sweden
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2008In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is convoluted and, in my opinion, quite fascinating.
Gotland is a large limestone island in the Baltic and a province of Sweden. Its first organised Christian congregations came together in the early 11th century, and they had some rather unusual burial customs. They had already practiced inhumation as…
esiegel | April 24, 2008Even creationists have said that if you find something that's alive now that's over 6000 years old, it would prove to them that the Earth is at least that old.
Previously, the oldest tree in the world was thought to be a Bristlecone Pine in California, known as the Methuselah tree, at 4,840 years old (as of 2008).
It's huge! But you can also date a tree not by its trunk, but by its root structure. And as The Log Blog reports, Swedish researchers have found a tree on Fulu Mountain that is over 9,000 years old! Although it looks puny because its trunk dies every few hundred years or so and it…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2008
The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639.
My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is StorgÃ¥rdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-TÃ¥kernomrÃ¥det under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-TÃ¥kern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2008Restrictions on the use of metal detectors vary from country to country. In England, they are too lax. In Sweden, they are too strict. In Denmark, they are pretty much just right. As I've written before, I think everybody would stand to gain if the Swedish restrictions were eased. My idea is that we should treat metal detectors as hunting weapons: anybody who can demonstrate sufficient knowledge of rules and best practice should be licenced by the county authorities to use the instrument, and then allowed to continue doing so until they prove unfit. (Currently, all amateurs are considered…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2008
Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to be central locations in their districts, often lending their names to Medieval Christian parishes after the end of the pagan cult. Place-name scholars are uncertain about exactly what these sacred fields were used for, but it seems likely that they were the sites of seasonal rituals having to do with…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2008
Here's a funny little guy from our site in Kaga. It's a crumpled-up disc-brooch, about 75% complete, original diameter 71 mm, copper-alloy pin extant and folded into the brooch, pin-catch extant on back, apparently soldered on.
On the surface of the brooch are a central large boss with mock-filigree, surrounded by five identical ones, and outside those five are another five smaller bosses. All in all eleven bosses. The surface of the brooch is divided into petal-like fields by lines of tiny bumps. All decoration is visible on the back side too: most of the piece is just 0.6 mm thick.
I…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2008Tobias Bondesson has kindly sent me photographs of several interesting finds, taken during our recent fieldwork with the heavy dudes of the Gothenburg Historical Society. With his permission, I've inserted them into the relevant blog entries:
Fieldwork in Hov and Vretakloster
Fieldwork in Tingstad and Ãstra Husby
Fieldwork in Kimstad and Kaga
Tobias has also opened my eyes to Nordisk Detektorforum, an on-line discussion forum and image database for (mainly Danish) detectorists. These guys are responsible, keen and hugely knowledgeable. One user, for instance, identified a coin we found as…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008Those questionable characters in productive Swedish goth band Kurtz have set up an RSS feed direct from their rehearsal room to your desktop. Coming up next: a song about a dorm mate of singer Pocke who was once in 1976 hung-over and wondered where the cereal bowls were.
[More blog entries about music, rock, gothic, Sweden; musik, depprock, rock, goth, Uppsala.]
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2008
Frag of a brooch decorated with embossed silver foil. 5th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Our site in Kimstad parish looked even better than I'd thought. This was one of many cases where I've come swooping in to sites that I've never visited before and directed metal detecting. In Kimstad, I had been attracted by Ãstergötland's only (probable) Viking Period wetland weapon sacrifice, a fine sword found during drainage work. But I didn't want more swords. They're too expensive to conserve, and my project is about the settlements of people who could afford to sacrifice that sort of thing…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2008
Frag of a lion-shaped badge with a rivet used to fix it to some surface. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Another day of fruitful fieldwork, with friendly landowners and pretty good weather. We started out with 20 man-hours in the fields around a fortified hilltop settlement in Tingstad parish. The hillfort was trial-trenched in 1903, yielding the richest finds known to date from a 3rd and 4th century settlement in Ãstergötland. I was hoping that we might run into something interesting of 5th century date. No such luck: our oldest datable find all day was a piece of a 9th century copper-alloy…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2008
Polyhedrical weight. 9/10th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
(Martin here, posting from the hostel of Norsholm on the Göta canal, using my handheld and the cell phone network. To get the post on-line, my dear scibling Janet has kindly agreed to act as go-between.)
Coin struck for Heinrich II, King of Germany. Mainz 1002-1014. Dbg 785. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
This is the third April in as many years that I'm reporting from a week of fieldwork in Ãstergötland with my metal detector buddies. I intend this to be the final expedition before I complete my book about late-1st…
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2008Here's something cool. Norway spruce trees sprout from subterranean root systems, and though the actual trees come and go, the roots are extremely long-lived. In this they're actually a lot like mushrooms.
New research by Leif Kullman at the University of UmeÃ¥ is just being reported on by the media. His team has studied spruce trees on the treeline of Mount Härjehogna in Dalecarlia, central Sweden, and found no standing trees older than 600 years when wood samples were dated. But below ground, the living roots of three trees gave radiocarbon dates at 5,000, 6,000 and 8,000 years BP! The…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2008
Last night's Hayseed Dixie gig rocked. This is the bluegrass band playing metal songs that I blogged about recently. Me and Paddy K went there after checking out some stand-up comedy with the ladies. We had been given the wrong starting hour, so we arrived at the Debaser Slussen club in the middle of the fourth song. But I believe John Wheeler and the others played for about an hour and a half. Afterwards they scattered into the crowd and chatted with everybody.
I spent the entire gig with a big foolish smile on my face. They placed so fast and so skilfully with a constant feeling of…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008Reading some US job ads I came across the terms "early career", "mid career" and "late career" applied to academics. As some of you may remember, I decided about this time last year that I had become officially middle-aged (defined as "closer to 50 than 20"). Now it's struck me that I am also mid-career.
Think about it. I've been doing archaeology for a living since I was 20. Standard retirement age is 65 in Sweden. (This is likely to change as medicine improves and the demography morphs.) Currently, society expects me to have a 45-year career, all in all. And I've entered the middle third of…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2008Viking Period Scandinavians had a funny custom where they would bury silver hoards and not dig them out again. On Gotland, the hoards are so common that the local paper has been known to note tersely that "this year's hoard has been found". But not all Swedish provinces are similarly endowed. My native area around Lake Mälaren has far fewer hoards.
Most silver hoards are found by farmers when they till their fields. Once in a very long while, archaeologists get lucky and find a hoard in situ. Of course, they tend to find the commonest kind of hoard, i.e., pretty small ones. This happened at…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2008I'm trainblogging again, somewhere between Norrköping and Nyköping, and the sun is shining. I am pretty pleased with things, not least with how my project about elite sites in Ãstergötland is working out.
Yesterday I received the Kaga parish landowner's permission to excavate in his field after the harvest, that is, in mid- and late September. This is where a gold-foil figure die turned up a year ago.
Then I received information that the Royal Academy of Sciences has given me the largest grant so far in my career, meaning that I wouldn't have to worry about my livelihood before Christmas…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2008
It's a running joke around Sb that the single most popular blog entry on the whole site is one where a scibling calls Britney Spears the High Priestess of something not very flattering. In fact, as Spears's latest hit demonstrates, she is the High Priestess of Swedish dance pop.
Look at her run of chart toppers.
1998. "...Baby One More Time". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
1999. "(You Drive Me) Crazy". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
1999. "Born to Make You Happy". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
2000. "Oops!...I…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2008
Local newspaper Ystads Allehanda reports on new fieldwork in Ravlunda by amateur archaeologist Bob G Lind and retired geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The last time the two enthusiastic gentlemen interfered with the Iron Age cemetery in question, they were reprimanded by the County Archaeologist. Now they are clearing brush from the site in order to make their imagined Bronze Age calendar alignments clearer.
Future plans include magnetometry mapping. Mörner is quoted as believing that this technique will allow the pair to map individual ancient footprints in the subsoil, because in his…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2008
Childcare is a context where people from different class backgrounds come into intimate contact. Indeed, for as long as there has been childcare, this work has been done largely by working class women, even when the kids in question have been middle- or upper-class. There's a common literary trope where an upper-class young man has a warm "natural" relationship to his working-class nanny and a cold distant one to his blood mother.
I've blogged before about how academic middle-class ideals of gender homogenisation clash with more traditional views among working-class daycare ladies. And…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2008
Swedes have taken up US Hallowe'en customs only very recently and half-heartedly, the whole thing being driven by merchants. But we do have something like trick-or-treating: the Easter Crone custom of Maundy Thursday.
Traditionally, there's no Easter Bunny in Sweden. (My mother once shocked our American nanny by serving a rabbit for Easter dinner.) Instead the holiday is associated with witches, believed to make an annual broom-borne pilgrimage to Blue Mountain on Maundy Thursday. There, of course, they celebrate orgies with the Devil. (Don't we all?) About 300 people were executed for the…