archaeology
gregladen | November 29, 2010A frail elderly woman would have a hard time walking a few blocks, from her apartment to the subway, then from the subway to the MET, with winds gusting to near hurricane strength. So, the patron of the arts and of archaeology, who happened to be a cousin of my first wife, called around to find a worthy pair to use her tickets to the private opening (for major patrons) of The Treasures of Tutankhamun, the exhibit of King Tut's tomb. The public opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City would be several days later. When it was found that the two only archaeologists in the…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2010Re-run from 25 December 2005 (no, Swedes pay no attention to Christmas Day, preferring to get worked up about Christmas Eve).
In Skive, Denmark, there's a pond dug to accommodate a plywood Viking ship that was never set afloat.
My friend Rud Kjems tells the story in local-history annual Skiveegnens jul 2005. Skive museum was incorporated in 1910, but only in 1942 did it get premises of its own. When the museum building was finally becoming a reality, the organisation received some unusual corporate sponsorship.
Danish brewery Tuborg financed a film set in the Viking Period for the universal…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2010Re-run from 22 December 2005.
The Viking Period was a funny time, only three centuries long, leaving a huge footprint in terms of ideas and archaeology. Speakers of Scandinavian languages lived mainly in the fertile southern third of Scandinavia, most of them being subsistence farmers. The endless pine woods and ground-down mountain ranges of the north were home mainly to Saami and Finnish hunters and freshwater fishers. But along the Norwegian coast, deep-sea fishing and sea mammal hunting supported Scandinavian settlements all the way up to the edge of the Arctic ice. Here's where the…
gregladen | November 19, 2010Video 1: Dan meets Alice, Alice pwns Dan.
Video 2: Dan meets Alice, gets her name wrong. Dan pwned again.
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2010It's re-run week! I've gone back to my first month of blogging and found some good stuff. Here's a piece from 20 December 2005.
Lately I've been washing a lot of ruined building materials, debris from a house fire 2000 years ago.
Me, my friend Howard and his students excavated a Viking Period boat burial in Ãstergötland last summer. It dated from the 9th century AD and was sitting on the remains of a settlement from the 1st century BC. We weren't there to study that period, but we ended up with a shitload of burnt daub. Thousands of pieces of fired clay with imprints of twigs and straw.…
gregladen | November 18, 2010First, this one that Julia just sent me:
Then, this one I just made. It's experimental.
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2010
As mentioned here recently, the Nazis didn't like Modernism, pessimism or decadent urban themes in art. So in 1937 they sanitised German art museums, removing stuff they didn't like. Between 1937 and 1941, a selection of the censored work formed a travelling exhibition under the title Entartete Kunst, "Degenerate art". The intention was to teach the public what NOT to like. As you can imagine, artists since then haven't minded much if you call them entartet.
Now something mind-boggling. During an excavation for an extension of Berlin's subway in RathausstraÃe, archaeologists have found a…
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2010On Sunday 14 November at 1400 hrs I'm giving a talk on the aristocracy of the 1st millennium AD at the Town Museum of Norrköping, Holmbrogränd.
On Monday 15 November I'm speaking at a seminar in Gothenburg about social media and scientific and political communication. My talk will be some time between 1300 and 1600 hrs, and treat of how I as a professional research scholar take part in the writing of Wikipedia. The venue is most likely at the IT University, Forskningsgången 6 on Lindholmen.
On Thursday 9 December some time after lunch I'm speaking at a seminar in Stockholm about the…
aardvarchaeology | November 4, 2010
Lately I've been thinking and giving some talks about Scandinavian pseudoarchaeological writers, that is, people who publish books on the past with unsubstantiated claims to scientific credibility. The beyond all comparison most famous of them is the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002).
Heyerdahl is mostly known not as an archaeologist, but as a great navigator, being the organiser of numerous projects where he would have a reconstruction built of some ancient boat and make an ocean voyage with it. Most famously, he travelled by balsa raft from Peru westwards to Tuamotu in 1947 (with my…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2010
Two days ago I talked about four Scandy writers of pseudoarchaeological books at the Kritisk masse conference in Oslo: Bob G Lind, Lennart Möller, Erling Haagensen and Thor Heyerdahl. Despite being largely composed of Norwegians, the audience seemed unperturbed by my unflattering views of Heyerdahl's archaeological contributions. He is a national hero and the museum celebrating his achievements is (tellingly) just a stone's throw from the Viking ship museum in Oslo. Them Norwegians like their maritime identity! But I don't think the country's skeptics are being fooled, as shown i.a. by my…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2010Compared to the Swedish system, academic recruitment is extremely swift in the UK. In Scandyland, it's typically 7 months from the application deadline to the rejection letter, mainly because of slow external referees. The worst I've seen was 14 months. But in the UK, it's all done in a matter of weeks.
I recently had the pleasure of receiving my first invitation to an interview for a UK academic job. Though in the end I didn't actually get the job, it was overall a very friendly and pleasant experience. Before I describe my trip, I'll relate a story told to me by one of the other applicants…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2010Sweden's traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people's minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don't respect the country's cities much, these generally being much later in origin.
Stockholm is a case in point. Today's urban area is neatly bisected by the boundary between Uppland and Södermanland provinces. And therefore, myself and other Stockholmers only get half of our High Medieval itches scratched by a new archaeological guide book, Det medeltida Sörmland by…
aardvarchaeology | October 26, 2010Interested in archaeological stratigraphy? In 3D fieldwork methodology? Then come to Jönköping in southern Sweden for the VIIIth Nordic Stratigraphy Conference, 25-26 February 2011.
The theme of the conference is Modern Times - New Epochs & New Roads over Familiar Ground. Main sessions will cover post-Medieval excavations, burial archaeology and landscape archaeology.
I've been to two previous conferences in the series, and they were wide-ranging and stimulating. Archaeology can never be better than its data collection methodology!
Here's the prospectus & call for papers.
[More…
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2010
Fornvännen's spring issue (2010:1) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!
Michael Neiss analyses the intricate animal interlace on a weird new 8th century decorative mount. It looks like it might be Scandinavia's earliest book-cover fitting! Did it adorn the cover of a manuscript of the gospels or of the Elder Edda - or of something I shudder to even think about?
Ylva Sjöstrand finds thought-out structure among the innumerable elks carved on rocks at Nämforsen during the Neolithic.
Henrik Klackenberg and Magnus Olsson discuss a papal lead seal found in…
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2010One of the perks of keeping Aard is free magazine subscriptions. I make it worthwhile for the publishers by writing these "Recent Archaeomags" entries, which may look a little strange since it's the New Media reporting on stories in the Old Media. But I concentrate on stories that interest me, and most of the mags I get are probably not read by many Aard regulars, and so I hope you, Dear Reader, don't mind.
The Danish Skalk is one of my favourite periodicals, and it's not just because its editors tell me they like what we do with Fornvännen. In the August issue (2010:4), I particularly like…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2010
Good news for Swedish metal detectorists! And for us Iron Age scholars who want the finds, the sites and the free expert labour these amateurs are eager to provide us. And also for any small-finds nerd who would like to have a labour market (who? me?), communicating with the detectorists and classifying their finds.
The European Commission has ruled that the Swedish restrictions on metal-detector use contravenes EU rules for the free mobility of goods. If Sweden doesn't take measures towards legislative reform within two months, the issue will be referred to the EU Court of Justice.
As I've…
aardvarchaeology | October 9, 2010Sensible. Tell me "sensible" and I'll reply "shoes". Sensible shoes is what your butch 60ish aunt and her partner wear when vacationing in Paris. Although my Ireland-based colleague Stuart Rathbone and I share a great many opinions, I don't think it's a good idea to call for sensible archaeology.
Empirical, yes please. Plainly phrased, indeed. Solidly argued, always. Do I scoff at pretentious academic jargon, like Stuart does? You bet your trowel I do. Should we avoid unfounded speculation, perhaps even accept the "positivist" moniker? Sure.
But rather than sensible archaeology, I think we…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2010The Indian Express reports that according to Dr. Gautam Sengupta, director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, "it is time for us to rethink our own ideas and concepts of archaeological analysis in order to combat the worldwide crisis in the discipline". Disturbing words from a very powerful archaeologist! What's going on!?
Though woefully ignorant of Indian archaeology, I have a reasonable grasp of Western European and US archaeology, and I believe I have a pretty good idea of what's going on in Scandinavia. And I have seen no sign of any worldwide crisis. Particularly not one…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2010
I once produced a small shell midden in my kitchen. Just now I made a small clearance cairn in the garden. My wife has ordered a peony bush from Gansu in China via a plant dealer in Turku, Finland, and I picked it up at a trucking firm the other day. Now it fell upon me to dig the hole and plant the thing. While digging I set aside all the stones I came upon, as lo-tech farmers have done for millennia, only at a smaller scale. And thus my little cairn.
[More about archaeology, gardening; arkeologi, trädgård.]