Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Adele 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 dark fill and the yellow sandy subsoil in the section was uniquely sharp, it seems safe to say that it's a late addition to the site. Lars L of Arkland visited us today with a colleague (he's got pix!). He reckons that we may be dealing with traces of late-pre-Roman activity that the metal detector survey failed to identify. Sites like that hardly contain any metal objects, or even pottery, sigh. I spent the summer of 1992 digging something similar on the Arlanda airport railroad, and although I certainly learned how to section and draw features, it did get kind of boring.
If that's what we've run into, then we've added two chronological components to the site in as many days. Though I of course want the foundation postholes of a 6th century mead hall, filled with gold foil figures, smashed glass beakers and garnet jewellery-making residue.
After a communal dinner at Tolefors, I introduced four of the Chester students to Roborally, and Connor beat us all soundly on the first try!
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden; arkeologi, östergötland, linköping.]
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Perhaps a little more digging and your currently mythical mead hall will be revealed.
Congratulations, btw, on having an 'excavator virtuoso' and recognizing him as such. We sometimes don't appreciate enough the people who are able to use these machines with delicacy and accuracy, seeing them as more brute force tools, which in most circumstances is how we see them used.
I was guilty of that myself until I watched a fellow operate an excavator/power shovel around my garden without disturbing any of the bordering rocks or timbers, except two that needed to be dug under - and when he was finished, he moved those elements back, with the excavator, to within a millimeter or two of where they had been. Awesome! A toast to Niklas!
Posted by: Bee | September 17, 2008 9:10 AM