Archaeology
Category archives for Archaeology
Boardgame Review: Beer & Vikings
Posted by Martin R on December 2, 2012 
Beer & Vikings – of course I had to review this new Italian boardgame, the follow-up to 2011′s Sake & Samurai in the “Spirits & Warriors” series. Let me say at the outset that the game art shows little influence from actual Viking Period material culture and the text shows little influence from Old Norse…
Fornvännen’s Spring Issue On-line
Posted by Martin R on November 2, 2012 
Check it out in full, for free! Kim von Hackwitz on miniature Middle Neolithic battle axes around Lake Mälaren Roger Wikell & Jörgen Johnsson on the re-discovery of a runic inscription on a cliff side near Stockholm Herman Bengtsson & Christian Lovén on indications in Medieval church art about the contents of a lost longer…
Medieval Norse Trappers On Baffin Island
Posted by Martin R on October 31, 2012 
Icelandic sagas and a single archaeological site in Newfoundland document a Viking Period presence of Norse people in the Americas. Now National Geographic’s November issue has a piece (here and here) on new work in the field, lab and museum collections by Dr. Patricia Sutherland. It deals with a group of additional and somewhat later…
Recent Archaeomags
Posted by Martin R on October 28, 2012 
Current Archaeology #271 has a long interview with Mick Aston of Time Team fame. When asked how he got into archaeology, Aston paints a little vignette of the renowned High Medieval archaeologist, professor Philip Rahtz: [At Birmingham in the mid-60s] Philip Rahtz had just been appointed, and was living in this lilac caravan on the…
On My Mind Right Now
Posted by Martin R on October 19, 2012 My landscape students in Växjö did extremely well on the exam: 79% passed with distinction. And they were extremely kind in their evaluation of the course, which took place before the exam. I’ve been put in charge of an on-line course in upplevelseproduktion, tourist site production, and so will spend the entire academic year of…
Gothic Greetings From Velvet-Season Crimea
Posted by Martin R on October 6, 2012 My dynamic friend and colleague Frans-Arne Stylegar has managed to liberate a respectable sum of Norwegian oil money to fund a collaboration with Ukrainian archaeologists under the direction of professor Igor Khrapunov. The first results of this collaboration have been two international conferences on the theme “Between Two Seas. Northern Barbarians From Scandinavia To The…
New Migration Period Hoard
Posted by Martin R on September 18, 2012 
A few weeks ago my friend Tobias Bondesson and his fellow amateur detectorists Iohannes M. Sundberg and Tommy Olesen found a 3.5 kg silver and gold hoard from the 5th century AD near Roskilde in Denmark. They reported their find to the town museum, the hoard was lifted by experts and excavations are ongoing. This…
Flew To Öland
Posted by Martin R on September 8, 2012 
Yesterday I went to Öland and showed my students some sites and landscape. We were joined by human geographer Carl-Johan Nordblom who knows all the post-Viking stuff. Lovely day! Though we couldn’t find our way to the best-preserved of the Resmo passage tombs. The land owner has tired of visitors and closed off the driveway…
Postcard from Hazor
Posted by Martin R on August 29, 2012 
My cousin Annika kindly forwarded me this postcard from a budding archaeologist just out of high school and on his first dig. I translate: * Hazor-Haglilit July 15th, 1990, 12:05 [Sunday] Shalom! Mainly I’m digging. At the same time we exchange some language teaching – my new Israeli acquaintances call each other “whitstevell” in passing…
Carver On Education In Archaeology
Posted by Martin R on August 24, 2012 Martin Carver in the editorial to the current issue of Antiquity: If the PhD is an apprenticeship, why does it include no formal training in fieldwork—our method of recovering primary data? Quite apart from the fact that the world is already full of academics who don’t know how to dig (but think they do), not…
