bronze age
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2010I'm writing a paper for the conference volume of the Helsinki meeting I attended back in October. Here's an excerpt from the manuscript.
In April and May of 2010 I visited nine sacrificial sites in Uppland and Södermanland provinces, selecting them by the criteria that I had to be able to ascertain their locations closely, the finds should preferably be rather rich, and I favoured sites located within walking distance of each other. The winter had been long and cold, and so vegetation was still sparse and much plough soil remained open to field walking. This ensured the best possible…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2010
Roger Wikell, Kenneth Ihrestam and Sven-Gunnar Broström during a recent documentation session with oblique lighting in Småland. Photograph by Emelie Svenman.
Many important categories of archaeological site are never discovered by academic archaeologists. In the case of wetland sacrifices, it's simply because nobody's figured out a method to look for them. We just have to sit around waiting for decades until one turns up in the course of some unrelated activity. But in most cases, our problem is actually that we aren't good enough at the methods that exist, simply because we don't spend…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2010
Rock art in southern Scandinavia generally dates from the Bronze Age and depicts boats, long war canoes with lots of oarsmen. Here are some recently found ship panels at Casimirsborg in northern Småland, the new big dot on the country's rock-art map.
Although rock art is some of the most intriguing source material Bronze Age people left behind, we have a perennial problem tying it into its wider societal context and understanding it. There are few examples of rock-art motifs repeated on bronze artefacts, and few examples of rock-art located in or near other kinds of Bronze Age remains such…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2010
The dams in River Eskilstunaån at Hyndevad regulate the water level in Lake Hjälmaren. Around 1880 when they were built, and the lake lowered, the river bed was temporarily laid dry. A major prehistoric sacrificial site was discovered, and luckily geologist Otto Gumaelius was there to document it. (He used the finds to date events in the watershed's recent quaternary geology.) The landscape has since been thoroughly messed up at Hyndevad, but still I went there yesterday to get a feeling for the place. I wish I had the resources to lay a few lakes and river stretches dry.
[More blog…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2010
Bronze Age Scandinavians believed that the sun was pulled across the sky in a chariot by a horse. They built models depicting this out of cast bronze. A well-preserved one has been found at Trundholm on Zealand, and fragments remain of one from TÃ¥gaborg in Scania. They also depicted the motif on burial razors and, rarely, rock-carvings.
The other day (when I found some humble cupmarks), my friends Roger Wikell and Sven Gunnar Broström found the first sun-chariot carving on Sweden's east coast: at Casimirsborg in SmÃ¥land. They are working there with fellow rock-art authorities Joakim…
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2010In front, a boulder upon which I found cupmarks. Behind, a Bronze Age burnt mound consisting of fire-cracked stones.
In order to study the landscape situation of something you need to know precisely where it is. This poses a problem when it comes to Bronze Age sacrificial finds, because they are almost never made by someone who can document the find spot. They used to be found by farmers and workers before anybody owned a map and before there was a national grid, and they are no longer found much at all.
Sacrificial finds, or "deposits", are defined by two negatives: they are not in graves…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2010While reading up on the subject, I'm writing the introductory remarks for a study of Bronze Age sacrificial sites. In January I put a couple of paragraphs up here about the possibly redundant distinction between retrievable hoards and irretrievable sacrifices. Here's some more, about ritual and rational behaviour.Ritual and rationality
As Richard Bradley has argued at length (1995), the distinction between ritual and domestic behaviour is not very helpful when dealing with prehistoric societies. One may easily think that "ritual" equals "irrational" and thus "functionally inexplicable".…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2010I'm studying sacrificial deposits made by people of a lo-tech culture in Sweden 3000 years ago, largely in wetlands. This was long before any word relevant to the area was written. The objects were mainly recovered during the decades to either side of 1900. Yesterday while trawling through back issues of the Journal of Wetland Archaeology I came across a really cool paper on a similar theme. It's about wetland deposits made by lo-tech people and excavated during the 20th century. But in this case the stuff was still being deposited in the 19th century AD, the objects are perfectly preserved,…
aardvarchaeology | January 14, 2010
Härnevi vicarage, Uppland. Large collection of bronzes, c. 600 BC. Packed into a belt box, wrapped in a leather garment and deposited in wetland. Found in 1902 during drainage digging.
In my work, I really prefer writing over reading, and in order to profit as much as possible from my reading while I remember it, I like to write while I read. Otherwise I just get sleepy and feel like I'm not really getting anywhere. So although I am still just getting acquainted with the research background of my Bronze Age project, I wrote the first couple of paragraphs for my next book today. (Note that I…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2009
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…
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2009The 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…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2009Helsinki 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…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2009
Small mounds consisting of burnt stone are a signature feature of Bronze Age settlement sites along the coasts of southern Sweden. They were the subject of my first academic publication in 1994, though I'd hardly even seen one, let alone dug one. This I have finally begun remedying today, when I did another day of volunteer digging with my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell.
Mattias and Roger started out as pioneer investigators of the Mesolithic archipelago that is now a bunch of hill tops in the southern part of inland Stockholm county. Their emphasis has shifted though: it's…