Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Bengt Nordqvist has published a preliminary account in Offa of his amazing finds from the Finnestorp war booty site. Check it out (in German)! I hope to contribute to the Finnestorp project in some way or another in the future. For more about war booty finds, se an earlier post of mine.
Indirectly, Finnestorp has had a decisive influence on my own work for the past five years. Bengt has long been working at the site with the Gothenburg metal detectorists. One day in the early 00s when I was a grad student with an office at the Museum of National Antiquities, Tim Olsson came along to check out some earlier Finnestorp finds. We became friends, he opened my eyes to the possibilities of doing Danish-style detector archaeology in Sweden, and now we've just done our fifth campaign together in Östergötland.
Meeting new people can have huge effects on your life, though you rarely realise it at first. Like the time when I was 21 and called the editor of Fornvännen to offer him a manuscript. (He became my PhD thesis supervisor and I'm now managing editor of that journal.) Or the time when I was 27 and met a hot Chinese girl at a party. (Nine years together and counting, one kid.) Or the time when Tim told me about this amazing place called Finnestorp.
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, migrationperiod; arkeologi, Västergötland, folkvandringstiden.]
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Four more years of excavation there. It sounds as if they believe they have only scratched the surface and that there is a lot more to find.
Too bad one can't find any of the rituals on youtube. I would have watched :)
Posted by: Marcus | May 28, 2008 8:30 AM