bronze age
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2012
Yesterday I went to Jutish Viborg by train, plane and bus. This took a bit less than eight hours. Exiting Aalborg airport into the icy sleet I managed to walk straight into the glass wind breaker outside the turnstile, banging my forehead and knee. Everybody around studiously avoided noticing my antics. On arriving in Viborg I found the museum, met some colleagues and received a key for the visiting scholars' building at Asmild that I'm staying in. Then to the city library where there is warmth and (flaky) wifi, and where I am now sitting again. Wednesday ended in good company with…
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2012British Archaeology #122 (Jan/Feb) has a good feature on the origins of Roman London, presenting and collating evidence from excavations in the 90s and 00s for a military camp immediately post-dating the AD 43 invasion of Britain. The editors have slapped a silly headline on the thing though, playing up a short passage about human heads deposited in the Walbrook stream as if this were the main issue dealt with in the piece.
The unsigned last page discusses the important work of Raimund Karl (in The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice Oct 2011; read it on-line), who has compared the…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2011My current project on the siting of Bronze Age sacrificial sites aims to rediscover some of the the period's landscape rules. In other words, I'm building an heuristic model which might allow archaeologists to search actively for such sites instead of waiting for farmers and drainage workers to find them by chance. I was encouraged to read the following in David Yates' and Richard Bradley's paper "The siting of metalwork hoards in the Bronze Age of south-east England" (Antiquaries Journal 90, 2010).
"For some time it has been obvious that metal detectorists have been extraordinarily fortunate…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2011
Yesterday my dad had his boat lifted out of the water like he does every autumn to keep the ice from damaging it. I hadn't seen the lift they used before: it's a remote-controlled motorised thing, fast and nifty. Note the yellow control box.
This reminded me of a fairly common motif in Bronze Age rock art, the boat carrier. Boats are extremely common, and sometimes you'll find a guy lifting the boat, crew and all. I think this is probably a depiction of the Sea God. But it may also be a human lifting a wooden ship model. We have a few bronze figurines that look like they may have adorned…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2011Back in February I wrote about a new issue of Halland County Museum's periodical Utskrift. And now I have already received two new issues! I'll talk a little about #12 here as I haven't read #11 yet.
The volume is an homage to Lennart Lundborg on his 80th birthday. Lundborg is a beloved figure in Halland archaeology and a former employee of the museum. Fittingly, five of the twelve papers deal with the Bronze Age in Halland province, the man's main field of study, and three with other aspects of his work, including the many comics he's drawn!
The three longest papers (all 14 pp.) are a report…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2011
Scandinavian Bronze Age art features a number of motifs having to do with the movement of the sun through the heavens during the day and the underworld during the night. Here on Aard, we've previously seen a recently found sun-chariot rock carving, which most likely depicts a wheeled bronze model. But more commonly, there's a horse pulling the sun's disc across the sky without the benefit of wheels. This motif is known from several rock art sites on Sweden's west coast.
Awesome rock art surveying team Roger Wikell, Sven Gunnar Broström and Kenneth Ihrestam have recently found the first two…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2011
Few Swedish caves contain any known archaeology, and those that do mainly feature Mesolithic and Neolithic habitation layers. The Pukberget ("Devil's Mountain") cave near Enköping is a rare exception. In the mid-20th century a fox hunter crawled into the cave and felt his way around. His questing hands encountered something on a ledge which he put in his coat pocket. When he came out into the open air, he saw that he'd found a bronze spearhead and a horse tooth. Both are now in the Museum of National Antiquities. The spearhead dates from the Late Bronze Age, about 700 BC.
I've spent the…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2011Since the autumn of 2009, I've spent most of my research efforts studying sacrificial finds in the Bronze Age local landscape. I was thus pleasantly surprised (though a little disappointed because I missed the whole thing) when I learned that there had been a symposium on the theme "Sacrificial finds in the Late Bronze Age local landscape" at the museum in Viborg, Jutland, in March last year. Recently, only about a year after the event, a fine proceedings volume (104 pp., A4 format, 2-column text, colour printing) was published, and I was kindly sent a copy for review here on Aard.
The volume…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2011
In the Lake Mälaren area of Sweden, you rarely find any large pieces of Bronze Age metalwork in graves or at settlement sites. When the beautiful larger objects occur - axe heads, spear heads, swords, neck rings, belt ornaments - they almost exclusively come from odd find contexts that I for one feel comfortable with terming sacrificial deposits. My current main project aims to find out the rules that decided where people made sacrificial deposits. This entails looking at the finds we already know of and trying to trace the find spots, which is difficult as most finds were made about 1900…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2011Andreas Oldeberg (1892-1980) is rumoured to have had some pretty ugly political leanings. But just because you like cheese, you needn't socialise with cows. If you're into Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age metalwork from Sweden, there is absolutely no getting around Oldeberg's huge illustrated catalogue from 1974.
I'm currently grabbing data out of the catalogue for my sacrificial sites project. And I've come across a funny detail that shows that old Oldeberg was not up to speed with his day's archaeological methodology.
Whenever Oldeberg describes a spearhead, he classifies it according to…
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2011
I've reported before [1 - 2] on the on-going discoveries in the Tjust area of NE Småland province. Here Joakim Goldhahn is employing the country's best rock-art surveyors to work through an area that is turning out to be extraordinarily rich and diverse in Bronze Age petroglyphs. These years will be remembered as a time when the Swedish rock art map was redrawn in a dramatic fashion.
Here are two fresh finds from last week, pics courtesy of my friend Roger Wikell. Some of this rock art is pecked on quartzite, a material so hard that Roger compares it to bullet-proof glass. The cool thing…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2011
Success and failure in archaeological fieldwork is a graded scale. I wrote about this in autumn 2008:
My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2011
Half a year ago I gave a talk about sacrificial sites to a Bronze Age seminar at the Stockholm County Museum. Now the contributions have appeared in a fine little volume in Swedish that can be read on-line for free or mail-ordered from the museum. Thanks, editors, for swift and accurate work!
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2011Skalk's first issue for 2011 opens with a great article by Mr. Bronze Age Religion himself, Flemming Kaul. It deals with two wooden votive helmets found in a bog on Lolland in Denmark. Their closest parallels are from a big multiperiod deposit of pre-Roman metal helmets found at Negova/Negau in Slovenia. One of the latter carries an extremely early inscription in Germanic, the name Harigasti, which makes the link to the Uglemose find even more interesting.
Kaul shows further parallels from coeval situla art where boxers compete for similar helmets. And then comes a passage that made me laugh…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2011
The National Geological Survey of Sweden has put an interactive deglaciation and shoreline displacement model for the country on-line for free. You can download detailed hi-res maps of your favourite parts of Sweden for 0-16 thousand years ago, and a few thousand years into the future! (But only at intervals of whole millennia.) Invaluable for Swedish prehistorians!
Above is the area between LÃ¥ngbro and Hjortsberga in VÃ¥rdinge parish, Södermanland, where I'm planning some fieldwork, as it looked in 1000 BC according to current knowledge of the shoreline displacement process. I scouted the…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2010Update 13 December: Florian at Astrodictum Simplex has translated the whole entry into German. Thank you, Florian!
Update 21 December: German pop-sci web zine Scinexx reports on the poor status of the impact hypothesis and refers to this blog entry. They also mention a really weird idea of the CIRT's that I hadn't heard about: that the impact event somehow taught certain Celts to make better steel, and that this material eventually allowed the Roman empire to expand!
Back in August, I blogged about this dodgy paper that had been published in Antiquity. Subsequently, German geologists Robert…
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 | July 10, 2010I had two pages in the May issue of Forskning & Framsteg (Sweden's equivalent av Scientific American) about recent books on the Scandinavian Bronze Age. I was happy to publish there, but not very happy with the rushed chop job the contribution went through without my involvement before it was sent to the printers. So, below the fold is an uncut review in Swedish of the following books:
Det 10. nordiske bronsealdersymposium. Trondheim 5.-8. okt. 2006. Red. Terje Brattli, Trondheim 2009.
Changing landscapes and persistent places. An exploration of the Bjäre peninsula. Jenny Nord. Lund…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2010
Reiner Knizia is one of the board-gaming world's greatest celebrities, famous for a long string of hit games. According to the members of Boardgamegeek.com, the best of Knizia's games is Tigris & Euphrates (1997), which is #11 on the site's thousands-strong ranking list. I can't really compare against other Knizia games, but I do know that it's one of my favourites.
As you may imagine, I was very happy the other day when I discovered that Boardgamegeek.com actually offers on-line T&E for free, played against real people! The rules are available in many languages on BGG. Let's have…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2010
The Pukberget sacrifical cave, Uppland
I recently submitted my contribution to the proceedings volume from the 11th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium. Here's the manuscript and here's the abstract:
Gods of High Places and Deep Romantic Chasms
Introductory remarks to a study of the landscape situation of Bronze Age sacrificial sites in the Lake Mälaren area
This paper outlines work in progress with the Bronze Age sacrificial sites of the Lake Mälaren provinces in Sweden. The project's goals are twofold: a) to understand the landscape rules behind the siting of deposits, and thereby b) to develop…