sweden
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2009Signs of spring so far around where I live, apart from the obvious sunshine and disappearance of the snow & ice:
Crocus
Snowdrop
Scilla
Blackbird singing at sundown (ah!)
Magpies brawling
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2009As chronicled here before, some forward-thinking colleagues of mine in the Swedish heritage business are embracing the social web and launching cutting-edge apps and projects. This is impressive not least because they are all working for state bodies founded in the 17th century. Just the other day Minister for Municipalities and the Financial Market Mats Odell gave the National Heritage Board a big shout-out for their Flickr project. (This is funny because Odell is a Christian Democrat and my buddies Lars and Johan are not so much.) Well-deserved praise!
Now Ulf Bodin has announced the start…
razib | March 23, 2009Sweden Says No to Saving Saab:
Which makes it all the more wrenching that the Swedish government has responded to Saab's desperate financial situation by saying, essentially, tough luck. Or, as the enterprise minister, Maud Olofsson, put it recently, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."
Such a view might seem jarring, coming as it does from a country with a reputation for a paternalistic view of workers and companies. The "Swedish model" for dealing with a banking crisis -- nationalizing the banks, recapitalizing them and selling them -- has been much debated lately in…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2009The Swedish Heritage Board (or, more specifically, my friends Lars and Johan who work there), has begun putting historical photographs whose copyright has expired onto Flickr Commons. Well done! Check it out!
The Board is a lot like the Museum of National Antiquities: even though some of its projects just make me want to weep, it also has excellent world-class stuff going on. This is of course an effect of the individual people behind each project. And the, shall we say, wide-open-mindedness of their superiors.
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2009Since a bit more than a year, Fornvännen's first 100 years (1906-2005) have been freely available and searchable on-line. It's a quarterly multi-language research journal mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and Medieval art, and I'm proud to be its managing editor. Now we've gone one step further and made the thing into an Open Access journal. The site's run of the journal is complete up to 6 months ago, and every issue will henceforth appear on-line half a year after it was distributed on paper. Here, for instance, is an excellent paper in English by my buddy Svante Fischer from last…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2009
A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny.
As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an ice cream stick, dating from the '00s. Its context is unusually unclear in the on-line info, but it appears to have been donated during an outreach project where kids were invited to give the museum stuff and speculate about how people in the future will one day interpret it.
I don't think curating,…
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2009
Here's a little archaeological riddle I've been thinking about. From about 1350 to 1700, three-legged brass cooking pots were common in Sweden. When metal detecting in ploughsoil, you often find bits of them. They're easily found as the fragments tend to be large and heavy: they make the detector sing loud & clear. But here's the thing: you almost only find the feet and legs of the pots, hardly ever the wall or rim. Why is that? I think I've come up with an answer.
These pots weren't used out in the fields. The reason that we find the feet there must be that household refuse was thrown…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2009
How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in PhotoShop and Windows Paint. Here's an example of my handiwork, and a snippet of the paper I made it for, submitted last week.
The first decisive step in the formation of the Medieval state of Sweden appears to have been taken about AD 1000 when two ethnic groups, the Svear and the Götar, elected a…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2009
It's time for a blogmeet! On Monday 9 March at 17:30 I want to see you guys at Akkurat on Hornsgatan 18 in Stockholm. This place offers an awe-inspiring selection of rare ales and malt whiskeys, and serves great mussels. Please make your intention to be there known in a comment!
Chances are you'll meet me, Felicia, Henrik, Kai and Ãsa there.
Update 4 May: Check out Henrik's photos!
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2009
Now and then I blog about abandoned tree houses. But of course, real large houses are even more fascinating in their extended boundary state between dwelling and archaeological site (as I wrote about in January '06).
I recently read a new book (in Swedish) about abandoned houses: Svenska ödehus, finely written by Sven Olov Karlsson and illustrated with exquisite photographs by Philip Pereira dos Reis. Every abandoned house has its story, and the two have sought them out. Highly recommended! Order it here.
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2009Bohuslän province on the west coast of Sweden is known internationally for its many and varied Bronze Age rock art sites. But its archaeology is rich regardless of what period you look at. My maternal great-granddad's people came from Tanum and Kville parishes, so I'm sort of a Bohuslän aborigine.
The discovery of a Medieval shipwreck off the Bohuslän coast was recently announced. Or rather, the wreck has been known for centuries, and local tradition held it to date from the grim early-18th century reign of warrior king Carolus XII. Now maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin from the…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2009
A central theme in post-modernist archaeology of the more science-friendly, not radically relativist kind for the past 20 years has been the study of the after-life of monuments, or "the past in the past". Archaeologists are of course keenly interested in the archaeological record, and I think there's a reasonable argument for studies of how the people we study engaged with the remains around them in their era. Mind you, I think this should be treated as a side issue and a bit of a novelty. I've heard Mesolithic scholars proclaim that a lithics scatter in a river bank was as significant to…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2009The Stockholm County Museum has just put my report on last summer's fieldwork at Djurhamn on-line (in Swedish). As you may remember, I blogged about it at the time (here, here and here). The results were actually a bit of a let-down after the sword I found in '07.
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2009Fornvännen -- Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research has had a number of different cover designs over the past century and the colour of the stock has varied. Starting with the first issue for 1966, it has had a beige rusticated cover. Starting with the current issue, 2008:4, it suddenly has a pale grey rusticated cover. My buddy Leif at Arkeologi i Väst speculates as to why this may be -- is it because I got a steady job working with the journal? No. We had to change the cover paper because the makers of the beige stuff suddenly quit offering it! Leif also has some incisive comments about…
aardvarchaeology | January 24, 2009My lovely Chinese wife came to Sweden with her family at age seven and grew up here. This has given her an unusual level of bicultural competence. I like to quip, lewdly, that she's a dual boot machine with two operating systems and the most awesome hardware, man. She's like this typical bright Swedish middle-class chick who somehow happens to know everything about China and looks like an Imperial princess.
So I can't really say that we have grappled with and overcome our cultural differences. She pretty much does that for me on her own. But there are some details where our different…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2009Back in August I blogged about a manuscript where a scholar appealed to Thomas Kuhn's old theory of paradigm shifts in order to evade criticism of their work. At the time I couldn't give the real details as I had received the manuscript in my capacity as journal editor.
I've said before that I consider it an editor's duty to correct muddle in debates, both in the interests of scientific advancement and to help contributors avoid looking silly. So I wrote to the scholar in question and asked her to work some more on her contribution, specifically to address more of her opponent's substantive…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2009
Bronze candlesticks, early 15th century, made in Germany or Flanders. Top: Rute parish, Gotland. Height c. 18 cm. Photograph by R. Hejdström. Below right: Fragment from Tåby parish, Östergötland. Photograph by M.R.
Back in November I checked out the enigmatic Tåby figurine and blogged about it. Now I've found out what it is: it's part of a 15th century candlestick and there's a complete specimen in the Gotland County Museum. The Gotland specimen was kept above ground, in use and in repair from the Middle Ages until recently at a farmstead in Rute parish. Arthur Nordén wasn't aware of it, but…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2008
Today marks Aard's second anniversary. I'm still having fun and hope you are too! Looking at October and November, the blog had about 950 unique readers daily and was ranked #24 out of 74 blogs on Sb. I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies.
For much of these two years I have bragged in the left-hand side-bar that Aard had the highest Technorati rank among the net's archaeology blogs. This is no longer so, and the main reason is that I have stopped hosting blog carnivals. Technorati ranks a blog according to the number and quality of…
aardvarchaeology | December 24, 2008Merry Christmas, Dear Reader! I am in a good mood, checking my mail while most of the celebrants at my dad's house watch the annual Disney special, just having dropped my kids off for dinner at my mom's place where my son's mom will join them. This, you understand, can only be Scandinavia, where:
Christmas Eve is a big thing and Christmas Day nothing,
People are willing to watch the same Donald Duck show every year,
Everybody's a divorcee.
I hope you also have a good stressless Christmas in enjoyable company!
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2008
Here are two snaps of my new home, taken just after breakfast today (the first bread I've baked in the house!). Both are taken toward the north: one from the kitchen door toward the dining room, the other standing just west of the dining room and looking down the length of the living room.
Note:
Many Swedes hang a star-shaped lamp in their windows during December. It harks back to the star of Bethlehem but is really just a feeble attempt to alleviate seasonal affective disorder (cf. our celebration of St. Lucy).
The semi-assembled book case ended up like that because I haven't found the…