Fornvännen's Spring Issue On-line

Fornvännen 2013:1, last spring's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access.

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Fornvännen is not only a paper quarterly on its 107th year, but also an Open Access journal that appears for free with a 6-month delay. The autumn issue for 2011has just gone live! All papers have English abstracts and summaries. Påvel Nicklasson on 19th century zoologist and pioneering…
Fornvännen's web site has become subsumed into the general document repository of the National Heritage Board. I am not happy about this. But still, we can now offer two new issues on-line for free! So much good research here! Autumn 2012 (no 3): Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay on the first farmers of Öland…
The Archangel Raphael. Recently uncovered mural in Kil church, Närke. C. 1250. Today's my 16th anniversary as editor of Fornvännen! Issue 2014:3 is now on-line on Open Access. Ole Thirup Kastholm on dugout canoes from before AD 1 on the Scandinavian peninsula. Ole Stilborg on Late Bronze Age…
Fornvännen 2016:2 is now on-line on Open Access. Ola George reports on a Migration Period chamber grave excavated at Björkå in Överlännäs parish, Ångermanland. Peter Persson surveys chamber graves in all of Västernorrland county. Ny Björn Gustafsson on radiocarbon-dated beeswax and metalworking on…

I'll have to brush up a bit on my archaeological swedish to study this logboat article in detail. We got one here at the local museum that has been dredged out of the riverbed, it has a very similar "box-like" form.

By Murmel Jones (not verified) on 14 Dec 2013 #permalink

Murmel, a more comprehensive paper on log boats all across Sweden is slated for publication in issue 2014:1 (April).

The Skatamark finds illustrated above are also interpreted as having been joined together. Pontoon ferry may be a good description. But Harnesk believes they were used to gather reeds for winter fodder.

Really liked the article about Skatamark, where many generations of people on my father's side of the family comes from (except that it has not actually been called Skatamark for ages...). Anyway, always nice to learn more about the early history of my original home region, which is much less investigated than my current home (Uppsala).

The article even claims that my childhood home village Heden is "the oldest in Lule river valley and one of the oldest in Norrbotten" with evidence of farming going back to the 11th century. I'm not in a position to judge how well supported that claim is, but still really proud of my old home.

What I don't understand is how the author can make any claims about what language the people in the Heden-Boden-Skatamark area were speaking 1000 years ago. To my knowledge, neither boats nor bows nor axes can speak any language whatsoever (regardless of where they were made) and I don't see any mentions of preserved texts written by the locals at the time.

I think Harnesk is making the assumption that the coastal farming communities mainly spoke Swedish. This to my knowledge tallies well with the written sources of the time. But I'm sure individual Saami and Finnish speakers married into those families, and a knowledge of many languages was of course an asset there as everywhere.

Erika
Finns or Swedes (with probably a lot of Sami intermarriage) living there ? Absolutely no way to know for sure. Even DNA would be futile.

By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 16 Dec 2013 #permalink

(OT) Yangtze River's ancient origins revealed http://phys.org/news194845886.html#nRlv
Happy 45 millionth birthday, Yangtze. This makes the Three Gorges feature much older than those Norwegian fjords.

By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 18 Dec 2013 #permalink

I once saw a report on a horrendous tsunami in a Norwegian fjord caused by a coastal rock fall (it was horrendous in size when it reached the opposite side of the fjord - I don't know if it caused casualties or damage). Like tsunamis caused by large seabed slides, and unlike tsunamis caused by seabed thrust fault earthquakes of Magnitude >8, which are cyclic movements with periods of hundreds or thousands of years, such tsunamis are not cyclic and therefore not predictable/avoidable.

Whether people predict and avoid them is another thing.

By John Massey (not verified) on 18 Dec 2013 #permalink