sweden
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2008In Sweden, the County Archaeologist's office decides where contract-archaeological fieldwork is needed, how much it can be allowed to cost the land developer, and which excavation unit should do the work. Ãsa at Ting & Tankar reports (in Swedish) about a recent case where the County Archaeologist's representative went quite a bit farther than that in overseeing some contract fieldwork.
aardvarchaeology | September 27, 2008
For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other convenient surfaces all around the Swedish capital, as a kind of analog local blog. I pocketed an entry dated Friday near the NW corner of the Humlegården park yesterday. Here are two excerpts, translated by yours truly.
"26/9 '08. You can really tell that the Minister of Culture in Sweden is a talent-…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2008Here's another whine about academic employment in Scandy archaeology.
Yesterday my PhD diploma turned five years old. This means that I have now, at age 36, ascended to heights where I am automatically considered over-qualified (or simply failed) for a forskarassistent entry-level assistant professor's position at Swedish universities. Having done research full-time for the past 14 years and published about 120 pieces of archaeological work, I allow myself to believe that I am not an entirely failed scholar. It's an over-populated labour market.
In the past five years I have applied for…
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2008
Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is usually two metal planes reflecting the detector's signal. They shrill like mad.
Above is a pic of two cartridges I picked up at Sättuna today. The left-hand one is the most common type in Swedish farmland, used mainly to hunt large mammals, but also I believe in standard-issue army rifles of the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2008We finished digging today. Tomorrow I'll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned.
A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand:
Scattered lithics, knapped and then abraded by wave action on a beach. Mainly quartz, some hälleflinta/leptite, a little flint, one chip off a ground greenstone axe. Also a complete greenstone adze that permits us to date the assemblage to the Middle Neolithic about 3000 cal BC, but more likely the…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2008My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second best result would be to find other cool things than the ones I had expected, say, something with quite…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2008
We finished machining away the ploughsoil today, and I reckon we've uncovered about 800 square meters. I have a permit for 1200 sqm, but I stopped here. The landowner doesn't want us to expand in the most interesting direction where we have more cool metal-detector finds. And the directions that remain to us are out of the metal-finds swarm and downhill.
Sunken features everywhere, and the team has been busy cleaning away remnants of the ploughsoil, finding the edges of features, sectioning many. None with any finds worth writing home about though. Pete/Fozz did find a seltzer bottle sherd:…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2008Adele and Laura joined us last night, and so we were thirteen people digging at Sättuna today plus Niklas the excavator virtuoso. We continued to strip away ploughsoil, uncovering lots and lots of dark splotches underneath, and the team sectioned and sieved about 25 such sunken features visible in the surface of the natural subsoil. Most are functionally indeterminate, some are hearths, one or two are postholes.
Very few finds in the features, a little bone and fired clay. One did give a fair number of find types including a piece of modern window glass, and as the demarcation between its…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2008
I've just sat down in a comfy chair on the top floor of our luxurious excavation headquarters at Tolefors. Phew! I am very happy after a first day of excavations at Sättuna where every little bit has fallen into place as planned. (Hope I don't hit a frickin' elk when I go to pick up stragglers an hour from now. [I didn't.])
After an uneventful two-hour drive this morning I came to Linköping and met up with my buddy and co-manager Petter. We loaded the County Museum's digging gear into his car, picked up our first British recruit Karen and drove to the site, where landowner Christer greeted…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2008
The 1640 coin I found the other day came to light at an opportune moment. For some time, my wife and I had planned a trip to Falun for the weekend just passed, and that's where the coin is from.
The great copper mine of Falun was an important part of Sweden's economic backbone during the country's century as a major player on the European scene 1611-1718. The mine's origins are lost in prehistory, but paleobotany suggests that some small-scale ore extraction took place already in the 8th century, and the written record starts in the 13th century. Falun boomed in the 16th and 17th century,…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2008
To compensate for our inadequacies, us boy archaeologists like to search for large phallic objects and measure them. The most extreme case I've heard of was a couple of colleagues who went looking for the crash site of a mismanoeuvred 14-meter V2 rocket. In my case it's the 16th-century Djurhamn sword. All 93 centimetres of it.
I checked it out yesterday, taking a lot of measurements (of course including length and diameter), taking pix. My report on this summer's digging at Djurhamn is nearly finished now, and I plan to write a paper on the past two years' fieldwork for some annual…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2008Swedish has a number of subtleties designed to keep furriners from learning the language of glory and heroes™. A famous one is the genders of our nouns, where almost every one is either of our two neutral genders -- apparently haphazardly selected. Another one is certain non-trivial uses of the definite article suffix: you can't say "I'm looking for that record by Roy Zimmerman, you know", you have to say "I'm looking for that record-the by Roy Zimmerman, you know".
A particularly good thing we've got going is that we don't have any verb corresponding to "to put". Instead, everything you…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008For historical reasons having nothing to do with engineering or rationality, Swedish nuclear power plants dump a lot of warm cooling water into the sea. In a revealing blog entry, Paddy K offers an estimate of just how much energy that cooling water contains.
It's one third of the energy produced in the country.
I suddenly don't feel very motivated to keep my morning showers brief.
[More blog entries about environment, powerproduction, energy, nuclearpower, Sweden; miljö, energi, kärnkraft, energiproduktion.]
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008
Yesterday I did two hours of metal-detecting at a manor in Boo parish whose documentary evidence starts in the 13th century. Ancient monuments in the vicinity take it on down at least to the 10th. There are some nice 16th century small finds from the manor grounds, and my visit was intended to follow up on them. Lo & behold: I picked up one of Queen Christina's quarter öre copper coins from 1640. They are generally the oldest coins you'll find at any site, as in their day they were the largest issue yet in the history of Sweden: both as to the number of coins struck and as to the…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2008
Just back home from a lovely evening in the company of friends. Good food, good drink and good conversation with (left to right) Tor, Felicia, Kai, Ãsa, Pat, Anders and Lars & Thinker who left before I thought of whipping out my phone cam. Many thanks, guys!
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2008
An hour and a half in the woods around little nearby lakelet Knipträsk garnered us a fine harvest of mushrooms. The last time I blogged about a shroom-picking expedition we had ten kinds. Today we had eleven, most of them hedgehogs and boletes:
Terracotta hedgehog, Rödgul taggsvamp, Hydnum rufescens
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
Slippery Jack, Smörsopp, Suillus luteus
Gypsy mushroom, Rynkad tofsskivling, Rozites caperata
Common puffball, Vårtig röksvamp, Lycoperdon perlatum
Black…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2008
For many years, the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm was strictly a custodian and exhibitor of archaeological finds, performing no excavations of its own. Recently, however, its staff has resumed excavations on a small scale. The unusual nature of this fieldwork identifies it as inspired by post-modernist trends in museology.
I have already blogged a bit about the museum's reverse excavations, an "incavation". But my colleagues there are excavating as well. They started with their own back yard a few years back. The museum grounds are on the erstwhile site of a cavalry regiment in…
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2008
Scrabble was first published in 1948. Shortly thereafter, it was ripped off for the Swedish market by a firm named Lemeco, under the tell-tale Anglophone title Criss Cross. The main difference between the ripoff and the original is that individual letters don't have point values in Criss Cross: instead you get five points per vowel and ten per consonant.
Criss Cross does not bear a printing year. I date it at about 1950, because my copy still contains the notebook where my dad and his kid sister recorded their games. A signature of my dad's in the notebook looks like the handwriting of a…
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2008Affärs- och Kapitalnytt reports that the Scanian bank Sparbanken Syd has given an $8300 grant (SEK 50,000) for archaeological fieldwork and research: "a first instalment for excavations" at a cemetery in Ravlunda parish. Well done!
Unfortunately, the bank has chosen to give the money to our old friend Bob Lind, a homeopath and amateur archaeoastronomer with really wigged-out ideas. Bob has neither formal qualifications nor any excavation experience. On the contrary, he was recently reprimanded by the County Archaeologist for unauthorised de-turfing and addition of stones to the cemetery in…
aardvarchaeology | July 24, 2008
On my evening walk, while listening to a Skepticality interview with secular humanists Mel Lipman and Lori Lipman Brown, I took some pix of fireweed growing in weird places. (That's Epilobium angustifolium, Sw. rallarros, mjölkört, "railroad man's rose", "milk plant"). The plant propagates by wind-borne seeds like thistledown, and they can apparently sprout anywhere. Some were growing out of a crack in a vertical cliff face.
Others appeared to have been planted on Mr. Kight's, my ground-floor neighbour's, balcony.
As it turned out, he had simply left a little planting soil with his…