osteology
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2017Supported by a grant from the King Gustavus Adolphus VI Foundation For Swedish Culture, osteologist Lena Nilsson has analysed the bones we collected during excavations last year at two Medieval strongholds. Two weeks with 19 fieldworkers at Birgittas udde produced only 0.4 kg of bones, because the site has no culture layers to speak of and the sandy ground has been unkind. But from the following two weeks at Skällvik Castle we brought home 32.7 kg of bones! And now Lena has looked at them all. Here are her reports:
Birgittas udde 2016
Skällvik Castle 2016
The reports are in Swedish, but the…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2016As with the bones from the 2014 fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Rudolf Gustavsson of SAU in Uppsala has again analysed the bones we found this year (report in Swedish here). And as expected, there are no human bones: this too is mostly food waste. The body parts represented indicate that trench D just inside the perimeter wall contained meal remains while trench F inside the south tower contained more butchery refuse.
The material is dominated by youngish pigs, a tell-tale marker of aristocratic housekeeping, followed by cattle and finally sheep/goat to a lesser proportion than in the 2014…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2014Things are coming together with the post-excavation work for last summer's castle investigations so I'm putting some stuff on-line here.
I've submitted a paper detailing the main results to a proceedings volume for the Castella Maris Baltici symposium in Lodz back in May. There are no illustrations in the file, but you'll find all you need here on the blog in various entries tagged ”Castles”.
Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has completed his reports on the bones from the two sites (Landsjö – Stensö).
For the Dear Reader who doesn't read Swedish, a short summary of Rudolf's results is in order.…
laelaps | March 19, 2010The skeleton of an elk-moose (Cervalces scotti), photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.