archaeology
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2009
My recent talk in Trävattna parish hall, Västergötland, was covered by two regional papers. Rune Torstenson has kindly scanned the items for me. The headlines read "Power once originated in the mead-hall" and "Searching for ancient power-wielders". To read the articles, click on the images.
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2009The 72nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at A Hot Cup of Joe on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Carl before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2009Sven Gunnar Broström, known as Stone Gunnar.
In June of last year I reported on my visit to a small research excavation directed by my Fornvännen boss Lars Larsson at Botkyrka golf club south of Stockholm. The Stensborg site is highly unusual by the standards of this part of the country: a place near the sea shore where some of the region's first farmers congregated almost 6000 years ago and did some really weird shit. Sven Gunnar Broström, PhD h.c., one of Sweden's most active and respected self-taught archaeologists, discovered it in the late 60s. Simply through fieldwalking he and Kent…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2009Sösdala style silver sheet fittings. Image from the Finnestorp project's web site.
Among the many things Swedish archaeologists envy our Danish neighbours are their splendid war booty sacrifices mainly of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries AD. These are silted-up lakes whose anaerobic peat deposits are full of vandalised military equipment taken from less fortunate invading armies (more here). In Sweden, we know of only two major sites in this category: Skedemosse on Ãland, which was unfortunately drained and ploughed out long before archaeologists came to work there, and Finnestorp in VästergÃ…
gregladen | July 21, 2009It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature ... the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human (as opposed to other-ape). Therefore, the use of adornment is seen by early 21st century archaeologists as evidence of modern human behavior.
Some artifacts from early archaeological sties might be adornment, or they might be 'art' (or at least "arty") and they might be related to…
gregladen | July 17, 2009... continued ...
One of the main reasons we were staying in Kimberley at all was to assist the museum staff with a particular, and rather singular, survey and excavation. The location and circumstances of this field project were quite remarkable.
This was on the location of an historic hunting reserve, where every one of the buildings where guests were quartered and entertained was built well before World War II. Even the ancient charcoal refrigerator was intact and in use. This was a large cylindrical structure with double mesh walls. When the game was afoot and dozens of buck were…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2009Today I didn't make any effort to entertain the kids until mid-afternoon. I was busy filling in some gaps and writing the last piece of text for my Ãstergötland manuscript, an entry for the gazetter at the end of the book. It's been my main project for almost four years. What remains now is fiddling with details (bibliography, figure numbering and captions, test-reader comments, read-through and final copy edit) and collecting/making illustrations.Regna and Skedevi parishes
In northernmost Ãstergötland, far from the plains belt, is Lake Regnaren whose surface is 60 meters above current seal…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2009The seventy-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Neuroanthropology. 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. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2009
In early May (I was <this> close to capitalising "Early" because I write about archaeological periods all the time.) metal detectorists on Bornholm, Denmark, rediscovered one of the earliest-documented find spots of guldgubbar. These are tiny embossed gold foils depicting people: usually a single man, sometimes an embracing man and woman, less frequently a single woman. They are a diagnostic artefact type of the Vendel Period's elite manor sites (AD 530-790). A cool thing about the new find is that is contains gold bracteates as well, which suggests that we are dealing with one of the…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2009The 72nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Neuroanthropology tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Greg. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
gregladen | July 13, 2009Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2
Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from almost every native culture from thousands of kilometers around.
The city's very existence is highly questionable…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2009KÃ¥reholm manor on the Slätbaken inlet in Ãstergötland, home of my friends the Danielsson family.
In the 1950s there was a company (maybe several?) in Sweden whose business was to fly around rural areas and take aerial photographs of farms, mills, churches and small factories. Employees in pilot uniforms would then ride around in limousines and sell copies to the landowners. For an extra fee you could get yours hand-tinted by a pilot's wife in the suburb next to Bromma airport.
The company didn't sell the negatives, and for most sites they didn't make a sale at all. So the company archives…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2009The seventieth 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. The next open hosting slot is on 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009Current Archaeology's July issue offers a lot of good reading, of which I particularly like the stories on human origins (see below) and garden archaeology at Kenilworth Castle. But I have two complaints.
First point of criticism. The editors of CA have this weird habit of doing "media tie-ins" without any clear indication of authorship. In the past three issues were excerpts from a forthcoming book by Barry Cunliffe. They weren't billed as written by Cunliffe. Instead you got the impression that a nameless writer had read his book manuscript and paraphrased it for the magazine. "Cunliffe…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2009The 71th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Afarensis on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to the bloggin' australopithecine. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2009
Swedish island-province Ãland's second-largest silver hoard ever was found recently. Dating from the 11th century and consisting mainly of about 1000 German and English coins, it also has some Islamic ones, one from Sigtuna and even one from India, a very rare occurrence. Some hack silver as well, and a piece of gold rod unless I'm mistaken.
The droning noise at the start and end of the above newsreel is a Bronze Age trumpet that had been lying in a bog for almost 2000 years at the time when the hoard was buried and would spend almost another 1000 years there before it was unearthed. Nice…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2009tags: book review, Unholy Business, religious antiquities, biblical antiquities, fraud, Christianity, Judaism, Nina Burleigh
There are two different types
of people in the world,
those who want to know,
and those who want to believe.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
In November 2002, an ancient carved limestone burial box designed to hold the disarticulated skeleton of a dead person was put on public display in Canada's Royal Ontario Museum. Although common throughout Israel, this particular box, known as an ossuary, was unusual because it was inscribed. Even more remarkable, its ancient Aramaic…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2009I'm finishing writing a book and you guys will have the opportunity to review the manuscript some time towards late summer. The working title is Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats. Elite Settlements and Political Geography AD 375-1000 in Ãstergötland, Sweden.
The title alludes to the Old English epic poem about Beowulf. Set mainly in 6th century Denmark, it is all about the petty kings of the time whose political life was centred upon the feasting hall. That's where raids were planned, guests entertained, loot from raids shared out, religious rituals performed, epic poetry about raids listened…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2009
Dendrochronology is the study of tree-rings to determine when and where a tree has grown. Everybody knows that trees produce one ring every year. But the rings also vary in width according to each year's local weather conditions. If you've got enough rings in a wood sample, then their widths form a unique "bar code". Collect enough samples of various ages from buildings and bog wood, and you can join the bar codes up to a reference curve covering thousands of years.
Dendrochronology has a serious organisational problem that impedes its development as a scientific discipline and tends to…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2009
Here's a cool thing from my buddy Claes Pettersson at Jönköping County Museum. He's been directing big excavations of the town's 17th century industrial precinct, and his team has found something that appears to be a forged gold coin. It consists of a soft grey metal (tin?) with a thin coating of a yellow metal. So far nobody's been able to tell quite what type of coin it was supposed to look like, only that one side features a crowned head. Any ideas?