archaeology
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2010The eighty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Magnus at Testimony of the Spade. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 10 March. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2010
I type these words in a seafood restaurant at the main square of Visby on the island of Gotland. I haven't been here for almost a decade. Today I had the rare pleasure of teaching undergrads. My old grad-school buddy Gunilla Runesson at Visby University College gave me four hours to talk about the Late Iron Age elite, which is what occupied most of my working hours from 1994 until last fall. So I got up at 06:15 this morning, rode a tiny propeller plane across the sea and did three hours on settlements and one hour on graves. Very nice students!
Afterwards I walked through the Medieval city…
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2010
Apparently the Lejre excavators still haven't realised that the lovely silver miniature they found depicts an aristocratic woman who can't be Odin, regardless of who may be the owner of the throne she sits on. A Danish news site contacted me today and asked me about the issue. Here's what I said (and I translate).In the art of the Vendel and Viking Periods, just as in today's art, there's a set of conventions for how men and women are depicted. Largely it's a question of clothing and jewellery that real people used as well. The main difference is that Iron Age art only depicts aristocrats,…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2010I'm reading the recently published 50-year anniversary volume of "UV", the excavations department within the Swedish National Heritage Board. I worked my first fieldwork season for one of their regional units back in 1992. The book's an interesting read as UV is the single organisation that has done the most archaeological fieldwork in Sweden. Ever. And it's the country's biggest archaeological employer. This arguably means that it is the country's biggest producer of archaeological research. Yet it has no academic affiliation.
In Stefan Larsson's paper about the organisation's current and…
aardvarchaeology | January 14, 2010
Härnevi vicarage, Uppland. Large collection of bronzes, c. 600 BC. Packed into a belt box, wrapped in a leather garment and deposited in wetland. Found in 1902 during drainage digging.
In my work, I really prefer writing over reading, and in order to profit as much as possible from my reading while I remember it, I like to write while I read. Otherwise I just get sleepy and feel like I'm not really getting anywhere. So although I am still just getting acquainted with the research background of my Bronze Age project, I wrote the first couple of paragraphs for my next book today. (Note that I…
aardvarchaeology | January 13, 2010The eighty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the A Primate of Modern Aspect. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 10 March. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | January 12, 2010The Open Laboratory is an annual anthology of blog writings on science started by Bora over at A Blog Around the Clock. I was very proud to get pieces selected for the 2006 and 2007 volumes, and then I was miffed to not make the cut for the 2008 one. But now I'm proud again, because my blog entry "Making the Archaeological Record" from February has been selected for Open Lab 2009! This year's volume is being edited by SciCurious over at Neurotopia.
aardvarchaeology | January 10, 2010The 84th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the A Primate of Modern Aspect on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Modern Primate, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. It's a great way to get some traffic and visibility in the anthro/archaeo bloggyspheroid. The next open slot is already on 27 January. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2009The eighty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Primate Diaries. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to the keeper of A Primate of Modern Aspect. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 27 January. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
gregladen | December 28, 2009... in Indiana Jones Staff of Kings Co Op mode. Which we figured out and is so hard to do I thought I'd share it.
If you don't know what this is in reference to, then you don't need to know the answer. If you do know what this is in reference to than you are desperate to know the answer.
First, I hope you know that if your plane is on fire, all you need to do is fly through any available waterfall to put it out. Earlier in the game you may have figured out that if you blow up a water tower, you can fly through the resulting spray and put the fire out as well. Northwest Airlines is now…
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2009The 83rd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the Primate Diaries on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Eric, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. It's a great way to get some traffic and visibility in the anthro/archaeo bloggyspheroid. The next open slot is already on 27 January. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | December 24, 2009I spent Wednesday evening wrapping presents and reading the latest popular archaeomags that have reached my mailbox. Pleasurable pursuits!
Current World Archaeology's Dec/Jan issue (#38) has a story on new interpretations of the inter-war excavation results at Dura-Europos in Syria. This is an important Roman fortress town that was laid waste after a protracted siege by Sasanid Persians in the AD 250s. Thus it preserves the state of the place just as the siege ended, which is highly unusual, with loads of well-preserved military gear and temporary siege-related structures that would have been…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2009A correspondent of mine who requests anonymity tells a sad tale of what Oligarch Russia does to its cultural heritage these days. Money talks!... the scandalous case with the monuments of ancient St. Petersburg on the place of which the Government plans to build a big (400 m high) skyscraper of Gazprom. This is in the very centre of the city, some 600 m from Smolny, and from the beautiful Smolny cathedral, the baroque creation of Rastrelli. The cathedral will be reduced to nil [I take it the cathedral will be physically dwarfed by the Gazprom skyscraper, not torn down]. UNESCO has warned that…
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2009
The mines of Gladhammar near Västervik in SE Sweden were worked at least from the 16th century to the 19th century, producing iron, copper and cobalt. Now they pose a big environmental problem because of heavy metals leaching out of the spoil heaps into a nearby lake. A project is afoot to do something about the site, removing all the spoil (!) to a safer location, and so my colleagues from the Kalmar County Museum have been called in to do some early industrial archaeology prior to the cleanup. Here's a fascinating short film they've shot from a basket lowered with a crane into one of the…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2009The eighty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Eric at the Primate Diaries. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 13 January. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | December 15, 2009A new paper in the Norwegian journal Viking offers exciting news about two less-well-known ship burials from the Avaldsnes area in Rogaland on the country's west coast. Being poorly preserved, they have been difficult to date. Bonde & Stylegar now show with dendrochronology that these are the earliest dendro-dated ship burials in Norway!
Storhaug. Ship built c. 770. Burial in 779.
Grønhaug. Ship built c. 780. Burial in c. 790-795.Another exciting result is that we now know where the famous Oseberg ship was built. Dendro studies have shown that it was built about AD 820, repaired later…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2009
The July issue of Fornvännen has come on-line in all its free full-text glory less than six months after paper publication.
PÃ¥vel Nicklasson publishes his second paper on the forgotten early-19th century antiquarian, J.H. Wallman, and relays information about a Late Roman Period snake-head gold ring found in a highly unusual context.
Ny Björn Gustafsson analyses a poorly understood class of Viking Period ironware and builds a case for a chilling functional interpretation: they were slave collars.
Svetlana Vasilyeva, the most Swedish-speaking colleague we have in Russia, discusses the…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2009
The on-line version of Antiquity's winter issue (#322) was published just the other day. Here are some highlights (links to abstracts, papers then hidden by a pay wall):
A pair of "ornamental trousers" found in an exceptionally well preserved 1st century BC grave in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang. These fancy pants were apparently made out of a pictorial wall hanging looted in the 2nd century from a Bactrian palace.
An Early Neolithic Linear Pottery ceremonial centre on the Middle Rhine in south-west Germany whose voluminous causewayed enclosure ditch is full of cannibalised human bones and…
gregladen | December 6, 2009Cannibalism has been documented again and again in archaeological contexts, as part of normative human behavior. Here's a recent report (I've not looked yet at the original) from the German Neolithic:
Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports.
The authors say their findings provide rare evidence of cannibalism in Europe's early Neolithic period.
Up to 500 human remains unearthed near the village of Herxheim may have been cannibalised.
source
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aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2009The eighty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Spider Monkey Tales. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krystal at Anthropology in Practice. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 30 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.