Denmark
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2008
Tobias Bondesson treats us to the tale of a recent find that blew his mind.
Oh, mercy mercenary me!
Being a detectorist is damn hard work! I get out of bed at the crack of dawn on my day off from work to perform the ritual of "sweep, beep, dig deep" for as many hours as I can before I really, really, have to head back home, lest I want my detecting privileges revoked by a higher power (i.e. girlfriend). And what do I have to show for it? A bum knee, sore shoulders and a mild case of tinnitus are some of my more prominent achievements. On the other hand, metal detecting is the best hobby ever…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2008
The Skalk article I mentioned the other day (with the rubber goat) tells the story of an unusual find made in northernmost Jutland in the summer of 2005. Peter Jensen was stripping some land of topsoil for gravel extraction when, from the vantage point of his machine, he spotted something interesting on the ground. Jensen happens to have much experience of machine operation at archaeological digs. It turned out that he had managed to identify a pit in the subsoil filled with thousands of amber beads: an Early Neolithic votive deposit datable around 3500 cal BC.
Most votive amber deposits…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008
I'm a big fan of Danish archaeology. In my opinion it is the best in Scandinavia, both regarding the sites they have and what they write about them. This love of Danish archaeology has been a strong incentive for me to learn to read Danish easily, though I still have a very hard time understanding it when spoken. (Rumour has it that Danish babies learn to speak on average several months later than other European ones, simply because it's so hard to discern any words in their parents' fond gurglings.)
Swedish and Danish aren't really separate languages in the sense that e.g. French and German…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia's main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it's been issued quarterly. I've been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal's editors since 1999.
I'm very proud to announce that the first 100 volumes of Fornvännen are now available freely on the web! Roughly 3000 PDF files including complete scans, illustrations and all, and searchable text! The site has an excellent search & browse engine.
Most papers in the journal are in Scandinavian…
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2007
Long-time Dear Readers may remember that I've written in the past about the wonderful Danish war booty sacrifices. Victorious defenders dunked the equipment of foreign armies they had beaten into sacred lakes, mainly during the Late Roman Iron Age c. AD 150-400. The lakes soon silted up into bogs, whose anaerobic conditions preserved the weaponry and other gear perfectly. Bee-youtiful stuff.
(Also, it's a very good blogging topic if you want heavy traffic, because any mention of booty, particulary Danish bog booty, will attract porn surfers like you wouldn't believe. Server logs show that a…
aardvarchaeology | July 16, 2007
Without much fanfare, the Department of Archaeology in Lund continues its excavations at the insanely large and wealthy 1st Millennium settlement at Uppåkra parish church outside Lund. This place was clearly a royal seat and the finds are unbelievably rich both in number and quality. A week-by-week fieldwork diary in Swedish is available here, and that's where I've nicked the photographs of gold finds from recent weeks: one of two gold bracteates and a gold filigree cross pendant, all dating from c. AD 500. The two new bracteates are identical to each other and to one found at the site and…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007I've checked the literature and found out what really happened in the Goldhahn vs. Berntsson fight about barrow-building. Of course, whatever the result, it would have left the Lund Archaeological Review editors looking bad.
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line):"Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2007
An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck's interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and quite impossible to ignore for anyone working in that field.
Writes Hagen Keller (and I translate):"On 8 May Karl Hauck died, aged 90. He was the founder of the Institute for Early Medieval Studies and former…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2007This year's issue of the Lund Archaeological Review reached me last week. It's the volume for 2005-2006, and most of the papers are dated 2005. Such a delay is no big deal in archaeology: our knowledge growth doesn't progress at the rate typical of the natural sciences.
What caught my attention in the new issue was three polemic pieces at the back of the volume. First there's another salvo in the war between my buddy Påvel Nicklasson and his erstwhile colleagues at the Jönköping County Museum. To the extent that I understand the conflict, what seems to have happened is that Dr. Nicklasson, a…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, religion, vikings, vikingperiod, Scandinavia; arkeologi, religion, vikingar, vikingatiden.]
Thursday morning I stopped by the Royal Library in Stockholm and read a paper by Johan Callmer in the great big symposium volume concluding the Vägar till Midgård project ("Roads to Middle-earth"). I was mainly there to check what he had said about the above 8th century brooch from Åland, apparently depicting a headless quadruped. But I also found a couple of really good paragraphs on another issue toward the end. Unfortunately the camera in my handheld computer…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, history, Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway; arkeologi, historia, Skandinavien, Danmark, Norge, Sverige.]
Archaeology consists of a myriad of weakly interconnected regional and temporal sub-disciplines. My work in Östergötland is largely irrelevant to a scholar in Lapland and entirely so to one in Tokyo. Larger interregional syntheses are rare and tend to be read mainly by undergraduates who have yet to select a specialty.
Now, imagine someone outside of Scandinavia, who speaks none of our languages, but who wants to approach our prehistoric…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, vikingperiod, vikings, Denmark, Germany; arkeologi, vikingar, vikingatiden, Tyskland, Danmark.]
I made one of my infrequent visits to the University of Stockholm campus today. After getting my PhD in 2003 I was really tired of the place, and I've pretty much stayed away since apart from a few vivas (Sw. disputationer). But today there was an international seminar on Viking Period towns, so I went. Weird to think it's been almost 17 years since I enrolled.
Turned out a team from Schleswig, people working with Haithabu, are here to meet people…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2007
Very timely with the discovery of the Kaga foil-figure model, my buddy Ing-Marie Back Danielsson has published her PhD thesis in archaeology, Masking Moments. The transitions of bodies and beings in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (available on-line). There's a picture of a foil-figure or other late-1st Millennium human representation on almost every page. The viva is on Thursday Friday 20 April in Stockholm, and the opponent none other than that enfant terrible of the British Neolithic, Julian Thomas. Reading his fine 1991 book Rethinking the Neolithic, I remember wondering if there is anything…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2007
Archaeologists love preciousss metals. Not for their monetary value, but because they keep so well. Take a fine damascened sword whose blade ripples like water, so well balanced that you hardly feel its weight, and bury it: it will look like crap after a few centuries. Bury a golden object, and it will in most cases remain unchanged for millennia. It's basically a question of information integrity. Materials like flint and gold allow us to see exactly what prehistoric people saw, and to understand that their material culture was no less skilfully made and eye-catching than ours.
Today…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007Scandinavians are unusually cool about nudity in certain well-defined situations. The Finnish sauna is a well-known example. Within Swedish families, nudity is also commonplace, while many other nations feel that allowing your kids to see you starkers is tantamount to sexual molestation. (Which is a hot topic here at Scienceblogs at the moment.)
My wife and I once had dinner with a young couple down the street, where the man was a Chilean. His parents also had an apartment on the same street. He told us, chuckling, that his ma & pa could never draw the blinds in their kitchen, because…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2007
A new peer-reviewed intercontinental multidisciplinary journal has just been announced: Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). Apart from my discipline, JONA will also cover paleo-environmental reconstruction and modelling, historical ecology, anthropology, ecology of organisms important to humans, human/environment/climate interactions, climate history, ethnography, ethnohistory, historical analyses, discussions of cultural heritage, and place-name studies. Its offices are in Maine and the editorial board includes people based in the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2007
The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on the late-1st Millennium temple at Uppåkra, Scania, Sweden; on mid-to-late 1st Millennium research as historical archaeology; on the Viking Period towns and trade network around the Baltic; and (as illustrated above) on voluptuous Late Magdalenian female silhouettes knapped in flint and found at…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007
One of my favourite Danes, Henrik Karll, offers this variation on an emblematic archaeological motif: a grinning skeleton looking up at the sky from a trench. Only this one's accompanied by a 1950s drain pipe that's sliced it lengthwise in half. As detailed on Henrik's blog, he had a snowy watching brief for some small-scale trenching at Holstebro church in western Jutland a few weeks ago. This is one of the dead people he ran into: dating from after the erection of the church c. AD 1100 but before the advent of careful churchyard planning c. AD 1900. It's an adult individual, sex unknown.…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2007Back in August, I blogged about a paper I'd written on the chronology and iconography of Migration Period gold bracteates. It was published around the New Year and is now also available on-line in English. Please tell me what you think!
Rundkvist, Martin. 2006. Notes on Axboe's and Malmer's gold bracteate chronologies. Fornvännen 2006:5. KVHAA. Stockholm.[More blog entries about archaeology, migrationperiod, Sweden, Denmark; arkeologi, folkvandringstiden, Danmark.]