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 socket.
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Sorry to have to do this to you, but...
HA HA HA YOU DON'T HAVE ANY SNOW!
My only other comment is that the site looks like it'll be absolutely gorgeous in the summer, so you should start booking your readers to pop along and help with the digging and scraping.
Bob
That's toxic waste. It's leaching a variety of heavy metals.
Didn't think of that. I'm used to Iron Age settlement sites with loads of lead and mercury waste...
I greatly enjoyed your series on tree- and club-houses. Now I wish I had photographed the ruins of the tree-house my kids built back in the eighties, in rural North Missouri. The two main trees, a shagbark hickory and an oak which support the structure, decided to grow at different rates; this led to some weird hyperbolic curves in the connecting boards.
Our kids grew up, my wife and I divorced, the property has been sold... but I do have some vivid mental images!
Everything people build and make will be archaeology one day!
It never ceases to amaze me how children get airbrushed out of archaeological interpretation. After all, they do have lots of spare time, and creative minds.
I have a vague memory of a post-excav. discussion about chambered tombs (in Orkney, I think). Small bones, phalanges and so on, pushed into crevices in the chamber wall, maybe about a metre off the floor.
Needless to say, the "ritual" partisans shouted loudest and won the argument.
Or were funerals really boring for children in the neolithic too?
So either kids behave like religious adults or religious adults behave like children, at least from a field-archaeological point of view. (-;
This is a very interesting perspective that I hadn't considered before, children leaving ruins that are of (at least passing) interest to archaeologists.
I too was one of those children who left ruins strewn about at several sites. Your whole description rings true except for the fact that I visited my treehouse in the woods even after I had entered college. Perhaps I was immature ;-)
Immature or not, however, I would still like to build one with my child one day, so maybe I am only marginally more mature.
Anyway, it is true that we collected the refuse of nearby building sites to build our own structures. We may have even taken items that were not exactly in the rubbish bin :-) Also, we prided ourselves on never using a saw to cut boards. To a large extent, the shape of the wood we found dictated the shape of the structure we built.
The no-saws aesthetic is like something out of radically hip architecture!