archaeology
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2009
So I spent the day on GÃ¥lö, happily digging & sieving a square meter on a Middle Neolithic shore site 25 meters above current sea level that my friend Roger found two years ago. I haven't dug that period since 1993 when I spent almost the entire fieldwork season on the classic Bollbacken site outside VästerÃ¥s. (I did however write a paper about another site of the era in the early 00s.) Today I found knapped quartz and basalt and granite (!) and a lot of small potsherds, one of which has the Pitted Ware culture's signature pits and comb-stamp decoration. Mattias found the best…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2009
People in the Lake Mälaren area were on to Neolithisation immediately, with agriculture and stock breeding and pottery and sedentary life, when the package became available around 4000 cal BC. But then they said "oh, screw it" and spent most of the the Middle Neolithic as seal hunters and fishers again. My Stone Age bros Roger Wikell and Mattias Pettersson have descended from their Mesolithic heights (post-glacial land uplift and shore displacement, remember) and are now looking at Middle Neolithic sites in locations that were quite extreme at the time -- way, way out in the Baltic. And you…
gregladen | August 31, 2009The practice of growing food and keeping livestock was invented numerous times throughout the world. One 'center' of agriculture is said to be the Middle East. Despite the fact that calling the Middle East a "center" in this context is a gross oversimplification, it is true that agriculture was practiced in Anatolia and the Levant for quite some time before it was practiced in Europe, and it seems that the practice more or less spread from the middle east across Europe over a fairly long period of time.
Archaeologists have long asked the question: Was this a spread of agricultural people…
eklemetti | August 31, 2009First day of class! As you might imagine, I'm a little scattered (well, with classes and the fact that we bought a house over the weekend. You know, just that).
The Tavurvur Crater at Rabaul erupting in 1994.
News!
The Examiner.com (SF) has a slideshow and brief article on the current excavations of ruins buried by the Santorini/Minoan eruption that occurred ~3950 years ago. The eruption wiped out much of the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, but whether there was anyone actually still living on the island when it happened is still a mystery. It seems that most of the Minoans left the…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2009
I'm writing this on the train home from Lidköping on Lake Vänern in Västergötland province. I've spent a pleasant day discussing an interesting fieldwork project with colleagues. Gothenburg PhD student dynamic duo Anneli Nitenberg and Anna Nyqvist Thorsson have been working for years on the island of KÃ¥llandsö, famous mainly for Läckö Castle, and now they're doing something really audacious: they're digging a major barrow on the island's southern shore, diameter ~20 meters. Badgers have threatened to destroy it, and so the ladies got an excavation permit and ample funding from the…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2009The seventy-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Natures/Cultures. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 23 September. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2009
From Aard regular CCBC, a heritage management conundrum to ponder.
This is a curious situation that I heard about on metafilter.com. I have included some of the links.
Near Kaufdorf, Switzerland there is an auto junkyard that was in use from the 1930s to 1970. It has become overgrown with various forest flora and people have found it an interesting place to take photos. Recently, the Swiss government has decreed the place an environmental hazard and says that it must be cleared and paved to prevent fluids from seeping into the ground. Many people have protested on the grounds that:
This is…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2009The 74th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Natures/Cultures tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Adam. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2009The Department of Archaeology at the University of Lund is organising a panel debate about creationism on 30 August under the heading "Archaeology, the Bible and Charles Darwin -- a debate about evolution, creationism and archaeological evidence". On the panel are Neolithic scholar Kristina Jennbert, liberal ex-arch-bishop Karl. G.H. Hammar, author and polyglot philologist Ola Wikander and young-Earth creationist Mats Molén. I am not happy at all with this. The university shouldn't lend credibility to pseudoscientists like Molén by inviting them to public debates. He is in no way…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2009In Nazi Germany and its occupied territories there were many ways to get thrown into an extermination camp. But Friedrich Marby broke some kind of record: he was sent to Dachau for publishing too silly ideas about runes. He survived.
The Nazis themselves were no strangers to occultism, particularly Heinrich Himmler, whose neo-Pagan religious movement I've touched upon before. Movements similar to today's New Age, neo-paganism and occultism flourished in the early 20th century. But Marby was too much even for Himmler: he invented runic aerobics.
Marby's ideas took off from the cosmic and…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2009My dear friend and fellow archaeo-blogger Ãsa M. Larsson of Ting & Tankar has sent her PhD thesis off to the printers! This she has done with her supervisor's blessing, which in Sweden means that she is for all practical purposes a PhD now. The viva is just a ritual and your committee can't influence the thesis since it's already been printed.
Ãsa's will take place at 1300 hours on Friday 18 September, in the Geijer auditorium, building 6, Humanities Centre, Engelska Parken, Uppsala, Sweden. Meet me there. As an Aardvarchaeology exclusive, here's the abstract of Ãsa's as yet not even…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2009The seventy-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 23 September. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
gregladen | August 12, 2009Four Stone Hearth is the Anthropology Blog Carnival. The main page for the carnival is here. The previous carnival was held at A Hot Cup of Joe, and the next edition will be at Natures/Cultures blog.
The current edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival is ..... HERE, below the fold. Please visit all the sites and enjoy. We are heavy on linguistics this edition, by the way...
Neuroanthropology ... Uncyclopedia on Anthropology
For our readers not too familiar with the history or current state of anthropology, you could find much more useful resources, but why bother?…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2009As pointed out here many times before, archaeology is a bad career choice as the labour market is tiny and ridiculously overpopulated. I mainly keep tabs on the academic subset of this labour market. But via Alun I've received news that UK contract archaeology, the business where you remove and document sites that get in the way of land development, is in poor shape because of the economic recession. The Institute for Archaeologists announces that one in six jobs in contract archaeology has been lost since the start of the recession, with more losses likely in the near future.
In Sweden,…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2009
Illerup Ãdal in Jutland is known for one of Denmark's largest and most well-excavated war booty sacrifices, most of it dating from the early 3rd century AD. (See my recent entry about the similar Swedish site Finnestorp.) As I've learned from my friend Tim Olsson's new book about such sites, there's a second find spot at Vædebro, right where the Illerup stream empties into Lake Mossø, a few kilometres from the war booty site. The artefact finds here are few, but the bones of 25-30 people were found about 1960, mainly robust men, some with battle wounds. And now the Vædebro site has…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2009[More blog entries about mining, Norway, abandonedbuildings, photography; gruvor, Norge, övergivnahus, foto.]
From my buddy Claes Pettersson, pix he took in July at the abandoned Christian VI mine of Røros, Norway, at 62°N. It's a copper mine that was worked from 1723 until shortly after 1945. Located near the Swedish border and far from the sea, this is one of the coldest parts of Norway, which means that the wooden structures don't decay much through microbial action -- they mainly just erode.
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2009
From Aard regular Christina Reid (she started commenting less than a week after the blog opened, bless her heart!), a few pictures from Mid-summer Eve at the Scandinavian Cultural Centre in Burnaby, British Columbia. Tina and her hubby are active in the Reik Félag reenactment group. And her brother is the singer of Viking/Tolkienian metallers Amon Amarth!
We're seeing two periods of Scandy history being celebrated here. Tina & hubby represent the Viking Period in the 9th & 10th centuries. The other people, the ones erecting a May pole, are into the rural culture of the 19th…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2009I just finished reading Nils Ahnlund's 1953 history of Stockholm up to 1523, which marks the end of the Middle Ages in Swedish historiography. Its 538 pages of text offer less concrete detail than an archaeologist might wish for, and I soon lost track of everybody named Anders Jönsson and Jöns Andersson, but it was an interesting read nevertheless. Here are a few of the best things I learned.
Now I finally understand why the inhabitants of Dalecarlia play such a large role in the city's and country's history. I mean, OK, there's reasonable farmland up there, but it is way north and the…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2009
This picture is not from a film. It is something you would see back in the 17th century: a burning real tall ship. At the Djurö bridge, not far from Djurhamn where I have done fieldwork, is Point Brännskeppet, "the burnt ship", which commemorates the wreck of the Rikswasa ("Sheaf of the Realm") that burned and sank there in 1623 and was clumsily salvaged in the 1960s. But the image shows the death of the Prins Willem, a 1980 replica of a 1649 trading ship of the Dutch East India Company. It burned the night before last in Den Helder harbour.
Burning is a common and often intentional end…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2009The seventy-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Hot Cup of Joe. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 9 23 September. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!