Aardvarchaeology

Information Longevity Talk in Gothenburg

Category: Archaeology • History • Tech

On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Årtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt långa perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I'll cover ways that information has survived from the distant past, and aspects of how data from archaeological sites and museum collections can be safeguarded for a long future.

The lecture is free and open to the public. The venue is at Forskningsgången 6, square 2, floor 2, on the premises of IT-Universitetet on Lindholmen. Hope to see blog readers there!

[More blog entries about informationsecurity; informationssäkerhet.]

Posted by Martin R at 7:17 AM • 1 Comments

Anthro Blog Carnival

Category: Archaeology • Blogging

The seventy-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology.net. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!

Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Colleen at Middle Savagery. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than four weeks, on 2 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!

Posted by Martin R at 9:56 AM • 0 Comments

Archaeological Namesakes

Category: Archaeology • Sweden

I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up.

In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a bibliographical essay in Fornvännen titled (and I translate), "Notes on the bibliography of Swedish numismatics and archaeological historiography". It covers writings about coins and the history of archaeology. And on page 285 we find mention of one G.H. Rundquist who had published a "Catalogue of the coin and medal collection in Växjö high school as well as similar collections united with it though belonging to the Museum of Småland in Växjö". The man's full name was Gustaf Hilding Rundquist, and he was custodian of that collection from 1916 to 1965, almost 50 years.

Says Lars Thor (and I translate),

"Hilding Rundquist had an unbelievable working capacity. It is also told that during his many years as a teacher he did not take a single day of sick leave, and that he and his wife were known to entertain a considerable number of friends in their home. Taking into account that Rundquist, apart from all this, was also an active lodge member and enthusiastic choir singer, the picture of him of course becomes even more impressive."

And other Rund??ists in Swedish archaeology? Apparently none who have written very much. There's Sten Rundkvist and Harry Rundqvist and Bengt & Maj Rundquist and Lisa Rundqvist Nilsson who have all made unpretentious contributions to the literature. And then there's me. No relation of the others, to my knowledge.

[More blog entries about växjö, småland, numismatik, mynt.]

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments

The Rundkvists Have Taken Their Swine Flu Shots

Category: Health

My family and I just came home from our local vårdcentral, the public medical centre, where we've taken our shots for epidemic H1N1/09 swine flu. It cost us nothing and we waited for only about 15 minutes. We got something called Pandemix, which appears to be Pandemrix mixed with another vaccine. They're not sure if a second shot will be needed or not, but if so then we will take it at the same time as I get my annual non-swine flu shot. Juniorette cried a little after the jab but calmed down after eating two saffron buns. She then went with her mom to swimming class.

[More blog entries about h1n1, flu, swineflu, vaccines; svininfluensan, vaccin, h1n1, influensa.]

Posted by Martin R at 10:57 AM • 10 Comments

Dating the Looting of Ancient Tombs

Category: Archaeology

Finland has a lot of cairns, usually sitting on hill tops near the sea. Unlike a mound, the cairn consists only of stones, and so it lets rain water percolate through. This messes up the contents of the cairn. Bones and burial goods are rarely preserved, and it seems that the ancient Finns didn't stock their cairns with a lot of interesting stuff to begin with anyway. This makes individual cairns difficult to date, though seen as a class their chronology is fairly well understood.

Despite the fact that few Finnish cairns contain anything interesting or valuable to a layperson, a lot of them have central depressions indicating that people have delved into them some time after their construction. There is no evidence to suggest that the depressions are due to the collapse of any internal wooden chambers.

During the excursion last Saturday at the Bronze Age conference in Helsinki, Tapani Tuovinen let us in on an interesting methodological development. How do you know at what date a burial cairn was looted?

The bedrock in southern Finland weathers in a characteristic way visible in a microscope. During the last Ice Age, a lot of nice round pebbles were produced through abrasion, and they're really good for cairn building. When you retrieve one them from the sea or the glacial till, they show no signs of microweathering at all to begin with. But if you look at pebbles on an undisturbed 3000-y-o cairn, you find heavy microweathering on the upper half of the stones. Their lower halves are far less weathered.

Tapani & Co looked at the stones scattered around the central depressions in looted cairns, and found that many of them were upside down: the undamaged bit was no longer pointing downward. This showed that they had been moved around relatively recently, most likely during the 19th century. The method doesn't give absolute dates, but it's still useful information.

Then the team looked at the bedrock beneath cairns they excavated, and found that it was much less weathered than the rock outside the bases of the cairns. This confirmed that they are pretty damn old: the cairns have been sitting there long enough for a slow weathering process to produce a visible difference.

[More blog entries about archaeology, datingmethods, geology, Finland; arkeologi, dateringsmetoder, geologi, Finland.]

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments

Runological Report on the Hogganvik Rune Stone

Category: Archaeology • Language • Norway

Runologist James E. Knirk has published a report on the recently found Hogganvik rune stone. His transliteration is

[?]kelbaþewas:s(t)^ainaR:aaasrpkf
aarpaa:inanana(l/b/w)oR
eknaudigastiR
ekerafaR

His translation is

Skelba-þewaR's ["Shaking-servant's"] stone. (Alphabet magic: aaasrpkf aarpaa). ?Within/From within the ?wheel-nave/?cabin-corner. I NaudigastiR [="Need-guest"]. I, the Wolverine.

So there isn't actually an explicit lord-retainer relationship in the text, just a guy whose name includes the word for servant, thewar. It also occurs in two names inscribed on weaponry from Danish war booty finds.

[More blog entries about runes, runestones, Norway; runor, runsten, Norge.]

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 10 Comments

I Got A Prime Time Spot

Category: NOIBN

If I had to take a paper newspaper, then I would like Dagens Nyheter's news section, Svenska Dagbladet's arts & entertainment section, no sports section and no business section. SvD is a conservative rag and some of its political columnists are really distasteful, but DN never gets anywhere near SvD's coverage of the historical humanities. DN's arts section is mainly preoccupied with pretentious modern crap, installation artists and poets who will be forgotten three months from now.

So I was very pleased when the editor of SvD's arts essay page (through the good offices of Åsa Larsson of Ting & Tankar) asked me to write for him about a couple of new books. Getting onto that essay page (and hopefully staying there) has been a latent goal of mine for many years. And I was even more pleased when the piece I submitted was published today: on a Sunday, when people actually had time to read the thing before they tossed the paper into the recycling bin.

Nor was my sunny outlook diminished this evening when I received a letter from an editor at a major monthly mag who, on the strength of the SvD piece, offered me a reviewing gig on the spot.

Editor Ludvig Hertzberg comments on my piece on his blog.

Posted by Martin R at 4:11 PM • 14 Comments

Not Resting Place of the First Finns

Category: Archaeology • Bronze Age

I'm posting this from a Helsinki basement café after a day's excursion by bus and boat in the countryside west of town. We mainly looked at cairns of various form, date and function, including a group of very fine large mountaintop ones of the typical Bronze Age variety.

Toward the end of the day we saw a preserved little bit of an excavated cemetery to which had been added a memorial stone in the 1930s. On the plaque the site is dated to about AD 100 and proclaimed as burial place of the first Finns! The reasoning went like this.

"We have a gap in the archaeological record during the Last Millennium BC. And the linguists believe that the Finnish language arrived here from Estonia about AD 1. And the grave type here has its closest parallels in Estonia. So this must be the grave of early Finnish-speaking colonists who arrived in the country when it was empty about AD 1!"

In the decades since, we have learned that there is no gap in the Finnish settlement record in the Last Millennium, and the grave type has been shown to be native to the coasts all around the south-eastern Baltic Sea. And the linguists have changed their mind about the date of the arrival of the Finnish language. So all that remains of the ideas celebrated on that stone is that yes, we still date the grave goods to about AD 100.

But as I told my colleagues, this is not by far the silliest memorial stone erected on an archaeological site. A strong candidate is found at Vendel church in Uppland where rich boat-burials have been excavated. It reads,

VENDEL PERIOD
PERIOD OF STATE-BUILDING
PERIOD OF MEN

[More blog entries about archaeology, Finland; arkeologi, Finland.]

Posted by Martin R at 11:26 AM • 4 Comments

Danes Run Entire Urn Burials Through CT Scanner

Category: Archaeology • Bronze Age • Denmark

The jaw-drop moment of the conference came for me when osteologist Lise Harvig off-handedly showed us pictures of what she is doing. She's a PhD student with Niels Lynnerup at the Dept of Forensic Medicine at Copenhagen. Remember the crumbling Neolithic amber bead hoard that the Danes ran through a CT scanner instead of excavating and stabilising the thing? Now Lise is putting entire Bronze Age urn burials through that scanner. She knows where every piece of bone and bronze is in those urns before she even cuts open the plaster they've been encased in since being lifted out of the ground. She has perfect 3D digital models of urns that fall apart when you remove the plaster. And she has demonstrated that a lot of the bone fragmentation, that has commonly been assumed to be due to dedicated crushing and grinding by the mourners, is actually simply due to the brittleness of burnt bones whose organic component has leached away over the millennia. Big bones are sitting in the urns, each fragment in place, and fall apart when you try to lift them. As Lise put it, "The one who does the ritual crushing is me, when I empty the urns".

So, how can a PhD student in archaeology afford to use this sort of hi-tech equipment? Turns out, the technology is developing so fast that the hospitals frequently swap their CT scanners for newer models. The used one at the Dept of Forensic Medicine makes one slice every three millimeters. Not good enough anymore for brain surgery. But perfectly useful for archaeology.

Other issues covered in today's presentations were:

• Correspondence analysis of Gotland's stone ships.
  
• The landscape situation of sacrificial sites in the Lake Mälaren area (me).
  
• An Early Bronze Age magnate farm excavated recently near Halmstad.
  
• Human sacrifice and corpse rituals in Lithuania.
  
• The unusually late introduction of animal husbandry in Finland.
  
• Bone pins in the Baltic states.
  
• Copper in Fennoscandia before the Bronze Age.
  
• Bronze ring casting sites on Saaremaa and elsewhere in the Baltic states.

[More blog entries about nordicbronzeageconference, computertomography, bronzeage, Finland, Denmark, Sweden; nordiskabronsålderskonferensen, datortomografi, bronsåldern, Finland, Danmark.]

Posted by Martin R at 12:03 PM • 8 Comments

11th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium, Day 1

Category: Archaeology • Bronze Age • Travel

Helsinki isn't far from Stockholm. It took me a bit more than four hours from home to my hotel here, and I could have shaved more than an hour off of that if I had taken the bullet train to the airport and a cab to the hotel instead of going by bus.

I'm at the 11th Nordic Bronze Age symposium, which for the first time includes a bunch of Baltic colleagues as wall. Everybody's very friendly and the atmosphere is informal. It's a pretty sizeable conference as these things go in my discipline: about 60 registered participants, of which I have made the acquaintance of at least half by now. For reasons unclear to me, I was made the afternoon's discussant, which was fun and flattering.

I'm here to learn what Bronze Age scholars in my part of the world are doing right now, because I'm planning to become one of them. So far I've been able to understand everything reasonably well, though I lack basic skills of the trade for the period in question. Menace me with a Bronze Age sword, and I will generally not be able to place it in the right Montelian phase to save my life. (Unless you lend me the sword so I can look it up in the literature. It's safe, I'm a pacifist. Come on now, just hand it over.)

Here are the main themes touched upon in today's presentations:

• Building a new model of how Bronze Age society in Southern Scandinavia was organised.
  
• Current Bronze Age research in Estonia.
  
• Past and present interpretations of the Early Metal Age and Bronze Age in Finland.
  
• Why does the Hajdusamson-Apa sword type occur both in Scandinavia and in Carpathia?
  
• Is it possible to find a northern border of the Nordic Bronze Age culture along the coast of Norway?
  
• The Bronze Age in the Stockholm archipelago (Mattias & Roger reporting on their on-going Ornö dig!).
  
• Recent rock art surveys in Södermanland province.
  
• Is it possible to radiocarbon date bronze?
  
• Bronze socketed axe found with a piece of the shaft inside, this has been dated, sadly the typological date didn't match the radiocarbon.)
  
• The ethnic and social background of various find types in the Finnish Bronze Age.
  
• A Late Bronze Age seal-hunting centre in Ostrobotnia.

[More blog entries about nordicbronzeageconference, bronzeage, Finland, Denmark, Sweden; nordiskabronsålderskonferensen, bronsåldern, Finland, Danmark.]

Posted by Martin R at 4:31 PM • 5 Comments