Aardvarchaeology

Very few Scandinavians realise how unfortunate the English title of the journal is. It came about due to a mistranslation of the Swedish adjective antikvarisk, meaning

1. Concerning the far past and ancient artefacts,
2. In accordance with professional standards in heritage management,
3. Of the used-book trade.

"Antiquarian", on the other hand, has the primary meaning "of antiquarians". This is really embarrassing, because the moniker "an antiquarian" is usually reserved for 18th and 19th century British amateur scholars who had their tenant farmers dig through ten barrows daily to find pretty antiquities. So whereas the Swedish word marks our journal as a solidly professional one, the cognate English word instead suggests that we cater to the interests of wealthy dilettantes of a bygone age.

Anyway, the new issue has five papers and fifteen book reviews. Michael Nordin of the Södermanland County Museum writes about a Late Mesolithic arrow-making site. Peter Tångeberg, recently retired from his job as conservator of Medieval wooden sculpture, has a long groundbreaking paper about the re-working of Madonna sculptures through the Middle Ages. 12th century sculpture was continually updated through our Catholic centuries, with the original strict facial expressions sometimes being carved into cute Late Medieval grins. This hasn't been well understood before, as art historians with little technological knowledge have interpreted the resulting mixed-style pieces as retro work made from scratch in the Late Middle Ages.

The good young doctors Jens Heimdahl and Leif Häggström discuss the interpretation of Optically Stimulated Luminescence dates, suggesting a model for why so many of these dates turn out weird. Their idea is that sand grains become packaged in earthworm faecal pellets, preserving early dates long after the surrounding free sand grains have been re-zeroed by sunlight. This paper is also notable because, to my knowledge, it contains the first mention of the word "anus" in the more than century-long run of the journal, with an instructive picture of one drawn by Jens.

Dan Malkolmsson presents new-found runic graffitti in the church of Kinneved, Västergötland. Jan Peder Lamm tells the story of how Oscar Montelius bought a collection of antiquities in the Baltic States in 1876 and laid the foundation for the comparative (non-Scandinavian) collections in the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm. Among the book reviews are one by myself of G.G. Fagan's Archaeological Fantasies and one by regular Aard reader Henrik Karll of a monograph on a Danish 14th century fortress, Boringholm.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, middleages, Medieval, sculpture, art, datingmethods; arkeologi, konsthistoria, medeltiden, skulptur, dateringsmetoder.]