November 3, 2009
Category: Archaeology
Finland has a lot of cairns, usually sitting on hill tops near the sea. Unlike a mound, the cairn consists only of stones, and so it lets rain water percolate through. This messes up the contents of the cairn. Bones and burial goods are rarely preserved, and it seems that the ancient Finns didn't stock their cairns with a lot of interesting stuff to begin with anyway. This makes individual cairns difficult to date, though seen as a class their chronology is fairly well understood.
Despite the fact that few Finnish cairns contain anything interesting or valuable to a layperson, a lot of them have central depressions indicating that people have delved into them some time after their construction. There is no evidence to suggest that the depressions are due to the collapse of any internal wooden chambers.
During the excursion last Saturday at the Bronze Age conference in Helsinki, Tapani Tuovinen let us in on an interesting methodological development. How do you know at what date a burial cairn was looted?
The bedrock in southern Finland weathers in a characteristic way visible in a microscope. During the last Ice Age, a lot of nice round pebbles were produced through abrasion, and they're really good for cairn building. When you retrieve one them from the sea or the glacial till, they show no signs of microweathering at all to begin with. But if you look at pebbles on an undisturbed 3000-y-o cairn, you find heavy microweathering on the upper half of the stones. Their lower halves are far less weathered.
Tapani & Co looked at the stones scattered around the central depressions in looted cairns, and found that many of them were upside down: the undamaged bit was no longer pointing downward. This showed that they had been moved around relatively recently, most likely during the 19th century. The method doesn't give absolute dates, but it's still useful information.
Then the team looked at the bedrock beneath cairns they excavated, and found that it was much less weathered than the rock outside the bases of the cairns. This confirmed that they are pretty damn old: the cairns have been sitting there long enough for a slow weathering process to produce a visible difference.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments
November 2, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Language • Norway
Runologist James E. Knirk has published a report on the recently found Hogganvik rune stone. His transliteration is
[?]kelbaþewas:s(t)^ainaR:aaasrpkf
aarpaa:inanana(l/b/w)oR
eknaudigastiR
ekerafaR
His translation is
Skelba-þewaR's ["Shaking-servant's"] stone. (Alphabet magic: aaasrpkf aarpaa). ?Within/From within the ?wheel-nave/?cabin-corner. I NaudigastiR [="Need-guest"]. I, the Wolverine.
So there isn't actually an explicit lord-retainer relationship in the text, just a guy whose name includes the word for servant, thewar. It also occurs in two names inscribed on weaponry from Danish war booty finds.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments
November 1, 2009
Category: NOIBN
If I had to take a paper newspaper, then I would like Dagens Nyheter's news section, Svenska Dagbladet's arts & entertainment section, no sports section and no business section. SvD is a conservative rag and some of its political columnists are really distasteful, but DN never gets anywhere near SvD's coverage of the historical humanities. DN's arts section is mainly preoccupied with pretentious modern crap, installation artists and poets who will be forgotten three months from now.
So I was very pleased when the editor of SvD's arts essay page (through the good offices of Åsa Larsson of Ting & Tankar) asked me to write for him about a couple of new books. Getting onto that essay page (and hopefully staying there) has been a latent goal of mine for many years. And I was even more pleased when the piece I submitted was published today: on a Sunday, when people actually had time to read the thing before they tossed the paper into the recycling bin.
Nor was my sunny outlook diminished this evening when I received a letter from an editor at a major monthly mag who, on the strength of the SvD piece, offered me a reviewing gig on the spot.
Editor Ludvig Hertzberg comments on my piece on his blog.
Posted by Martin R at 4:11 PM • 12 Comments
October 31, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Bronze Age
I'm posting this from a Helsinki basement café after a day's excursion by bus and boat in the countryside west of town. We mainly looked at cairns of various form, date and function, including a group of very fine large mountaintop ones of the typical Bronze Age variety.
Toward the end of the day we saw a preserved little bit of an excavated cemetery to which had been added a memorial stone in the 1930s. On the plaque the site is dated to about AD 100 and proclaimed as burial place of the first Finns! The reasoning went like this.
"We have a gap in the archaeological record during the Last Millennium BC. And the linguists believe that the Finnish language arrived here from Estonia about AD 1. And the grave type here has its closest parallels in Estonia. So this must be the grave of early Finnish-speaking colonists who arrived in the country when it was empty about AD 1!"
In the decades since, we have learned that there is no gap in the Finnish settlement record in the Last Millennium, and the grave type has been shown to be native to the coasts all around the south-eastern Baltic Sea. And the linguists have changed their mind about the date of the arrival of the Finnish language. So all that remains of the ideas celebrated on that stone is that yes, we still date the grave goods to about AD 100.
But as I told my colleagues, this is not by far the silliest memorial stone erected on an archaeological site. A strong candidate is found at Vendel church in Uppland where rich boat-burials have been excavated. It reads,
VENDEL PERIOD
PERIOD OF STATE-BUILDING
PERIOD OF MEN
Posted by Martin R at 11:26 AM • 2 Comments
October 30, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Bronze Age • Denmark
The 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 has perfect 3D digital models of urns that fall apart when you remove the plaster. And she has demonstrated that a lot of the bone fragmentation, that has commonly been assumed to be due to dedicated crushing and grinding by the mourners, is actually simply due to the brittleness of burnt bones whose organic component has leached away over the millennia. Big bones are sitting in the urns, each fragment in place, and fall apart when you try to lift them. As Lise put it, "The one who does the ritual crushing is me, when I empty the urns".
So, how can a PhD student in archaeology afford to use this sort of hi-tech equipment? Turns out, the technology is developing so fast that the hospitals frequently swap their CT scanners for newer models. The used one at the Dept of Forensic Medicine makes one slice every three millimeters. Not good enough anymore for brain surgery. But perfectly useful for archaeology.
Other issues covered in today's presentations were:
- Correspondence analysis of Gotland's stone ships.
- The landscape situation of sacrificial sites in the Lake Mälaren area (me).
- An Early Bronze Age magnate farm excavated recently near Halmstad.
- Human sacrifice and corpse rituals in Lithuania.
- The unusually late introduction of animal husbandry in Finland.
- Bone pins in the Baltic states.
- Copper in Fennoscandia before the Bronze Age.
- Bronze ring casting sites on Saaremaa and elsewhere in the Baltic states.
Posted by Martin R at 12:03 PM • 8 Comments
October 29, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Bronze Age • Travel
Helsinki isn't far from Stockholm. It took me a bit more than four hours from home to my hotel here, and I could have shaved more than an hour off of that if I had taken the bullet train to the airport and a cab to the hotel instead of going by bus.
I'm at the 11th Nordic Bronze Age symposium, which for the first time includes a bunch of Baltic colleagues as wall. Everybody's very friendly and the atmosphere is informal. It's a pretty sizeable conference as these things go in my discipline: about 60 registered participants, of which I have made the acquaintance of at least half by now. For reasons unclear to me, I was made the afternoon's discussant, which was fun and flattering.
I'm here to learn what Bronze Age scholars in my part of the world are doing right now, because I'm planning to become one of them. So far I've been able to understand everything reasonably well, though I lack basic skills of the trade for the period in question. Menace me with a Bronze Age sword, and I will generally not be able to place it in the right Montelian phase to save my life. (Unless you lend me the sword so I can look it up in the literature. It's safe, I'm a pacifist. Come on now, just hand it over.)
Here are the main themes touched upon in today's presentations:
- Building a new model of how Bronze Age society in Southern Scandinavia was organised.
- Current Bronze Age research in Estonia.
- Past and present interpretations of the Early Metal Age and Bronze Age in Finland.
- Why does the Hajdusamson-Apa sword type occur both in Scandinavia and in Carpathia?
- Is it possible to find a northern border of the Nordic Bronze Age culture along the coast of Norway?
- The Bronze Age in the Stockholm archipelago (Mattias & Roger reporting on their on-going Ornö dig!).
- Recent rock art surveys in Södermanland province.
- Is it possible to radiocarbon date bronze?
- Bronze socketed axe found with a piece of the shaft inside, this has been dated, sadly the typological date didn't match the radiocarbon.)
- The ethnic and social background of various find types in the Finnish Bronze Age.
- A Late Bronze Age seal-hunting centre in Ostrobotnia.
Posted by Martin R at 4:31 PM • 5 Comments
Category: Biology • Health • Psychology
Ed Yong's excellent post about fruit-bat fellatio received some even better, eye-opening comments from one Russell and Frog:
Russell: "Tan is falling into the fallacy that animals have sex for the purpose of procreation. Or of writing as if. Those bats are having sex because they're horny, and the fellatio is somehow making their sex more satisfying. That might or might not enhance reproduction. But that is not on the little bats' minds when they're busy getting it on."
Frog: "The bats aren't making direct computations of relative reproductive success -- they're 'feeling good', and very often 'feeling good' is made better by making someone else 'feel good' (not assuming that the bats can actually model their partners mind like that).
Humans have sex for reproductive purposes -- I would bet we're the only ones who are that insane. Everyone else just does what they like to do.
This is like saying that animal X eats to keep their metabolism going -- only a few crazy people do that. Everyone eats because they like eating."
And of course. Animals take great pleasure from sex because it is adaptive to feel that pleasure. None of them is smart enough to understand that babies follow. And that obviates the entire discussion of what sexual behaviour counts as "natural" in humans.
The only rule we need to follow is "consenting adults". (With the addition, of course, that if a person consents to having grievous bodily harm done to them, then this is a symptom of mental illness and places a responsibility of care, not exploitation, upon people around. But then someone who would feel inclined to exploit such a situation sexually is of course also nuts.)
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments
October 28, 2009
Category: Biology • Health
Here's a confusing press release from the University of Gothenburg. Researcher Jonas Warringer is trying to find ways to slow the rate of genetic adaptation in certain microbes down to keep them from evolving resistance to antibiotics. But look at this (and I translate):
Slowed-down evolution can counteract antibiotic resistance
...
The resistance of an infectious agent against antibiotics is particularly serious when it comes to drugs made from fungi, penicillin for instance. Fungal cells are similar to human ones, which makes it hard to develop drugs that hit fungal cells (and are effective) but leave human cells unharmed (thus avoiding side effects).
...
Evolution creates random variations in the traits of an organism, which shows in infectious agents as an improved resistance against the drugs they encounter. In the end we get completely resistant fungal strains -- and the drug becomes ineffective.
What the press release fails to mention is that we usually use antibiotics against bacterial infections, not fungal ones. The research reported on is in fact irrelevant to the much-publicised concerns about MRSA and other bacterial strains that have evolved resistance to antibiotics. Looks like an attempt to ride the publicity wave of a separate issue.
Bruce Chatwin did have fungal trouble, though. Check out my homage.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments
October 27, 2009
Category: Blogging
A very prominent German Wikipedian, Meisterkoch ("Master Chef"), doesn't like bloggers much. In a recent opinion piece he manages to insult all the world's blogging scientists in one fell swoop.
"At best, blogs are run by second-rate scientists; typically, however, just by unemployed people. ... In fact, blogs allow the repeated and systematic transfer of half-knowledge and subjectivities which can be 'consumed' and amplified even further by other non-scientific media (other blogs, Twitter, etc.). ... Bloggers usually react with anger and denial if you point out that their blogs are not as important as the bloggers think. Nevertheless, blogs contribute to increased visibility for scientists who are at best mediocre."
So, one of the marks of a first-rate scientist is apparently that she does not blog. Luckily, my experience with young German scholars has taught me that this kind of Prussian authoritarianism is going extinct.
Via Mathias Klang.
Posted by Martin R at 10:58 AM • 9 Comments
Category: Tech
I've been on the instant messaging service ICQ daily since 1997. Last week, though, my entry in some database apparently got screwed up, so my password no longer works and I can't get the retrieval mechanism to send me a new one. Looking through my contact list I then realised that I hardly ever use ICQ anymore, because almost everybody I chat to is on MSN. (I hadn't noticed since I use client software that handles several different messaging protocols transparently.) So I've decided to simply say goodbye to ICQ. Anybody who wants to get in touch should be able to find me anyway, for instance on Google Talk which comes with every gmail adress.
Posted by Martin R at 9:22 AM • 0 Comments
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
