Fornvännen's Winter Issue On-Line

Fornvännen's winter issue (2009:4) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!

• Anna-Sara Noge looks at burnt mounds, Bronze Age heaps of fire-cracked stone, with bones in them, just like I once did for my first academic paper. But unlike me she has actual osteological data showing that there are human bones there!
• Ny Björn Gustafsson looks at Viking Period bellows shields, pottery or stone barriers that kept a metalworker's bellows from catching fire from the heat of the furnace.
• Mathias Bäck presents new evidence for Viking Period settlement outside Birka's town rampart.
• PÃ¥vel Nicklasson describes a 19th century debate about where Birka really was located and shows that present-day amateur scholars repeat ideas that were discounted almost two centuries ago by the very people who originally came up with them.
• Ola W. Jensen traces the way that the 1809 separation of Sweden and Finland influenced ideas at the time about the two countries' prehistory.
• Jes Wienberg, Christian Lovén and Johan Runer debate the significance of chancel-apses in Scandinavia's Romanesque rural churches.
• Jan Owe presents previously unobserved archival documentation for an Uppland rune stone.
• Karin Margarita Frei presents isotope evidence for where the sheep grazed whose wool formed a well-preserved Iron Age cloak found in a bog in Västergötland.

[More about archaeology; arkeologi.]