Denmark
Category archives for Denmark
Early Neolithic Amber Hoard CT Scanned
Posted by Martin R on February 25, 2008 The Skalk article I mentioned the other day (with the rubber goat) tells the story of an unusual find made in northernmost Jutland in the summer of 2005. Peter Jensen was stripping some land of topsoil for gravel extraction when, from the vantage point of his machine, he spotted something interesting on the ground. Jensen…
Danish Rubber Goat
Posted by Martin R on February 23, 2008 I’m a big fan of Danish archaeology. In my opinion it is the best in Scandinavia, both regarding the sites they have and what they write about them. This love of Danish archaeology has been a strong incentive for me to learn to read Danish easily, though I still have a very hard time understanding…
A Century of Fornvännen Free On-Line
Posted by Martin R on November 21, 2007 Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia’s main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it’s been issued quarterly. I’ve been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal’s editors since 1999. I’m very proud to announce that the first 100…
Villestofte: Danish Bog Booty
Posted by Martin R on August 10, 2007 Long-time Dear Readers may remember that I’ve written in the past about the wonderful Danish war booty sacrifices. Victorious defenders dunked the equipment of foreign armies they had beaten into sacred lakes, mainly during the Late Roman Iron Age c. AD 150-400. The lakes soon silted up into bogs, whose anaerobic conditions preserved the weaponry…
Uppåkra Produces Marvels
Posted by Martin R on July 16, 2007 Without much fanfare, the Department of Archaeology in Lund continues its excavations at the insanely large and wealthy 1st Millennium settlement at Uppåkra parish church outside Lund. This place was clearly a royal seat and the finds are unbelievably rich both in number and quality. A week-by-week fieldwork diary in Swedish is available here, and…
Goldhahn vs. Berntsson Fight Resolved
Posted by Martin R on June 26, 2007 I’ve checked the literature and found out what really happened in the Goldhahn vs. Berntsson fight about barrow-building. Of course, whatever the result, it would have left the Lund Archaeological Review editors looking bad.
The Rude Implements of Savages
Posted by Martin R on June 18, 2007 A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson‘s 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn’t…
Karl Hauck 1916-2007
Posted by Martin R on June 8, 2007 An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck’s interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and…
Archaeological Fist Fights in Lund
Posted by Martin R on May 29, 2007 This year’s issue of the Lund Archaeological Review reached me last week. It’s the volume for 2005-2006, and most of the papers are dated 2005. Such a delay is no big deal in archaeology: our knowledge growth doesn’t progress at the rate typical of the natural sciences. What caught my attention in the new issue…
You Can’t Grok Its Multiplicity
Posted by Martin R on May 4, 2007 [More blog entries about archaeology, religion, vikings, vikingperiod, Scandinavia; arkeologi, religion, vikingar, vikingatiden.] Thursday morning I stopped by the Royal Library in Stockholm and read a paper by Johan Callmer in the great big symposium volume concluding the Vägar till Midgård project (“Roads to Middle-earth”). I was mainly there to check what he had said…
