's strongest democracy according to The Economist, that it has among the highest standards of living in the world, that it's one of the safest and least repressive countries in the world for females, that it hasn't fought a war in two centuries, and that its taxes and liquor prices are extremely high.
I just learned that in addition to all this, Sweden's population is also the most tolerant one in the…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2007Saw three art exhibitions Sunday with the ladies of my family.
The Culture House, Kulturhuset, in central Stockholm shows US photographer Sally Mann's work, mainly selected from three collections: 1980s pictures of her kids (very controversial in the US back then because of child nudity, an issue few Swedes are able to get worked up about), 1990s landscapes from the southern US, and huge recent portraits of her grown-up kids where any documentary ambition is completely abandoned for out-of-focus fogginess. Absolutely wonderful stuff, and no photoshoppery, only analog chemical photography,…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2007
Readers of my blogging over the past 14 months will have come across many references to, and tidbits from, the work with the archive report for 2005's Viking Period boat grave excavation at Skamby in Östergötland. Howard Williams and myself directed the excavations of the first boat inhumation in that county and the third Pre-Roman Iron Age bronze casting site identified in all of Scandinavia.
I am very happy to announce that the report is now complete, on-line and available for free in English with lots of pics! Get it here, tell me what you think, ask me if anything is hard to understand.…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2007The incomparable net-head archaeologist Ulf Bodin directs the highly successful work to put the collections of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm (Statens Historiska Museum) on-line. Off and on over the past year, I've worked through the scanned catalogues of two centuries, searching for source material relevant to my work with Late 1st Millennium elite manors in Östergötland. To do this, I only needed to visit the museum once, looking in the flesh at some early acquisitions that weren't described well in the catalogue. So I could have done almost all of the work from anywhere in…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2007
The other day, I collected the larger finds from 2005's boat grave excavations at the conservator's studio. Among them are 23 amber gaming pieces, of which I have now taken nice photographs. The pieces' median dimensions are about 35 by 24 mm.
If it weren't for these gaming pieces, the boat grave dig myself and Howard Williams directed at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, would have been quite a disappointment for me. The other grave furnishings were few and understated, consisting mainly of a symbolic (indeed, incomplete) set of horse and driving gear. But these gaming pieces are…
aardvarchaeology | February 7, 2007
A buddy of mine sent me a reminder today of why I am happy to not be a contract archaeologist. It's twelve below zero centigrade around here, and still a number of unfortunate Linköping colleagues are out digging. And they're not digging Tut-ankh-amen's tomb today either: apparently they've been assigned the task of excavating and documenting an ancient ploughsoil. Yes, an expanse of clayey soil churned by the ard or plough a long, long time ago. Poor bastards!
See those fuzzy blotches in the pic? They're snowflakes.
Update 8 February: Says my Linköping colleague Katarina Österström:
"The…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2007
In recent years I've been involved in some archaeological fieldwork at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, Sweden. I like to get a handle on the names of places where I work, what they mean, how they used to be pronounced in the Middle Ages. I was particularly interested in learning about Skamby, because read in modern Swedish, this very uncommon name means "Shame Village".
There are two explanations for the name: a less entertaining one supported by linguistic scholarship, and a funny folk-etymology of recent centuries. I'll give you the scholarly interpretation first.
Names ending in "-…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2007
Sun Spurge
My friend Dr Jens Heimdahl is a Renaissance man. He's a quaternary geologist, an urban archaeologist, a palaeobotanist, a talented painter and a writer of essays on weird literature. He's co-translated Lovecraft's novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath into Swedish and illustrated it.
Jens recently studied the plant macrofossils me, Howard and Libby got out of a barrow in Sjögestad parish we test-trenched back in September. According to radiocarbon, the barrow was most likely built in the late 8th or the 9th century AD, that is, the Early Viking Period. With a diameter of 35 m…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2007
The excellent Markus Andersson has made a cemetery map out of the field measurements me and Howard Williams and our collaborators took at Skamby in Kuddby parish the summer before last. This is the prettiest of Östergötland's three boat inhumation cemeteries. We excavated grave 15, as I have blogged about repeatedly, and found it to contain a burial of the 9th century with unusual furnishings.
Now that the plan is done, all that remains is snapping pics of the finds post-conservation, and then I can stick all the report materials into one big PDF file for the delectation of the world's boat…
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2007On Thursday 1 February at 18:30 I'm giving a talk at the Town Museum of Norrköping. The subject is my ongoing research into the political geography of late 1st Millennium Östergötland, or simply put, My Quest for the Ancient Kings. Entry is SEK 60. Hope to meet blog readers there!
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi, Östergötland, Norrköping.]
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2007As I've observed before, enlisting bloggers to do marketing offers some interesting possibilities and limitations. Unlike the case with mainstream media, you can choose exactly which person will receive an advance copy of your product (preferably someone who will like it), and the blogger is likely to feel flattered that you even took her seriously enough to contact her. A blog often also has a tightly defined readership, so by choosing the right blogger you can usually reach a very specific target market. The main drawback is of course that of readership: you can be reasonably sure to get a…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2007Most archaeologists work with rescue excavations for land development, "contract archaeology". And because of the Field-Archaeological Paradox, operative in all Western countries with strong legal protection for archaeological sites, they get to dig a lot of really nondescript things. It's not Tut-ankh-amen's tomb every day, kids. This is one of the reasons that I do my best to stay out of contract archaeology.
One of the types of ancient monument that Swedish contract archaeologists get to dig quite a lot, but which is seen by many pretty much with heartfelt loathing, is colloquially known…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2007A recurring theme in my blogging of the past year (e.g. here: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4) has been that a degree in Scandinavian archaeology (BA, MA or PhD) is almost entirely useless from a career perspective. The reason is that our labour market is over-populated at all levels, from the lowly shovel-wielder to the august professor. In my past posts, I've documented this in various ways.
Since getting my degree in 2003, I've applied for twelve academic jobs in Scandinavia, all requiring a PhD in archaeology. A number of temporary jobs have also been given discreetely to people already within departments…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2007
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2006 were announced yesterday. (See also the 2005 awards.)
Professor of international healthcare Hans Rosling receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... for his enlightening efforts to spread a fact-based picture of the state and development of the world, particularly as regards the link between popular health and global economy. Hans Rosling is co-founder of the non-profit foundation Gapminder, that has produced software to visualise and compare statistics from various countries, making it comprehensible and available to anyone."…
aardvarchaeology | January 13, 2007Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science gave a speedy reply to my questions of this morning.
It seems that any evaluation of whether the US has strong or weak site protection depends upon what standards are actually followed when a site is considered for the National Register of Historic Places. I wonder what sort of sites fall through the safety net in practice. (As for the NAGPRA protection of graves, that doesn't seem to be of much use to archaeology as it largely keeps my American colleagues from studying burial sites -- for reasons of political correctness and belated post-colonial guilt.)…
aardvarchaeology | January 10, 2007
Check out Lars Lundqvist's web site about the Slöinge excavations in Halland, Sweden! It's been on-line for ages and I only found it just now. All in English.
The above picture shows a tiny gold foil figure of an embracing couple -- possibly the divine ancestors touted by Vendel Period aristocrats. You find them in the post holes of the period's mead halls. If you wet-sieve, that is.