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I’m happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his “technical work”, which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper “Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ørsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period”, though, is definitely a piece of my technical work.
The most iconic Viking Period jewellery type is the tortoise brooch. They’re big clunky things worn pairwise on your clavicles, fastening a dress with built-in suspenders over your shoulders. A number of standardised types were mass-produced during the 9th and 10th centuries, reflecting Viking Period Scandinavia’s beginning urbanisation and the concomitant changes in how craft and trade was organised. The standard work on tortoise brooches is Ingmar Jansson’s 1985 PhD thesis Ovala spännbucklor.
Far less well known are the 8th century ancestors of the tortoise brooches, belonging to the Late Vendel Period. Much smaller domed oblong brooches in fact show up already about AD 700 and develop a bewildering variety of styles and design that lasts a few decades into the 9th century before standardisation takes over completely. They’re lovely, almost every one of them unique. There has been no concerted study of them – until now.
I finished my own PhD thesis on social symbolism in Gotlandic burials of the 1st Millennium AD toward the end of 2002. The preceding year I had been to the Sachsensymposium in Lund and seen the amazing metal detector finds from Uppåkra. That project’s leaders were handing out artefact categories for study to various scholars, and I signed up for two brooch groups: the 6th-7th century snake-shaped ones and the 8th century domed oblong ones. I did this for two main reasons: I wanted to get into the metal-detectors & elite-settlement field of research and I hoped to establish a new university affiliation in Lund after my viva. Note the sociology of science aspect.
I began data collection on the two brooch groups in September 2002. My 25-page paper on the snake brooches was swiftly completed and published in late 2003. But the domed oblong ones took more time: there’s a greater number of them and they’re spread over a much larger area. For the second paper I ended up travelling to Lund, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Tromsø, Uppsala, Helsinki, Mariehamn and Ribe. I photographed and measured hundreds of brooches and read reams of obscure literature.
I have mixed feelings about this paper now. From a scientific point of view, I’m very proud of it. It is solidly empirical work with good statistics, I think my arguments are clear, there are two properly done seriation chronologies in it, and at the end is a detailed catalogue that will be useful to students of 8th century Scandinavia indefinitely. Rundkvist 2010 will be the one-stop-shopping reference for this kind of jewellery. I wish more research archaeologists were doing this sort of thing with their research time instead of being such… humanities writers.
From a career-strategical point of view, however, I have to say that it was a failure. The two brooch papers took 2½ years to write and were for all intents and purposes my post-doc project. I chose a type of investigation that is not common or fashionable these days, because it suited my scholarly ideals and it was encouraged by a well-funded research project with friendly directors at another university. But as it turned out, the longer paper took five years to appear because one of the directors fell gravely ill for a time. And the work did not open doors for me as I had hoped. I still have no affiliation with a Scandy university. Instead Exeter and then Chester in England have taken me on as visiting researcher.
Anyway. I never counted on writing an entire book on Östergötland’s elite settlements of the 1st Millennium before the domed oblong brooch paper was published. I had no idea that by the time the paper appeared, I would have finished up my 1st Millennium projects and turned to Bronze Age studies. But now it’s out, on paper and on-line, and I am much relieved.
Rundkvist, M. 2010. Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia Ørsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period. Hårdh, B. (ed.). Från romartida skalpeller till senvikingatida urnesspännen. Nya materialstudier från Uppåkra. Uppåkrastudier 11. Dept of Archaeology, University of Lund.
[More blog entries about archaeology, 8thcentury, Sweden, Scandinavia, Denmark, Norway, jewellery; arkeologi, vendeltiden, smycken, Danmark, Norge, Finland.]
February 26, 2010
February 26, 2010
February 26, 2010
February 26, 2010
February 26, 2010
February 27, 2010
February 28, 2010
March 2, 2010
March 20, 2010
May 28, 2010
September 15, 2010
