Denmark
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2010Re-run from 25 December 2005 (no, Swedes pay no attention to Christmas Day, preferring to get worked up about Christmas Eve).
In Skive, Denmark, there's a pond dug to accommodate a plywood Viking ship that was never set afloat.
My friend Rud Kjems tells the story in local-history annual Skiveegnens jul 2005. Skive museum was incorporated in 1910, but only in 1942 did it get premises of its own. When the museum building was finally becoming a reality, the organisation received some unusual corporate sponsorship.
Danish brewery Tuborg financed a film set in the Viking Period for the…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2010
Here's a funny find. My buddy Tobias Bondesson sent me these pics of a gneiss or granite object he's found, measuring 30 by 28 mm in diameter and 20 mm high. The find spot is near Lee church in northern Jutland (the current stone structure there goes back to shortly after AD 1100), and the metal detector finds go back at least to the 8th century. What do you think it is?
As Tobias points out, the shape and dimensions are exactly what you'd expect from a Viking Period gaming piece. But it's the wrong material. Those are almost exclusively made of bone, antler or horse teeth.
I have an idea…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2010Through my reading I was reminded of two Scandinavian early-12th century queens whose careers are pretty amazing. Though originally probably unrelated, they became kin by marriage in several ways.
~1085. Margareta Ingesdotter born, daughter of King Inge I of Sweden. (Birth year unrecorded.)
~1100. Ulvhild HÃ¥konsdotter born, daughter of the Norwegian nobleman HÃ¥kon Finnsson of the Thjotta family. (Birth year likewise unrecorded.)
1101. As part of a peace agreement between the Kings of Sweden and Norway, Margareta marries King Magnus III "Barefoot" Olavsson of Norway. Thus her cognomen…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2010
One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward the end of the 10th century. It's got the lines "There's thyme in it, said Toki in a cracked voice" and "He's done pissing now", and a duel that ends in a man's severed head landing in a tub of mead. (You can see why Bengtsson is one of my favourite writers.)
I recently complained about Skalk running…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2010
Tom Christensen, who heads excavations at storied Lejre on Zealand, Denmark, has a paper about the lovely Lejre figurine in ROMU 2009 (full text on-line) and another one in the new issue of Skalk. Here he offers some well-chosen comparative material and presents his arguments for the figurine's gender and identity. Everybody agrees that the figurine's throne, with its wolf heads and pair of ravens, must depict Odin's high seat Hlidskjalf. Everybody also agrees that the piece dates from the 10th century. But Denmark's foremost experts on 1st Millennium dress (and myself) classify the person…
aardvarchaeology | April 19, 2010Because of blogging and my involvement in the skeptical pro-science movement, in recent years I have come into close contact with Americans as never before in my adult life. More than half of Aard's readers are in the US. It's almost like when I met my wife and suddenly learned lots about China.
A couple of things recur in people's commentary here, largely on religious and political issues. My outlook is clearly quite exotic to many Americans. I view mainstream US politics as half of a full political spectrum, where voters really only get to choose between two different brands of conservative…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2010Skalk's February issue was not up to the Danish pop-arch journal's usual excellent standard. I am always keen to read interesting news from Jelling and Lejre, the country's proto-historic centres. But in this case the editors have devoted 17 of the issue's 30 pages to articles about Harold Bluetooth's Jelling despite the fact that nothing of interest has come up there recently. One reports on humdrum trial excavations and the other on the state of erosion on the hamlet's rune stones. Denmark's archaeology is extremely rich and there's no reason to go on and on about early royal sites just…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2010
I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ãrsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period", though, is definitely a piece of my technical work…
razib | February 23, 2010Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier
I think "Karen the single mom" ad does a better job of selling Denmark:
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2010Danes often have tripartite names, like famous Roman Iron Age scholar Ulla Lund Hansen or NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And I've been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids. So I wrote my erudite buddy, osteologist Helene Agerskov Madsen, and asked her to explain.
I learned that the system is not very old (~100 yrs?) and has already started to fall apart. But in its idealised form here's how it works. The middle name tracks a matrilineage and the last name a patrilineage. When a child is born it…
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 | November 13, 2009
So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press.
Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman.
She's wearing a floor-length dress. And a shawl. And four finely sculpted bead strings. This is a standard depiction of an aristocratic lady of…
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2009The jaw-drop moment of the conference came for me when osteologist Lise Harvig off-handedly showed us pictures of what she is doing. She's a PhD student with Niels Lynnerup at the Dept of Forensic Medicine at Copenhagen. Remember the crumbling Neolithic amber bead hoard that the Danes ran through a CT scanner instead of excavating and stabilising the thing? Now Lise is putting entire Bronze Age urn burials through that scanner. She knows where every piece of bone and bronze is in those urns before she even cuts open the plaster they've been encased in since being lifted out of the ground. She…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2009
Illerup Ãdal in Jutland is known for one of Denmark's largest and most well-excavated war booty sacrifices, most of it dating from the early 3rd century AD. (See my recent entry about the similar Swedish site Finnestorp.) As I've learned from my friend Tim Olsson's new book about such sites, there's a second find spot at Vædebro, right where the Illerup stream empties into Lake Mossø, a few kilometres from the war booty site. The artefact finds here are few, but the bones of 25-30 people were found about 1960, mainly robust men, some with battle wounds. And now the Vædebro site has…
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…
razib | May 4, 2009Late last year I reviewed a book by an American sociologist on Danish secularism. The book was titled Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, and apparently its publication resulted in some controversy in Denmark, in large part due to perceived misrepresentation of the Danish populace by the author. I suspected at the time that part of the issue was that of cultural miscommunication; what "secular" and "religious" are in the United States and Denmark vary a great deal, and the author was attempting to communicate primarily to an American audience…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2009Denmark has an excellent system in place to enable and govern a responsible and constructive metal detector hobby. While the UK's ploughsoil heritage is largely being trashed by nighthawks (despite the valuable efforts of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and Sweden's is left to corrode untouched out in the fields, the Danes organise metal detector festivals, inviting skilled amateurs and professionals alike! One is taking place at Halsted on Lolland between 3 and 5 April. The public is welcome to watch on Saturday the 4th. Rest assured that the international crew of 70 detector-wielding…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2008
Working with the Gothenburg Historical Society's metal detector group at Sättuna near Linköping in the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to be on site when Niklas Krantz found the thirteenth gold foil figure die known to scholarship. These dies were used in the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries to make tiny images of gods or rulers out of gold foil. The beauty of the dies is that the figures themselves are too small and light to trigger a most metal detectors. Not so the dies. And finding one of them is more interesting than finding a foil figure, since the die documents a site where the…
aardvarchaeology | November 1, 2008The other day I took a look at how the European Science Foundation's ERIH project grades journals in Scandy archaeology. Dear Reader Ismene pointed me to a corresponding list put out by the NDS, "Norwegian Data Support for the Social Sciences". While ERIH recognises three impact grades plus ungraded journals, the NDS has only two grades plus ungraded. Here's the list of relevant journals.
Grade 2
Acta Archaeologica
Fennoscandia Archaeologica
Norwegian Archaeological Review
Grade 1
Current Swedish Archaeology
Fornvännen
Journal of Danish Archaeology
Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2008The European Science Foundation has a project called the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH).
... there are specifities [!] of Humanities research, that can make it difficult to assess and compare with other sciences. Also, it is not possible to accurately apply to the Humanities assessment tools used to evaluate other types of research. As the transnational mobility of researchers continues to increase, so too does the transdisciplinarity of contemporary science. Humanities researchers must position themselves in changing international contexts and need a tool that offers…