Tree House Ruins
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2017
"Ways of knowing" = alternative facts.
I am on a WorldCon panel about the Medieval mind and fantasy literature. I just had the (unoriginal) idea to say that the High and Late Medieval aristocracy lived largely in an Arthurian fantasy world of their own creation.
Last night a skinny cat came miaowing at our door. Turned out to have left his home 200 m from us a week ago. With no sense of direction. And no hunting skills. He's back with his kind owners now.
I've bought a lot of ebooks from Google. I would happily continue to do so even though now I've got a Kindle, because Google has much…
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2017
There is no year zero in the common era. 1 BC is followed by AD 1. This is because Dionysius Exiguus worked around AD 500, long before the Indian concept of mathematical zero reached European scholars via the Arabs.
I don't quite understand why the guy in Springsteen's "The River" is so super sad. It's not in the lyrics.
I love Turkish fast food and "Here Comes The Rain Again".
Thorn-stabbed left eye acting up again nine months after that brush-clearing session at Skällvik Castle. Right-hand one showing its sympathy by clouding up too, leaving me unable to read or write much. Annoying. But…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2016
If you're a bricklayer with unusually high qualifications, being unemployed is frustrating. But very few customers in the construction business make any kind of public promise to always employ the most qualified bricklayer. Now imagine that they did. Imagine that it were illegal for builders to employ anyone but the most qualified bricklayer. And imagine our bricklayer's frustration when poorly qualified colleagues, who didn't even quote a lower price, got the jobs anyway. Imagine that. And welcome to academia.
Let's all refer to the 19th century historian C.G. Styffe as "Stiffie".
Much-…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2016 Tree-house ruin near the old chapel cemetery on Skogsö.
Fear me! I make bad puns in really, really bad Mandarin!
One Celsius and sleet. I have to drive for four hours today, so I'm switching tyres first.
Skänninge is dying. So many empty shop premises and housing properties. Facades flaking. Railway has cut off the eastern approaches to the town square. Last wave of investment in construction seems to have coincided with the mexibrick fad around 1970.
Incomprehensible: the re... play I guess? Of Toto's "Africa" with a few hip-hop passages inserted. Why oh why?
Why doesn't the Linköping…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2015 Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there's condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.)
Me: "subject". Autocorrect: "Sibbertoft".
Hey everyone who names your daughters "Chatarina"! I just want you to know that you're stamping your kid with this big label that says "From A Home With No Language Skills". It's like naming her brother "Piliph".
Huh? There's an online service named Plurk. I have no idea what it does but it sounds extremely funny in Swedish. Plurk plurk!
Whenever I see a schnauzer dog I wish I could give its face a buzz cut.
Android. The…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2015 Tree house ruin, Saltsjö-Boo
Listening to the classic rock station in the car, I turned it off in the middle of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge". Two days later I turn it on again and find myself in the middle of their "Scar Tissue".
Heh. American podcaster talks about someone named Rothschild (pronounced "roared-shilled"), consistently pronounces it "rots-child".
Norwegian reggae: Bo Mærøy and the Whalers.
I love Google Inbox’s snooze feature. Takes a huge load of stress off to be able to decide at what date and time I want to attend to a given letter, and then just forget…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2012
Played the zombie movie boardgame Last Night On Earth and Airlines Europe, both very enjoyable.
Had a party where I couldn't understand what anybody said since they spoke Mandarin, but I was happy being Grillmeister, waitor and dishwasher.
Logged five geocaches, which involved cycling around, climbing a tree and faffing about in the woods north of Älta. Saw the traces of a recent forest fire and found an abandoned camp used by homeless substance abusers (note the toothpaste and beer cans).
And you, Dear Reader?
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2010
In front, a boulder upon which I found cupmarks. Behind, a Bronze Age burnt mound consisting of fire-cracked stones.
In order to study the landscape situation of something you need to know precisely where it is. This poses a problem when it comes to Bronze Age sacrificial finds, because they are almost never made by someone who can document the find spot. They used to be found by farmers and workers before anybody owned a map and before there was a national grid, and they are no longer found much at all.
Sacrificial finds, or "deposits", are defined by two negatives: they are not in graves…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2010
On Easter Saturday, many Swedish kids receive candy-filled cardboard eggs. Mine have to jump through a lot of hoops to get theirs. Often I have made paper trails around the house, "Under yellow table", "Inside broom closet", "In Dad's rubber boot". Then increasingly (as Junior grew) I have obfuscated the clues by swapping à for all vowels, writing them backwards or writing them in English. Sometimes I've prepared GPS-based outdoor egg hunts. And that's what Juniorette faced this year, without any help from her older brother who was with his mom. She found the egg soon enough, once she had…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2009
Spent the day metal detecting for Thomas Englund at the battlefield of Baggensstäket, anno 1719 (as blogged about before: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4). This was my third time there, and the first time I've helped on the northern half of the area across the water from where I live. Thomas found musket and pistol balls. I picked up an 18th century coat button and loads of steenkeenggg aluminium bottle tops, and saw an abandoned tree house. I'm particularly interested in the pre-battle finds that are starting to accumulate.
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the local Walpurgis Night bonfire, met loads of neighbours old and new.
Played Abalone, Tigris & Euphrates and Qwirkle with Kai and other friends.
Went to a lovely dinner at the home of my friends Mattias & Lina.
Took a morning bike ride and walk in the woods to log a geocache that had appeared…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2008
Back in February I showed you some pix of abandoned tree houses at Djurhamn. One of them had a computer, just like my son once reported visiting a tree house with a typewriter.
I've spent the past three days metal detecting in the same area, falsifying our working hypothesis that there would be easily accessible 16th and 17th century stuff there. But I did find more tree house ruins. And one had an interesting piece of furniture: a gynaecologist's examination chair!? Turned out that the tree house was built on the margin of a dump area where all kinds of strange stuff was sitting, and…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2008
Logged my 600th geocache this bright May morning, took a picture of a treehouse ruin near the cache, then drove home listening to the Nashville Pussy. After lunch, me and the Rundkvist ladies took part in the annual street cleaning & planting day. I headed the cleaning of two sandboxes, cleared shrubbery that was engulfing one of the boxes and collected trash in the parking lot and front door bays. Unlike Blaine Cartwright, I am not lazy.
Lazy White Boy
By Blaine Cartwright of the Nashville Pussy
Got rhythm, just too cool to show it
Got a future, can't wait to blow it
Sit around getting…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2008The other day I found and photographed another tree house ruin. I decided to re-post the following piece from September 2006 and make these things a steady presence on Aard, with a category tag of their own.
If you've ever taken a walk in the woods near a housing area, you've seen them: modern archaeological sites, full of artefacts and building debris, abandoned to the elements in a way that is unusual in the well-organised industrialised world. They're settlement sites of a particular subculture with its own rules and customs, thriving on the fringes of mainstream society. I'm referring to…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2008
Spent the day walking around Djurhamn with my colleague Kjell Andersson of the Stockholm County Museum, searching for visible field monuments and generally scoping the area out for our coming investigations. We found no new features belonging to the 16th and 17th cenury harbour, but we identified some good areas for further metal detecting and test pitting.
Also, I added two sites to my growing collection of abandoned club houses and tree houses (of which I have spoken before here, here and here). Note that one has the remains of a PC, an old 386 or 486 judging from the empty processor…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2007
Two weeks ago when I worked for Thomas Englund and Bo Knarrström at the 1719 battlefield on Skogsö, I came across a variant on a type of archaeological site that I've blogged about before. A site where children have built and abandoned something, but this time it wasn't a tree house ruin: to me it looks more like the remains of an outdoor gym built by the cub scouts who periodically camp in a nearby house. You know, chin-ups and stuff.
To this end, the kids nailed and tied horizontal spires to trees, clumsily and with very little regard for the trees' well-being. While they were at it, they…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2007
Back in September, I wrote a piece about that common type of archaeological site, the abandoned treehouse.
At these sites you'll see rotting boards and beams hanging from clumsily bent nails on a group of trees, gradually collapsing to the ground. Perhaps some old shag pile carpet decomposing on the forest floor. The woods strewn with an enigmatic collection of objects, haphazardly selected, mostly old household gear. When visiting these sites, I always have the feeling that the inhabitants didn't choose the objects they brought there: they took whatever they were given by someone more…