archaeology
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2009The seventy-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in two weeks, on 4 November. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2009The Swedish Research Council just released the list of researchers who are getting funding this year. The following archaeological projects are on the list.
Ingela Bergman: Trade, trade routes and Sami settlements -- socio-economic networks in northern Sweden AD 1000-1500.
Gunilla Eriksson: Individual relationships -- cultural diversity and interaction in Neolithic Poland.
Henrik Gerding: Lateres coctiles -- the early use of fired brick in Europe.
Ulf Hansson: "The Linnaeus of Archaeology" -- Adolf Furtwängler and the great systematisation of Classical Antiquity.
Ragnar Hedlund: Propaganda…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2009The 78th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Paddy, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. The next open slot is on 4 November. Drop me a line!
gregladen | October 10, 2009A very early example of painting inside a built structure is being reported from Syria.
A Repost
Geometric polychromic painting on the interior of a built wall in a structure occupied by Hunter-Gatherers, about 11,000 years ago, in Syria. [source]
It looks like modern art, but this painting could hardly be older.
Archaeologists discovered the painted pattern of black, white, and red among the ruins of an 11,000-year-old house in northern Syria--making it the oldest wall painting ever discovered.
Researchers uncovered the prehistoric artwork while excavating the dwelling near the Euphrates…
gregladen | October 9, 2009A team of archaeologists working offshore from Haifa, Israel in the Mediterranean has discovered both direct and indirect evidence of human tuberculosis. This is important because, if confirmed, the TB cases date to 3,000 years earlier than expected: The disease should not be in skeletons this old. Also, this research seems to indicate that Tuberculosis did not originally arise in cattle to be later transmitted to humans, but rather, the other way around.
A Repost
The site is called Alit-Yam, and it is a 9,000 year old Pre-Pottery Neolithic village. This site is about two or three…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2009
Small mounds consisting of burnt stone are a signature feature of Bronze Age settlement sites along the coasts of southern Sweden. They were the subject of my first academic publication in 1994, though I'd hardly even seen one, let alone dug one. This I have finally begun remedying today, when I did another day of volunteer digging with my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell.
Mattias and Roger started out as pioneer investigators of the Mesolithic archipelago that is now a bunch of hill tops in the southern part of inland Stockholm county. Their emphasis has shifted though: it's…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2009The seventy-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Place Odyssey. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. 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 two weeks, on 21 October. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2009
Most rune stones are written with the late 16-character futhark and date from the 11th century when the Scandies had largely been Christianised. Their inscriptions tend to be formulaic: "Joe erected the stone after Jim his father who was a very good man". But by that time, runic writing was already 900 years old. It's just that inscriptions in the early 24-character futhark are much less common. And when you find them, their messages are usually far less straight-forward.
My buddy Frans Arne Stylegar reports in a series of blog entries [1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] on the discovery, less than two…
gregladen | October 7, 2009
This is for all your nascent researchers about to head off to remote places to engage in your very first fieldwork, and for all you eco-tourists or educational travelers about to embark on a trip through strange lands afar.
A Repost
When I was preparing to start my graduate research in Africa, I was already very experienced in fieldwork, but all of it was in the United States, and although there is cultural variation across the land even in old New England and New York, the work I was planning was at a field site in Africa originally selected precisely because of its extreme remoteness.…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2009
It's always bittersweet to return to sites you've dug. I guess I'm particularly susceptible to this nostalgia since I tend to feel it very shortly after moving on from anything or any place. And since I usually only dig during the sunny season I remember my old excavations as summer country.
Two days ago I checked in with the boat inhumation cemetery at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Ãstergötland. Me & Howard Williams and his students dug there in 2005. The turf and flora have regenerated nicely over our trench and a flock of broad-snouted sheep now grazes on the cemetery hill. They seem to…
aardvarchaeology | September 28, 2009
In 1995 a gold hoard was found at Vittene in Norra Björke parish, Västergötland. Its contents had been amassed over two centuries, and it was committed to the earth in the 3rd century AD. A fine book on the find and subsequent settlement excavations has recently been published and is available in full on-line.
Below is a picture of the Vittene hoard. Above is a picture of a replica of the hoard made of marzipan and gold leaf by Sören Elmqvist for the 1995 Christmas market at the county museum.
Thanks to Niklas Ytterberg for the tipoff.
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2009The seventy-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. 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 two weeks, on 7 October. No need to be an anthro pro.
gregladen | September 23, 2009This is the third of three parts of this particular falsehood. (Here is the previous part)
I previously noted that to survive as a Westerner, you can get away with participating in a culture that asks of you little more than to understand the "one minute" button on the microwave, while to survive in a foraging society you needed much much more. Moreover, I suggested that the level of complexity in an individual's life was greater among HG (Hunter-Gatherer) societies than Western societies.
However, this is not to say, in the end, that one form of economy and society is more complex than…
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2009
I type this in the hotel lobby while waiting for the train just across the street that will take me to Brussels. The conference closed at 13, I had sandwiches with my colleagues and then set out again for the countryside south of town to grab me a geocache. On the Mergel ridge I saw a motte (an 11th/12th century fortification mound), and I suppose the remains of its bailey might also have been visible if I had entered the pasture it sits in. I've only seen one of those before, in Oxford.
Then I crossed the Jeker stream on a foot bridge by a mill and entered farmland. Apple orchards,…
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2009Sculpture fragment from the Cathedral of St. Lambert in Liège.
Today's bus excursion took us up the river Maas/Meuse into Wallonia, Belgium's Francophone part, where our first stop was Liège. The city looks pretty crummy, I'm afraid, with a lot of dilapidated and dirty buildings. The ironworks (?) outside town are grotesque in their gargantuan size and run-down brutal ugliness. It's like a nightmare about the Ruhr. A must-see for industrial romantics.
In central Liège is a great big square that used to be the site of the Cathedral of St. Lambert. It got torn down 200 years ago, apparently…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2009
Here's a piece of fragmentology. In the 19th century a brooch (inset) was found at Vistena in Allhelgona parish, Ãstergötland. It's a copper-alloy piece decorated with embossed silver sheet panels in the Nydam style, approx. AD 375-450. In 2008 a member of my metal detector team found part of a similar brooch at Sättuna in Kaga parish, a few tens of kilometers east of Vistena. Apparently we're dealing with a regional metalworking tradition. The complete brooch measures 57 mm across the head plate, the fragment 42 mm.
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2009The seventy-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Ad hominin. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 7 October. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2009Back in April of 2008 I mused that strictly chronologically speaking, at 36 I was already a mid-career academic since I started working at 20 and retirement age is currently 65. I'm still years from the age when people get academic jobs in my discipline, 41, but anyway.
Yesterday I had two experiences that opened my eyes to the fact that I am now an archaeological dad. By that I mean that there are at least two fields where work I once did is no longer the Stand der Forschung, but where vigorous new studies refer to and build upon my old stuff. I am a member of the parental generation in…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2009The 75th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Ad hominin on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Ciarán. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. The next open slot is on 7 October 23 September. Drop me a line!