archaeology
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2009
I've filed the Sättuna excavation report with the State Board of National Antiquities, the County Archaeologist's office and the County Museum. And I've put it on-line at archive.org. Check it out if you're into the Late Mesolithic! We didn't get much data on the 6th century elite settlement.
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2009
It's been more than two years since the last time I hosted the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. Now it's my turn again with number 66!
Our first submission is a piece from Anne of the Spittoon blog about a recently published ginormous study of the population genetics of modern Africans. Africa is the part of the globe where people are most diverse since we started out there and have had time to diversify. Can you imagine those hundreds of thousands of years when all the planet's Homo sapiens lived in Africa and hadn't started to explore the rest of the world?
Razib at Gene Expression offers…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2009
Spent the day metal detecting for Thomas Englund at the battlefield of Baggensstäket, anno 1719 (as blogged about before: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4). This was my third time there, and the first time I've helped on the northern half of the area across the water from where I live. Thomas found musket and pistol balls. I picked up an 18th century coat button and loads of steenkeenggg aluminium bottle tops, and saw an abandoned tree house. I'm particularly interested in the pre-battle finds that are starting to accumulate.
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2009My buddy from the Swedish Skeptics, author Peter Olausson, reports on a recent visit to the Ekehagen prehistoric reenactment centre in Västergötland.Ekehagen Prehistoric Village
By Peter Olausson
In Ãsarp near Falköping, in a landscape littered with passage tombs, you'll find Ekehagen. Founded in 1983, the centre has a number of houses built to show what Prehistoric life was like in Scandinavia, from huts of the Mesolithic to a farm of the Middle Iron Age (no Vikings).
Note: This is not a museum. Walking around on one's own and studying the buildings etc. might work for people who already…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2009
Here's a fun project. Maja Bäckvall and Jannie Teinler with friends are visiting rune stones mainly in Uppland province, posing for photographs along with the stones and publishing them on a dedicated web site. So far they've done 121 rune stones!
aardvarchaeology | April 27, 2009The May issue of Current Archaeology (#230) has an interesting piece about warfare in the British Neolithic. The UK has a lot of battle-dead inhumations. There's even Neolithic battlefield archaeology of sorts at hillforts that have been besieged by archers and thus are full of flint arrowheads to this day. I heard a paper on this topic by Roger Mercer at an EAA conference back in ~1996, so I knew a little bit about it already.
Much of the issue is about the differentiation of Roman "villa" sites into functional categories such as shrines, tax-collecting depots and rural manors. In Scandyland…
gregladen | April 26, 2009A tomb in Egypt, on the sea coast, is being investigated by Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass, who claims it is the final resting place of Cleopatra and her main squeeze, Mark Antony. One of the pieces of evidence used to make this claim is a mask with a cleft chin, just like Richard Burton's.
It seems that most non-Egyptian archaeologists are claiming that this is incredibly unlikely. Most of the actual relevant evidence that would address the likelihood has not been examined by anyone, so I won't take this disbelief any more seriously that I'm taking the claim.
Details can be found here…
gregladen | April 23, 2009The World Digital Library has released the first in a new set of ancient documents. I'm very excited that this includes quite a bit of Sumerian material, because that is what I've been reading lately.
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2009The sixty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Primate of Modern Aspect. 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 already on 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a babe. Like me.
terrasig | April 20, 2009I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.
- Woody Guthrie, Ludlow Massacre (1944)
I've written variations on this post a few times, for both Labor Day and the anniversary of a major turning point in US labor relations that was kept alive by historian Howard Zinn and others. I had planned to…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2009
I really enjoyed my work yesterday. The forenoon saw me in the stores of the Museum of National Antiquities looking through Otto Frödin's uncatalogued finds from the "SverkersgÃ¥rden" site near Alvastra monastery. Not only did I find all the elusive 1st Millennium stuff that's mentioned in the literature but never illustrated, but I was also able to identify for the first time two small pieces of iron military equipment of the same date. These strengthen the case for counting SverkersgÃ¥rden among the province's rare Vendel Period elite settlements. After lunch at the Chinese place where I…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2009Yesterday the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education released an evaluation of the archaeology programs offered at eight of the country's universities and colleges.
The most dramatic finding was that three of the eight offer programs of dubious quality that will be subjected to in-depth evaluation:
All programs in Visby.
All programs in osteology and the PhD program in Mediterranean archaeology in Lund.
All programs in osteology and the PhD program in lab-based archaeology in Stockholm.This means that all Swedish programs in osteology are possibly sub-standard.
More generally, the…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2009
Högby near Mjölby in Ãstergötland is a magical place because of a serious lack of historical sensitivity. In 1876 (which is really late as these things go in Sweden) the locals demolished their little 12th century church and built a new bigger one a mile to the south. This meant that the parish centre of a millennium or so became a backwater and has not been built over later. It's completely rural, abutting a farm's back yard, very quiet. All that remains of the church is the churchyard wall and one of Ãstergötland's finest rune stones that was taken out of the sacristy wall. Some fine…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2009Today is my tenth anniversary as one of the academic archaeology journal Fornvännen's editors. While I was an undergrad my teacher Bo Petré encouraged me to subscribe from 1991 on, and I started contributing to the journal in 1994. That first contribution became a life-changer for me. It was my third-term paper, and when I called Fornvännen's editor to ask if he wanted to look at it, he asked me what I was going to do next. "I'd like to do Early Iron Age small-finds", I replied. "How convenient", said Jan Peder Lamm, "I'm working on a paper that's leading off into this funny artefact…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2009The sixty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Quiche Moraine. 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 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
gregladen | April 9, 2009... is here, at Quiche Moraine. Please go and visit this blog carnival, then visit all the sites pointed to by the blog carnival, read them, submit them all to social networking sites, enter them in blogspheric contests, and so on and so forth. Because that's how we do things in The Blogosphere .
I'll check back with you later.
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2009Björn in Helsingborg wrote me with a few questions regarding archaeology as a career.
Where did you study, for how long, what exactly?
University of Stockholm. Three years crammed into two years at 150% speed, that is, a BA / fil.kand. Four terms of Scandinavian archaeology, one term of history, one term of social anthropology. Later I did a PhD as well, but that's not needed to work as an archaeologist.
What's the labour market like? Is it true that there are no jobs?
The labour market is crap and there are no jobs. All Scandinavian countries produce new archaeologists at a vastly higher…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2009I'm almost done with the report from my excavations at Sättuna in Kaga last September. Here's an excerpt.
Finds and radiocarbon dates allow us to identify five phases on-site, two of them corresponding to the dates of the metal detector finds that occasioned the excavations.
Late Mesolithic: finds and features with one radiocarbon date.
Middle/Late Neolithic: one hearth with a radiocarbon date, no finds.
Mid-1st Millennium AD: a pit and a hearth with two radiocarbon dates, no finds.
Viking Period: one posthole with a radiocarbon date, no finds.
Modern rubbish pits.Late Mesolithic
This phase…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2009Not far from my home, in the woods down by the tracks, are the foundations of an abandoned railroad man's homestead. Its name, Vinterbrinken ("Winter Slope"), survives in a nearby street name, though few know that anymore.
The house was built by the railroad company in the 1890s and was torn down, along with its barn, in the 1950s. The municipal archives have photographs of the buildings and the people who lived there, and they are all known by name.
Lately, the staff at a nearby daycare centre has been taking the kids down to the site and had them excavate parts of it, collecting hundreds of…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2009As chronicled here before, some forward-thinking colleagues of mine in the Swedish heritage business are embracing the social web and launching cutting-edge apps and projects. This is impressive not least because they are all working for state bodies founded in the 17th century. Just the other day Minister for Municipalities and the Financial Market Mats Odell gave the National Heritage Board a big shout-out for their Flickr project. (This is funny because Odell is a Christian Democrat and my buddies Lars and Johan are not so much.) Well-deserved praise!
Now Ulf Bodin has announced the start…