Wagons at Frännarp in Scania

This rock art is carved into the smooth surfaces left by the inland ice. The paint and chalk is recent. The red-painted figure above the Himmelstalund wagon is a pair of incomplete foot soles or shoes. The thin chalk lines represent two ships that appear to have been mostly weathered away before the wagon was carved. People returned to these panels and made additions for centuries.

Note that the person who painted the foot soles didn’t see the wagon or the faint ships! This shows how important it is to return to rock art panels regularly with skilled personnel for renewed study. In this case I can take a small amount of avuncular pride in the find, because Theres Furuskog is a long-time collaborator of mine who has done GPS surveying, fieldwalking and metal-detecting with me on many sites in Östergötland and Södermanland. She has also worked for years with cleaning and painting rock art. Her find is a prime example of how important it is to employ educated, intelligent and experienced people for such tasks.

Another fine first in east-coast rock art was the sun horse of nearby Gärstad, found in 2011.

My friend and fieldwork collaborator Tobias Bondeson is a skilled amateur detectorist who regularly publishes scholarly papers on his finds. He pointed me to the latest developments in Swedish officialdom on the topic, a 26 March proposition from the Ministry for Culture to Parliament: Kulturmiljöns mångfald, ”The Diversity of the Historic Environment”. Tobias sent me some insightful comments on 19 April on the bits about metal detectors. Here’s a summary.

• The proposition’s definition of a metal detector, ”a device that can be used to detect underground metal objects electronically”, inadvertently also covers magnetometers and, to some extent, ground-penetrating radar gear. These latter can’t be used to find small things like coins and should carefully be excluded by the rules designed to keep crooks from picking up Iron Age coins.

• The crucial distinction between ploughsoil (where everything is out of stratigraphic context) and untouched stratigraphy is still left out of the discussion despite decades of people pointing this out.
• The suggested legislation introduces the intent to find antiquities into whether or not an applicant should be given a permit to use a metal detector. If you have that intent, then no permit. But a person’s intent can’t be observed. And there are no amateur metal detectorists who would not like to find antiquities. The important distinction is whether a given detectorist is honest and submits his finds to a museum according to the rules, or if he is a crook.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need a system similar to how we deal with hunting rifles. Anybody who can demonstrate the necessary knowledge of how to use this tool constructively and responsibly should be given a licence to do so. And if a person turns out not to measure up to our collective trust in them, then we revoke that licence.

In Sweden right now, it is easier to get a permit to use a device that is immediately lethal to a 600 kg bull elk at 200 m than to get a metal detector permit. And meanwhile, our cultural heritage is eroding bit by bit in the ploughsoil. The distribution maps of more categories of archaeological find and site than I care to count show Sweden as white space while Denmark is full of the stuff. We should foster a culture of responsible metal-detector associations and let the detectorists police themselves while contributing their time and expertise pro bono to archaeological research and enjoying their heritage.

Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds. People then leave the barrows in peace for several centuries and don’t return to the site in any serious way until the Late Bronze Age shortly before 1000 cal BC. And that’s when the weirdness starts. Three round enclosure ditches are dug and re-dug, slighting five of the barrows. The ditches were found to contain household refuse, episodic feast remains and a burial or skull deposit (all shared with various pits inside the enclosures). And the smallest barrow gets slighted from another side by a continuous complex of at least 36 pits, some of them bearing evidence for re-cutting and re-use. The uncovered part measured 29 by more than 52 m. Here’s where the weirdness turns to horrors.

Respectful Late Bronze Age burial in England is typically urned cremation in closely clustered cemeteries. The treatment of the bodies deposited in the Cliffs End pit complex is strikingly deviant. Basically what they’re doing here is killing people and livestock, manipulating their remains ritually, often exposing them on site for a time, and finally inhuming them in pits. Bone preservation is perfect, leaving it all too clear what is going on. And it goes on for 800 years, well into the Middle Iron Age about 200 cal BC. A three-century hiatus during the Early Iron Age, I speculate, may be covered by the part of the feature that hasn’t been excavated.

At least 24 people end up in sacrificial pits between 1000 and 800: males and females, ages 6 to 55. One large pit sees the following sequence (image above):

1. Redeposited human bones and two new-born lambs
2. Woman over 50, killed by sword blows to the back of the head
3. Another pair of lambs
4. Cow’s head, two children and a teenage girl
5. Cattle foot and bag containing dismembered man, 30-35
6. More redeposited bones from people who died before the pit was dug (see below)

Some of the disarticulated bones from this pit are partly charred or gnawed by scavengers or show a patination typical of temporary deposition in a nearby midden. The excavators apparently interpret the animal parts and certain small artefacts in the pit as grave goods, but to my mind nothing in the pit should be seen as a respectful burial: human bodies, livestock and artefacts are all sacrificial gifts to some particularly blood-thirsty deity. The artefact finds are mainly pottery, but also a rare and interesting lead weight and part of a bone balance. Weights and balances are indicative of trade and a grasp of mathematics, but are also important tools when composing metal alloys such as the period’s all-important bronze. Scandinavian weights of the same era take the shape of little female statuettes wearing paired torque neck rings, and we find the paired torques as wetland sacrifices.

Iron Age practices in the sacrificial pit complex are less intense and intricate: over a period of three centuries, eight people get buried whole and seven disarticulated bone bundles are deposited. One young man is buried on top of half a horse. The bone bundles bear signs of scavenging by dogs.

Who were these people then? Could anybody at Cliffs End get roped in for sacrifice and be denied respectful burial at the whim of the local druid? Historical and ethnographic accounts suggest that this is unlikely. Small low-tech societies have a strong sense of in-group versus out-group. If you don’t get your urn in the clan’s urn field in this era, it’s highly likely that you are simply not a clan member. And here’s where stable isotopes come in, a fantastic data source that sees more and more use in interpreting bone finds. Among the questions isotopes can answer today are main food sources and geographical area of residence.

Andrew Millard of Durham University analysed all suitable teeth from 25 individuals. Here’s the geographical breakdown of the sacrificial victims’ area of origin:

36% local
32% southern Norway or Sweden
20% western Mediterranean
12% indeterminate

The reason that you do more than one tooth from the same individual is that teeth form in sequence during gestation, childhood and adolescence. If you move or change your diet during that period, this shows up in the isotope ratios of whatever tooth your body is making at the time. This gave particularly interesting results in the case of an old woman whose disarticulated skull was redeposited in the Late Bronze Age charnel pit discussed above. She was born in Scandinavia, moved to northern Britain as a child, lived a long life and finally ended up as a prop in a religious ritual on Thanet.

More than half of the victims are foreigners. And though more than a third are locals, we don’t know if their parents were locals as DNA hasn’t been done yet. Who travels like this in the 1st millennium BC? Certainly not tourists. Traders do travel, but for a community dependent on long-distance bronze deliveries, it would not be a sustainable strategy to ambush and kill the traders – never mind that these were in all likelihood well organised and armed. My guess is that we’re dealing with slave raiding and slave trade. Goods travelled, and one valuable commodity was slaves. All valuable commodities were appropriate as sacrifices to the gods when that time came.

In the case of the well-travelled old woman, I imagine her being taken from her tribe in southern Norway by Scottish slave raiders, growing up in Scotland, and then being traded on maturity to a Kentish tribe with odd religious practices. She probably gives birth to more slaves there (perhaps a few of the recovered individuals with local isotope signatures) and lives most of her adult life at Cliffs End. Not as a member of the clan, but as property of a clan member. And then comes that final Beltane feast out by the barrows.

Check out Wessex Archaeology’s on-line exhibition on Cliffs End! A monograph is in press: Jacqueline McKinley et al., Cliffs End Farm, Isle of Thanet, Kent: a mortuary & ritual site of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Period with evidence for long-distance maritime mobility.

I shouldn’t really be reviewing my buddies’ books, so regarding Dr. Regner’s work I’ll just say that this lady knows what she’s talking about and she knows how to communicate it. The Stockholm volume has all the strengths of the previous instalments in the series: solid and interesting contents, generous thematic bibliographies, beautiful illustrations, good graphic design. But it also suffers even worse than the ones I’ve read before from weak guide-book machinery.

The subtitle is “an archaeological guide book”, but the volume hardly offers any of the rock-bottom basic aids I expect when I buy a city guide for tourists. I lay the blame at the doorstep of the editors, who also happen to be colleagues of mine, not tourism professionals.

• The contents are organised thematically, not by city precinct. When standing at any given spot in the Old Town, I have to riffle through at least the chapters about the waterfront, the town and the ecclesiastic institutions for bits about that neighbourhood. And those chapters make up most of the book’s girth.

• The single-page table of contents lists only six top-level chapter headings, and none of the informative section headings inside these chapters.
• There are no page headers to aid browsing.
• There is an alphabetical index at the back of the book, but it has been produced blindly according to whatever is mentioned in the text, not comprehensively according to names of streets or blocks. Three interesting spots may be on the same short alleyway, but I’m only likely to find one of them with the aid of the index because in one case the text (and index) refers to the street name, in another to the block name and in the third case to the building’s name, “the Petersén building” etc.

If instead we accept that despite the subtitle this is in no way intended as a guide book, but as a popular introduction to the subject that we are supposed to read from one end to the other (as I did), then we are, conversely, bothered by vestigial remains of guidebookishness. The text keeps repeating certain details in a way that would only make sense if you were reading bits of it here and there. Between pp. 114 and 145 Regner drops out of her attractive expository style and delivers a compact slab of archaeological data with street addresses as headings. Then it’s back to “In addition to the King and the Burghers, the Church was the third power factor that shaped the development of the Medieval town” etc.

To sum up, this good-looking and readable book is full of up-to-date and interesting information based on a comprehensive reading of the technical literature. But when standing, book in hand, at a particular spot in Stockholm’s Old Town, you are unlikely to be able to locate the relevant bits of information about that spot unless you have time to perform a brute-force search through the book from one end to the other. No e-book version that could make this easier is currently available.