archaeology
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2010
Here's something new in burial archaeology!
In 2008 a cremation burial of the Pre-Roman Iron Age was excavated at Skrea backe near Falkenberg in Halland province. It's unusually rich for its time, being housed in a continental iron-and-bronze cauldron and containing three knives, an awl and 5.3 litres of burnt bones from a lamb, a sheep, two pig's trotters, a bird and three people.
I've never seen a knife-handle like that before, with an iron-rod frame, but I've never really worked with the period nor with Halland so that counts for little. A bizarre detail though is that a foot bone from…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2010
Here's a funny find. My buddy Tobias Bondesson sent me these pics of a gneiss or granite object he's found, measuring 30 by 28 mm in diameter and 20 mm high. The find spot is near Lee church in northern Jutland (the current stone structure there goes back to shortly after AD 1100), and the metal detector finds go back at least to the 8th century. What do you think it is?
As Tobias points out, the shape and dimensions are exactly what you'd expect from a Viking Period gaming piece. But it's the wrong material. Those are almost exclusively made of bone, antler or horse teeth.
I have an idea…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2010I'm giving a talk at the Stockholm County Museum in Sickla, Saturday at two o'clock, as part of a day seminar. The subject will be my on-going research into Bronze Age sacrificial sites, where I collaborate with the museum on fieldwork. Aard readers are welcome: just tell the organisers that I'm your estranged dad. And do say hi to me!
I'm a little nervous, though, as I've found out that I'm on immediately after a talk by my old coursemate Dr. Susanne Thedéen, a Bronze Age specialist, who is going to talk about pretty much the same theme! I try to console myself with the fact that she gave…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2010
To my horror, Ystads Allehanda reports that Wladyslaw Duczko has joined Nils-Axel Mörner on a project to excavate the famous Ales stenar stone ship.
Why does this pain me? Because while (as I have reported here before) geologist Mörner and his collaborator homeopath Bob G. Lind are Swedish archaeology's most notorious cranks, Duczko is not. He is a respected senior archaeologist and known as an authority on Slavic silver jewellery of the Viking Period.
If I had heard that Duczko was going to excavate Ales stenar, I would have said "Well done, Wladde, I'm looking forward to seeing your…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2010[More about archaeology, metaldetecting; arkeologi, metallsökare, Uppsala.]
The view from my second investigation area. The great barrows were erected about AD 600.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday metal-detecting for my buddy John Ljungkvist on some of the most storied soil in Sweden: Old Uppsala. Archaeology and early historical sources unanimously point this village out as one of the Lake Mälaren region's most important power centres from shortly before AD 600 until about 1250, when it was superseded by the nearby town of (New) Uppsala. My Ãstergötland project in 2004-2009 largely aimed…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2010Archaeological chronology aims to answer the question "When did this or that event happen?". This question can usually be re-phrased as "When was this or that thing made?", where the thing under study may be anything from a bead up to the Great Wall of China.
Most dating evidence is based upon similarity: people are almost incapable of doing anything in exactly the same way for any long stretch of time, and when they try to return to an old way of doing something, they never get all the details right. Such similarities (again on all scales of evidence) are dealt with in a more or less…
gregladen | September 1, 2010Natalie Munro (UCONN) and Leore Grosman (Hebrew University) have reported an interesting site dating to about 12,000 years ago in northern Israel. It is interesting because it seems to be the remains of feasting, a specific activity that any cultures around the world engage in. I'm actually writing something about feasting and related activities, so this is quite interesting to me. From the abstract:
We found clear evidence for feasting on wild cattle and tortoises at Hilazon Tachtit cave, a Late Epipaleolithic (12,000 calibrated years B.P.) burial site in Israel. This includes unusually…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2010Grötkräkla, "porridge sceptre"
The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival first opened its gaudy tent flap almost four years ago, in October 2006. Since then, 50 blogs have hosted it, 32 of which are still active. The record for most 4SH hostings is shared by Afarensis and Remote Central, both of which have hosted seven carnivals. Well done, everybody!
Here are the submissions for the 100th instalment:
Krys at Anthropology in Practice discusses the Piltdown hoax.
Dan at Neuroanthropology writes about linguistic relativism, the idea that our language forms our world rather than the other way around…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2010My debate piece in Antiquity has proved popular (many people have asked me to send it over, and now I've received the journal's permission to place the paper on-line for free in PDF format) and controversial (several have offered criticism in comments here). Mainly replies seem inspired by the two paragraphs I quoted from the article in my blog entry. Both deal with my opinion that archaeology needs to be fun and popular, because boring archaeology that interests few people is effectively worthless. In the following I will reply to the most interesting comments. To see if I've sneakily…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2010Back in February I posted snippets of an opinion piece I'd been asked to write about the current state and future prospects of Swedish archaeology. Now the thing has appeared on-line in Antiquity (behind a pay wall, but see below), though the journal's autumn issue has not reached subscribers on paper yet.
For you nat-sci types, I should probably explain that Antiquity is my discipline's equivalent of Nature. So, getting to inaugurate a new recurring heading there, "Prospects", is something I'm very proud of.Archaeology should have a popular/populist slant designed to please tax-payers. We…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2010Dear Reader, do you come across a lot of ancient blubber concrete in the course of a normal day? I got some exciting news from Mattias Pettersson Tuesday morning regarding his and Roger Wikell's Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve. As Aard's regulars know, Tyresta is a former archipelago that is now wooded highlands due to isostatic land uplift, all full of early post-glacial seal-hunting camps. It's easy to share Mattias's enthusiasm (and I translate):Does anyone remember the burnt bubbly lumps we found under the hut floor at the 85 m a.s.l. site in Tyresta? Now Sven Isaksson of…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2010My friends Petra Ossowski Larsson and Lars-Ãke Larsson have synchronised and analysed large chunks of the Belfast dendrochronological data (that were made publically available by court order), and published them on their web site in standard dendro file formats.
gregladen | August 17, 2010There is a swath across the map of Minnesota that runs northwest to southeast across the state, separating the major biomes of the eastern two thirds of the country, and for complicated reasons. North, it is colder, south warmer. Much of the moister in the region, especially in the summer, comes from the Gulf of Mexico, directly to the south, whence air masses move north and swerve east. So, there is a west to east gradient of increased rainfall, and a south to north gradient of decreased rainfall. However, the cooler conditions to the north mean that what rain does fall counts for more,…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2010The Public Library of Science publishes a number of peer-reviewed Open Access research journals, most of which specialise in some specific field within the natural sciences. But PLoS ONE has a much wider remit within the sciences. When it first opened a few years ago, I looked for archaeology in it and was disappointed. But now you get 121 hits when you search the journal for "archaeology archeology". This means that PLoS One might be a potential publication venue for research in my discipline.
So, what sort of archaeology does PLoS One publish? Well, just because a paper mentions the word…
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2010Shortly after my buddy Jeff Medkeff died in 2008, a joint book review of ours was published in Skeptic Magazine. Here we criticised a book by Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, two aeronautics engineers, where they claimed that a 7th century BC cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia described an asteroid striking the Austrian Alps in 3123 BC. Their argument was in our opinion extremely speculative or pseudoscientific, regardless of whether you saw it from an astronomical, geological or archaeological point of view.
Bond & Hempsell self-published their book. But to my surprise, the summer issue of…
gregladen | August 8, 2010Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were globally at a very low point (with vast quantities of the Earth's water busy being ice), and at that time George's Bank would have been a highland region on the very edge of the North American continent, extending via a lower ridge to eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2010
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…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2010In the early 15th century, Imperial Chinese mariners under the eunuch admiral Zheng He made great voyages of discovery in enormous ships. Then the Hongxi Emperor decided that what they had found on far shores was underwhelming, the whole fleet was scuppered and the Chinese paid no further attention to seafaring. In 2007 I discussed a silly story about alleged descendants of Zheng He's non-eunuch crew in Kenya who had suddenly remembered their Chinese heritage, which was convenient since the Chinese were interested in local mining rights.
Now the Guardian has news about the Kenya - Zheng He -…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2010
Spent 5.5 hours on site in Wales today and 7 hours by car, train and plane to get from there to Skavsta airport. I've got another couple of hours by bus and train before I'm home. The trains I rode in the UK were on time but often did not leave from the platforms indicated by the online trip planner.
No big news on site today. I did some topless deturfing in the sun and taught a bright student to use a metal detector. Funny how much wordless knowledge you accumulate and spell out only when teaching. "Grab clod, wave over dish, listen, divide clod, wave, listen, toss quiet half, repeat. Close…
aardvarchaeology | July 22, 2010
The Department of History and Archaeology in Chester is moving from their lovely but run-down Georgian building at the north city gate to the main campus. So I spent most of today helping with the move: shifting finds from a Tudor manor site at Stokenham in Devon and excavation gear. On our way to the excavation site we then stopped to check out the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, an amazing 195-year-old piece of hydraulic engineering where a transportation canal has been made to cross a river 38 metres above its surface. The afternoon's fieldwork was interrupted and finally cut short by torrential…