sweden
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2008The Swedish language has produced three truly great fantasists. Two are internationally reknowned: Astrid Lindgren (with Pippi Longstocking) and Tove Jansson (with Moomin). The third, Erik Granström, is almost exclusively known among Swedish gaming nerds like myself. From 1987 to 1994 he published a series of wildly innovative adventure and background books for the Swedish role-playing game Drakar och Demoner. Granström's material soared miles above the fare us ex-kobolds were used to, particularly the 1988 travelogue/novella that introduced us to the islands of Trakoria. I game-mastered…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2008Another career whine.
Applying for academic jobs that are invariably given to people who are much older than me, I've come across a frustrating conundrum.
In Scandyland, it takes about seven months from the application deadline to decide who gets an academic job. This is because the selection process is guided by two or three external referees. The department doesn't get to choose the person they want, but they can pretty much choose the referees, and so influence whether they'll be likely to get e.g. an empiricist or a theoretician.
Now, one of the most important assets an academic can…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2008
Here's something neat. Annika and Bengtowe Angare are photographers and digital retouch artists (check out their site and hover your cursor over each picture!). They've photographed the early-16th century sword I found at Djurhamn in 2007 and stuck it point first into the find spot on a vintage map of Djurö!
This post is timely as I have a short talk scheduled for tonight about my work at Djurhamn. Wish me luck!
Thanks to Annika & Bengtowe for permission to blog publish their © image.
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2008Conversing with a friend recently, I mused, what could be the background to the expression "batshit insane"? My friend suggested that it might have something to do with having bats in the belfry. I then wondered what the Swedish equivalent of this expression would be.
In Swedish, you don't have bats in the belfry. You have gnomes on the loft. Thus, "batshit insane" translates to tomtespillningstokig: gnome poop insane.
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2008"In the morning I left voice mail messages to call me on my mother's and sister's numbers. As I came in to work I saw S still logged in to his Skype account, where he'd left it going for his final exercise round. More subdued phone calls during the day, there would be a viewing at the hospital the next day. I was unfamiliar with the term, but googling confirmed that it was an opportunity to see the body. When had this procedure been (re-)introduced?"
Read more over at Pointless Anecdotes.
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2008
Chris, the most highly allocthonous of the SciBlings, just did something neat over at his place that immediately called for emulation. He's a geologist, and he's graphed what periods of Earth's history he's been studying when. So, Dear Reader, here's my graph: not as pretty as Chris's, but hopefully legible. You may note that I specialise in the later 1st Millennium, that my work in the Neolithic must be rather superficial, that I have never worked with the Mesolithic nor the Early Iron Age nor the Middle Ages, and that I plan to return to Bronze Age studies next year.
Oh, and one more thing…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2008
Here's some characteristically excellent photography by my friend Lars of Arkland. He's recently moved to Visby on Gotland, a big old limestone slab in the Baltic Sea, where he's the Hauptnetzmeister of the National Heritage Board. The funny thing about the above picture is that it shows young vandals/graffiti artists to have a conscious and highly traditional perspective on the cultural heritage. Much more traditional than today's heritage administrators, who worry endlessly about whether their perspective is democratically informed, in touch with the times etc. While these administrators…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2008
Last Thursday I went to Norrköping and checked out the Town Museum's collection of prehistoric metalwork. Most of it is decontextualised, but I did manage to collect some useful data on the movements of my 1st Millennium aristocrats across Östergötland.
Among the things I handled was, unexpectedly, the Tåby statuette. It's a stray find from a field near Tåby parish church. Arthur Nordén published it in Fornvännen 1924 and suggested a Late Medieval date about AD 1400. I don't know if the piece has been discussed in print since. It looks neither quite like Bronze Age figurines nor Early Iron…
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2008
When you've finished an archaeological excavation, you always produce an archive report describing the results. Most excavation units these days actually publish their reports in small print runs. If you're lucky enough to find something really interesting, you should also try to publish it in a journal, anthology or monograph. This is good for you, because it enhances your academic qualifications, and it's good for research, because it makes new data available to colleagues and opens up a discussion of the new finds.
In the summer of 2005, me and my friend Howard Williams directed the…
aardvarchaeology | November 3, 2008
A year ago I showed some pictures of particularly cool finds that Claes Pettersson and his team from Jönköping County Museum had made in 17th century urban layers near their offices. One of them was the above clay mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. Claes believes that it may have been used to make candy. Now he knows where the motif came from.
The mould is actually a contact copy of a 1631 royal medal used to decorate military officers. And among Claes's finds is a piece of yet another mould copied from a coeval medal, this one an equestrian portrait. Muses Claes, "What have they…
aardvarchaeology | November 1, 2008The other day I took a look at how the European Science Foundation's ERIH project grades journals in Scandy archaeology. Dear Reader Ismene pointed me to a corresponding list put out by the NDS, "Norwegian Data Support for the Social Sciences". While ERIH recognises three impact grades plus ungraded journals, the NDS has only two grades plus ungraded. Here's the list of relevant journals.
Grade 2
Acta Archaeologica
Fennoscandia Archaeologica
Norwegian Archaeological Review
Grade 1
Current Swedish Archaeology
Fornvännen
Journal of Danish Archaeology
Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2008
Dear Reader Dveej asked me to write some more about the Purse Torment Tavern south of Stockholm. Its name is Pungpinan which is pretty funny, as pung doesn't just mean purse or pouch, but in modern Swedish more commonly scrotum. The name might thus be translated "Purse Torment" or "Pain in the Ball Sack", or even "Scrotum Torture". (Boy am I gonna get hits from the S/M porn surfers now.)
The heyday of the Purse Torment Tavern lasted from about 1670 to 1805. This was back in the era of horse-drawn carriages, when Sweden was covered by a dense grid of rest stops where you could change horses…
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2008
Looking at a map of Stockholm's suburbs, you find a swarm of place names denoting housing areas. The housing is almost entirely 20th century. But many of the names go back a thousand years or more. Today they're all just suburbs. But not so long ago, all of these names were part of a hierarchical nomenclature, a ladder of names. The names on the ladder's top rung denoted parishes and were used throughout the county. On the second rung down were the names of farmsteads, used among the surrounding few parishes, and among wayfarers in cases where a farmstead happened to be located on a major…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2008The European Science Foundation has a project called the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH).
... there are specifities [!] of Humanities research, that can make it difficult to assess and compare with other sciences. Also, it is not possible to accurately apply to the Humanities assessment tools used to evaluate other types of research. As the transnational mobility of researchers continues to increase, so too does the transdisciplinarity of contemporary science. Humanities researchers must position themselves in changing international contexts and need a tool that offers…
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2008Carina Andersson and Rickard Franzén at the Swedish National Heritage Board have put together a report in Swedish titled "What Does Contract Archaeology Really Cost?". Their answer to the question is, briefly, "less overall than the County Archaeologists would actually allow". County Archaeologists all over Sweden put out lots of contract work to tender and select who will do each job at what budget. And the archaeologists on average keep well within these budgets. Very likely, this is helped to a great extent by sites that look promising but turn out to be duds.
Another way of answering the…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2008The Swedish Research Council has just announced its 2008 project grants for research in the humanities and social sciences. 106 out of 993 submitted projects (10%) have received funding. Only two archaeologists got money: Thomas B. Larsson (b. 1953) who works with the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and Susanne Berndt Ersöz (b. 1959) who works with Turkey in the Last Millennium BC. Grant recipient Lena Larsson-Lovén (b. 1956) works with Roman dress, which places her in a border zone between art studies, history and archaeology.
As I have previously documented, you need to be about 42 and a recent…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2008Yesterday I gave a talk at a seminar organised by my friends in the Djurhamn project. This was interesting from a scholarly, a professional and a social point of view.
Not least piquant was that I ended up chatting briefly with two ladies whom I have criticised sharply in various media over the Ales stenar sign-post debacle. One was very friendly, telling me that she welcomed my voicing frank opinions, in a way that was too sweet to appear condescending. The other, whom I once offended pretty badly already during the Kristian Berg conflict, had a more restrained demeanour. In her talk she…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008
Erik Nylén in 1987, holding a ship's vane inspired by 11th century ones, standing in front of Krampmacken, a replica of a 12th century sailing boat. "Krampmacken" means "the brine shrimp". Photograph by Rune Edberg. Thanks Rune!
One of my archaeological heroes turned 90 last Saturday.
Professor Erik Nylén is huge in Swedish archaeology. His name is associated with any number of important fieldwork and publication projects, and also with a strongly pro-science movement during the 60s and 70s where fieldwork and labwork methods were greatly improved. One of Erik's big ideas was wholesale…
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2008
Fornvännen ("the Friend of Ancient Things") is one of the main journals of Scandy archaeology and Medieval art. It's been issued 4-6 times a year since 1906, for the past several decades on a quarterly schedule, and I've been a co-editor since 1999. The first 100 volumes have been scanned and are available on-line. Later issues are appearing on-line too with a 6-month delay, though we haven't quite ironed out the routines for that yet.
Issue 2008:3 recently came from the printers. Here's what's in it:
Hans Olsson and Katherine Bless Karlsen present an Early Mesolithic (c. 6900 cal BC) site…