1. aardvarchaeology
  2. Norwegians Dig Rock Art

Norwegians Dig Rock Art

By aardvarchaeology on June 15, 2007.

i-b3ea25eb3f75971f3191dd3f6849f034-randskar.jpg

Most rock carvings have very little archaeological context: people who search for them tend to remove hastily any layers on top of them, and they quit digging when they reach the edge of the carved panel. But in recent decades, there has been a trend among Bronze Age scholars to dig beside the panels and try to find ones that are still covered by culture layers. Such digs tend to turn up carving tools of stone, pottery, enigmatic clay marbles and above all lots of evidence of burning. Cultic fires illuminating the carvings as drunk fertility cultists cavorted and copulated in Mycenaean finery...

Recent pentagenarian Christopher Precott (congrats!) in Oslo tipped me off about a Norwegian fieldwork blog by students covering this type of work going on in SW Norway. Loads of artefact finds and buried carvings coming to light after millennia!

Tags
archaeology
Art
norway

More like this

How Do Older Things End Up Buried Under Newer Ones?
Tomas Romson asked me a good question. Why do archaeological layers form in such a way that older things end up buried below newer ones? The answer is, because people and natural processes deposit dirt on the ground. Using a word borrowed from geology, we call the study of such layers stratigraphy…
Back to the Bronze Age Again
Yesterday I began my return to the Bronze Age. For most of my career I've mainly worked with the Late Iron Age, a period that dominates the landscape of agrarian Sweden completely through its cemeteries and place names. But my first published piece of research, indeed the first research I ever did…
Guest Digging At Birka
When I tell people I'm an archaeologist, they often ask ”So have you dug at Birka?”. As of yesterday I can finally proudly reply ”yeah, a bit”. ”Birka” is a Latinate attempt to write Biærkey, ”Birch Island”. It's an island in Lake Mälaren, two hours by slow boat from Stockholm. For a bit more than…
The Ever-Present Past: Your Nearest Site
People have been everywhere on Earth and whatever they did originally in a certain spot rarely continues into the present. The Swedish legal definition of an archaeological site is that it should contain remains of people's activities in the past that have become permanently discontinued. This…