fieldwork
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2008Frag of a brooch decorated with embossed silver foil. 5th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Our site in Kimstad parish looked even better than I'd thought. This was one of many cases where I've come swooping in to sites that I've never visited before and directed metal detecting. In Kimstad, I had been attracted by Ãstergötland's only (probable) Viking Period wetland weapon sacrifice, a fine sword found during drainage work. But I didn't want more swords. They're too expensive to conserve, and my project is about the settlements of people who could afford to sacrifice that sort of thing…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2008Frag of a lion-shaped badge with a rivet used to fix it to some surface. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Another day of fruitful fieldwork, with friendly landowners and pretty good weather. We started out with 20 man-hours in the fields around a fortified hilltop settlement in Tingstad parish. The hillfort was trial-trenched in 1903, yielding the richest finds known to date from a 3rd and 4th century settlement in Ãstergötland. I was hoping that we might run into something interesting of 5th century date. No such luck: our oldest datable find all day was a piece of a 9th century copper-alloy…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2008Polyhedrical weight. 9/10th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
(Martin here, posting from the hostel of Norsholm on the Göta canal, using my handheld and the cell phone network. To get the post on-line, my dear scibling Janet has kindly agreed to act as go-between.)
Coin struck for Heinrich II, King of Germany. Mainz 1002-1014. Dbg 785. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
This is the third April in as many years that I'm reporting from a week of fieldwork in Ãstergötland with my metal detector buddies. I intend this to be the final expedition before I complete my book about late-1st Millennium…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2007
Today we finished fieldwork at the find spot of the sword I wrote about yesterday. Sieved 5 sqm without a single non-recent find, but the only way to know is to sieve. My dad came out with a pulley and removed the hazel stump that had been sitting on the sword, so we're pretty damn sure there wasn't anything else of interest within the confines of that trench.
Immediately outside the trench, though, began a quay foundation, taking the form of a straight c. 20 m long stensträng, a line of stone blocks, at a right angle to the incline. You can see it as a diagonal from top left to bottom…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2007
Happy Djurhamn project co-directors Katarina Schoerner and August Boj.
Aided by many volunteers and using tools borrowed from my dad and the Stockholm County Museum, I've spent the day getting the Djurhamn sword out of the ground.
I found the sword on 30 August while metal detecting around the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings. Today we marked out a 2.5 by 2.0 metre trench around the sword, got rid of a lot of vegetation, dug and sieved 2.5 square metres and got the sword out. Its point was wedged between the roots of a large hazel bush, so I only got it out in one piece thanks to its excellent…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2007
Here are the fruits of my ten hours of metal detecting in Kaga while Immo and Per mucked around with the magnetometer Wednesday and Thursday.
Top left is a spool-shaped copper-alloy handle, cast around a slim iron rod that's broken off at the lower end. There's indistinct cast relief decoration on the handle, and its shape and size are identical to those of 11th century key handles. These keys are L-shaped with prongs toward the end of the horizontal rod.
The next thingie is also a handle, belonging to a key or an ear scoop. El Cheapo openwork decoration typical of the 10th century, where…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2007Originally posted 19 September from my handheld via the cell network and e-mail to my old site.
Drove to Linköping this morning listening to the Digital Planet podcast, M Coast's latest album and a Povel Ramel hits collection. On site in Kaga I was greeted by my friendly National Heritage Board colleages Immo Trinks and Per Karlsson. They were busy assembling Scandinavian archaeology's first motorised magnetometer setup, and informed me that my site would see the equipment's first non-trial run.
The setup consists of a long trailer made of aluminium and held together by bronze and plastic…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2007
I've spent the day metal-detecting for a project called Vasakungarnas Djurhamn, that is, "Animal Harbour of the Sheaf Kings". This name may not make much sense to you, Dear Reader, so let me explain.
In the 1520s Gustaf Eriksson, the most successful of many ambitious young noblemen at the time who tended to end up decapitated, wrested Swedish royal power from the Danes with the aid of Lubeck. He soon implemented Reformation and used the riches of the church and monasteries to repay his debts and reorganise Sweden from the bottom up. A very good 2002 biography of the man has the subtitle "…
aardvarchaeology | July 2, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Mesolithic, forestfire; arkeologi, mesolitikum, Tyresta, skogsbrand.]
Spent Friday working for my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell, digging on one of their Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve south of Stockholm. It's an incredible place. Imagine:
An archipelago with lots of little rocky islands, located far from the coast of the mainland and teeming with seals. Mesolithic people go there in kayaks to hunt at certain times of the year, bringing chunks of rock for toolmaking. At their camps, they knap it into arrowheads,…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2007Just a note about yesterday's metal detecting at the Baggensstäket battlefield. We worked for less than four hours, but I got lucky and ran into the burnt remains of wooden fortifications on a seaward slope. Loads of nails and spikes in one place, and thanks to the fire, some were in pristine shape. Beautiful smithwork: octagonal cross-sections, square heads with bevelled edges -- all clearly taken from army stores (or the royal shipwharfs in town?) when news of the Russian approach arrived. Also charcoal and fire-cracked stone. I'd like to see an excavation there.
Bo Knarrström had modded…
aardvarchaeology | April 26, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, history; arkeologi, Nacka, historia.]
Long-time Dear Readers may remember the visit I paid last May to the wooded Skogsö hills where the Battle of Baggensstäket was fought in 1719. Bo Knarrström, Tomas Englund and the others on their project team are now back on the site with their metal detectors, finding more and more objects from the battle. This time, I'm joining the team for two days. Tuesday, they were visited by celebrated military historian Peter Englund.
A battle fought with firearms seeds an area thickly with evidence for what has taken…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Friday 13 April.
I write this sitting on a rock outcrop just east of the great barrow of Disevid in Heda parish. It brandishes four great old oaks at me as it sits across a little marsh with a small stream running through. Sunshine, lark song, some wind and the low growl of a diesel motor in the distance.
Theres Grönqvist is on my detector today, and with few finds there is little for me to slap GPS coordinates on. The barrow is one of the largest in the province and undated, which is why we are here.…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Thursday 12 April.
This morning we wrapped up our 20 person-hours in Varv, joined by regular Dear Reader Lars Lundqvist. The weather was great, but we found nothing older than the 11th century. A fragment of interlace-decorated jewellery with the openings between the tendrils marked crudely by round holes reminds me of Urnes brooches of c. AD 1100. A pear-shaped pendant with an obliguely hatched cuff feels vaguely like it might be a piece of High Medieval dress ornament. Together they may mark the spot…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Wednesday 11 April.
This has been a stressful but fun day: I have spent most of it talking to the mainstream media. You see, I forgot to tell you yesterday that somehow regional radio had heard of the foil-figure model find I blogged about Monday, and a lady came out to site and interviewed me and Niklas. This morning it was a big radio news story. And so the other Östergötland media jumped onto the bandwagon: two TV stations and one newspaper hunted us down to look at the find, one newspaper…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Tuesday 10 April.
Our Kaga site was very good to us today as well. 26 person-hours of metal detecting, six 1st Millennium brooches: four small equal-armed of the later 6th century, one disc-shaped with inlay socket of the 6/7th century, and part of a 5th century large equal-armed relief brooch. The latter has non-animal-art decoration in the Nydam style, a rare and exclusive piece of jewellery, fits nicely with the foil figure model. Also a High Medieval annular brooch. I'm crap at metal detecting:…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Monday 9 April.
This morning I woke up in an unexpected and not very welcome winter wonderland. Driving the 2.5 hours to Linköping on summer tyres was scary. But the snow was gone by lunch. An icy wind persisted.
I'm writing this from the kitchen of a little house we're renting at the hostel in Mjölby. Today my crew of six did 27 person-hours of metal detecting at our site in Kaga parish, collecting about a hundred objects, most dating from the past three centuries. Only one can be dated before AD 1100…