sweden
razib | September 24, 2009A few weeks ago I posted on a paper, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers.Another one is out in the same vein, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians:
The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century...Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible...Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2009
Here's a piece of fragmentology. In the 19th century a brooch (inset) was found at Vistena in Allhelgona parish, Ãstergötland. It's a copper-alloy piece decorated with embossed silver sheet panels in the Nydam style, approx. AD 375-450. In 2008 a member of my metal detector team found part of a similar brooch at Sättuna in Kaga parish, a few tens of kilometers east of Vistena. Apparently we're dealing with a regional metalworking tradition. The complete brooch measures 57 mm across the head plate, the fragment 42 mm.
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2009
My wife and I made a short mushrooming excursion to Lake Lundsjön after lunch. Little more than half an hour in the woods garnered us only four species, but huge amounts of one: velvet bolete. We went home early simply because we didn't need more mushrooms. I'm stewing them with cream. Never had shingled hedgehog before.
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Red russula, Tegelkremla, Russula decolorans
Shingled hedgehog, Fjällig taggsvamp, Sarcodon imbricatus
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2009Back in April of 2008 I mused that strictly chronologically speaking, at 36 I was already a mid-career academic since I started working at 20 and retirement age is currently 65. I'm still years from the age when people get academic jobs in my discipline, 41, but anyway.
Yesterday I had two experiences that opened my eyes to the fact that I am now an archaeological dad. By that I mean that there are at least two fields where work I once did is no longer the Stand der Forschung, but where vigorous new studies refer to and build upon my old stuff. I am a member of the parental generation in…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2009
People in the Lake Mälaren area were on to Neolithisation immediately, with agriculture and stock breeding and pottery and sedentary life, when the package became available around 4000 cal BC. But then they said "oh, screw it" and spent most of the the Middle Neolithic as seal hunters and fishers again. My Stone Age bros Roger Wikell and Mattias Pettersson have descended from their Mesolithic heights (post-glacial land uplift and shore displacement, remember) and are now looking at Middle Neolithic sites in locations that were quite extreme at the time -- way, way out in the Baltic. And you…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2009
Stacy L. Mason is an Aard regular and a talented artist. Check out his awesome interpretation of the Swedish tardigrades that are going to Phobos!
In other news, I have issues with the lyrics of the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas podcast's theme song, a fine ska tune by 7 Seconds of Love.
I'm gonna flip out like a ninja
'Cause that's what ninjas do
I'm gonna flip out like a ninja
And you should flip out too
The thing that throws me here is the word "because". When deciding on important matters such as whether or not to flip out, Dear Reader, I feel that a person should have a stronger justification…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2009
Phobos-Grunt ("soil") is a planned Russian sample return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. It may launch in less than two months. On board will among other things be the L.I.F.E. experiment, a small canister full of hardy micro organisms, designed by the US Planetary Society. If all goes well, those microdaddies will go to Phobos and back, and then biologists will be able to compare them to their stay-at-home buddies to learn what the environment out there in interplanetary space really does to an Earth creature. Or to a creature from another planet who might once have been thrown into…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2009
I'm writing this on the train home from Lidköping on Lake Vänern in Västergötland province. I've spent a pleasant day discussing an interesting fieldwork project with colleagues. Gothenburg PhD student dynamic duo Anneli Nitenberg and Anna Nyqvist Thorsson have been working for years on the island of KÃ¥llandsö, famous mainly for Läckö Castle, and now they're doing something really audacious: they're digging a major barrow on the island's southern shore, diameter ~20 meters. Badgers have threatened to destroy it, and so the ladies got an excavation permit and ample funding from the…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2009
[More blog entries about Sweden, photography, manor; Närke, Askersund, foto, herrgård.]
My part-time employers, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, sometimes receive rather hefty donations. This is how they came to own Stjernsund manor near Askersund in the province of Närke / Nericia. (Don't confuse it with Christopher Polhem's early industrial centre Stjärnsund in Dalecarlia.)
Stjernsund received its säteri manorial charter in 1637. The original buildings were replaced by the current neo-Classical structures shortly after 1800. Stjernsund then belonged to members of the Bernadotte…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2009My dear friend and fellow archaeo-blogger Ãsa M. Larsson of Ting & Tankar has sent her PhD thesis off to the printers! This she has done with her supervisor's blessing, which in Sweden means that she is for all practical purposes a PhD now. The viva is just a ritual and your committee can't influence the thesis since it's already been printed.
Ãsa's will take place at 1300 hours on Friday 18 September, in the Geijer auditorium, building 6, Humanities Centre, Engelska Parken, Uppsala, Sweden. Meet me there. As an Aardvarchaeology exclusive, here's the abstract of Ãsa's as yet not even…
aardvarchaeology | August 8, 2009
[More blog entries about sweden, nature, photography; skärgård, foto, stockholm, natur.]
Tärnskär ("Tern Island") is a low seal-like grey cliff on the outer margin of the Stockholm archipelago. My buddy Dendro-Ãke only goes there when an eastern wind is blowing, because if your engine dies and there's any other wind, you end up on the other side of the Baltic.
The archipelago is a really amazing land/seascape. Imagine a flat gneiss and granite plateau criss-crossed by huge faults and crevices. Now run a few glaciations across it, sanding it down real good, so that everything is…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2009
From Aard regular Christina Reid (she started commenting less than a week after the blog opened, bless her heart!), a few pictures from Mid-summer Eve at the Scandinavian Cultural Centre in Burnaby, British Columbia. Tina and her hubby are active in the Reik Félag reenactment group. And her brother is the singer of Viking/Tolkienian metallers Amon Amarth!
We're seeing two periods of Scandy history being celebrated here. Tina & hubby represent the Viking Period in the 9th & 10th centuries. The other people, the ones erecting a May pole, are into the rural culture of the 19th…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2009I just finished reading Nils Ahnlund's 1953 history of Stockholm up to 1523, which marks the end of the Middle Ages in Swedish historiography. Its 538 pages of text offer less concrete detail than an archaeologist might wish for, and I soon lost track of everybody named Anders Jönsson and Jöns Andersson, but it was an interesting read nevertheless. Here are a few of the best things I learned.
Now I finally understand why the inhabitants of Dalecarlia play such a large role in the city's and country's history. I mean, OK, there's reasonable farmland up there, but it is way north and the…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2009
My recent talk in Trävattna parish hall, Västergötland, was covered by two regional papers. Rune Torstenson has kindly scanned the items for me. The headlines read "Power once originated in the mead-hall" and "Searching for ancient power-wielders". To read the articles, click on the images.
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2009
Sven Gunnar Broström, known as Stone Gunnar.
In June of last year I reported on my visit to a small research excavation directed by my Fornvännen boss Lars Larsson at Botkyrka golf club south of Stockholm. The Stensborg site is highly unusual by the standards of this part of the country: a place near the sea shore where some of the region's first farmers congregated almost 6000 years ago and did some really weird shit. Sven Gunnar Broström, PhD h.c., one of Sweden's most active and respected self-taught archaeologists, discovered it in the late 60s. Simply through fieldwalking he and…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2009
Sösdala style silver sheet fittings. Image from the Finnestorp project's web site.
Among the many things Swedish archaeologists envy our Danish neighbours are their splendid war booty sacrifices mainly of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries AD. These are silted-up lakes whose anaerobic peat deposits are full of vandalised military equipment taken from less fortunate invading armies (more here). In Sweden, we know of only two major sites in this category: Skedemosse on Ãland, which was unfortunately drained and ploughed out long before archaeologists came to work there, and Finnestorp in Vä…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2009Today I didn't make any effort to entertain the kids until mid-afternoon. I was busy filling in some gaps and writing the last piece of text for my Ãstergötland manuscript, an entry for the gazetter at the end of the book. It's been my main project for almost four years. What remains now is fiddling with details (bibliography, figure numbering and captions, test-reader comments, read-through and final copy edit) and collecting/making illustrations.
Regna and Skedevi parishes
In northernmost Ãstergötland, far from the plains belt, is Lake Regnaren whose surface is 60 meters above current…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2009
KÃ¥reholm manor on the Slätbaken inlet in Ãstergötland, home of my friends the Danielsson family.
In the 1950s there was a company (maybe several?) in Sweden whose business was to fly around rural areas and take aerial photographs of farms, mills, churches and small factories. Employees in pilot uniforms would then ride around in limousines and sell copies to the landowners. For an extra fee you could get yours hand-tinted by a pilot's wife in the suburb next to Bromma airport.
The company didn't sell the negatives, and for most sites they didn't make a sale at all. So the company archives…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2009
Saturday me and the kids went on an unusual package tour. First we took the 1903 steam ship Mariefred from Stockholm to Mariefred, and got to visit the engine room while the machine was working. Mariefred is a small town on Lake Mälaren whose name preserves that of Pax Mariae, one of the last monasteries founded in Sweden before the Reformation. It is home to one of Sweden's liveliest steam railroad societies which runs a narrow-gauge railroad with a plethora of lovely locomotives and wagons. We saw an amateur musical played at the old railway station, with the actors making entrances and…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2009Dear Reader Tom Stinnett alerted me to a really doom-laden article about Sweden in yesterday's Guardian. Says Ruben Andersson (apparently a Swedish expat and anthropologist),
Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats - the equivalent of the BNP - are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more. ... Sweden's homemade financial meltdown of the 1990s ... finally killed off the dream. Poverty was added to the pessimism. Savage cuts…