sweden
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2008
Last night I had the pleasure of catching two of my home town's best live music acts, each playing in a basement venue a couple of hundred meters apart on Stockholm's southern island. The Crawfish Cook and the Skandalites are both 60s-70s cover bands, but since they cultivate genres I usually don't listen to, they might as well have performed original material.
Crawfish Cook play New Orleans soul funk, with material culled from Doctor John, Professor Longhair, the Neville Brothers, the Meters and Little Feat. Last night they were an eight-piece: male singer, guitar, bass, drums, percussion,…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2008As I mentioned the other day, I'm hoping to do some Bronze Age research once my current project about Dark Ages magnate farms is done. The Swedish Research Council's annual application deadline is less than two weeks from now, and I've put a grant proposal together. The project title isIn the Landscape and Between Worlds. Bronze Age Sacrificial Sites in the Lake Mälaren Area.
The text is just two pages, and it's all about the research, no financial details. Dear Reader, I'd appreciate it if you would have a look and perhaps offer some constructive criticism!
Update 26 March: I've submitted…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2008
Sweden's first town was a place called Birka, frequently mentioned in Viking Period written sources such as Rimbert's book about Bishop Ansgar. The town was on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. Its remains are extensive and highly visible, and have been the object of constant archaeological attention since the birth of the discipline. Nevertheless, there's a tendency among local-patriotic amateur scholars all around the Baltic to try to argue that Birka was in fact located in their favourite spot on Earth. This is so common that it's a running joke in the trade. In the following, my…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2008
Yesterday I began my return to the Bronze Age. For most of my career I've mainly worked with the Late Iron Age, a period that dominates the landscape of agrarian Sweden completely through its cemeteries and place names. But my first published piece of research, indeed the first research I ever did, concerned the Late Bronze Age. And now I'm thinking of going back there once my current book project in Östergötland is done.
My old Bronze Age studies, I'm ashamed to admit, involved no field trips and hardly any artefact studies, but lots of archive work. I had no driver's license, hardly any…
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2008In 2005, when Howard Williams and I and a bunch of hard-working people excavated a Viking Period boat grave at Skamby in Östergötland, we found a funny little silver pin. It wasn't in the grave, it was found just outside the edge of the superstructure, near the ground surface, though technically in a culture layer of the 2nd century BC. I've been trying off and on to find parallells to the pin, showing its picture to a lot of knowledgeable people, to no avail. Everybody has the same impression as myself: it doesn't quite look like anything from Swedish Prehistory. So in a recent paper I co-…
aardvarchaeology | February 29, 2008It's February 2008. I've had access to the WWW for 13 years. Yet I can still not get a news feed filtered to any reasonable approximation of my tastes.
I want very little news: only the important stuff. I think almost all conventional news are a complete waste of time. I want no business, no sports, no reports on individual crimes or house fires, and for Dawkins' sake, nothing about TV shows or pop singers.
Until recently, I took the front-page feed of Dagens Nyheter, my country's biggest newspaper. This is the material they deem maximally important, but it's full of sports and reports on…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2008Dear potential academic employers,
I know you are all secretely competing for who will have the pleasure of giving me a forskarassistent assistant professor's position, to see me fire the imaginations of a new generation of students, to see me produce awesome research in great quantities and present a charming face for your department toward the media and the public.
I know you've just been joking with me for the past four years, receiving my job applications and saying, with a merry twinkle in your little eyes, "Oh no, the loveable little rascal may have 115 published pieces of work and the…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2008Good news from Uppsala: after the end of the year, there will be only one PhD student in archaeology left in that august academic city. This is the result of a simple reform enacted ten years ago by Minister for Education Carl Tham: since that date, no student may enter a PhD program at a Swedish university unless she has funding. The reform was a non-event in well-funded economically productive subjects, but it hit the humanities like a bomb. PhD student seminars started to melt away as people graduated or gave up.
But, as I said: good news. It's neither in the best interest of students nor…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2008
I'm a big fan of Swedish-Finnish ethno band Hedningarna ("the Pagans"). Centred around three musicians working with a series of very fine singers, the band released five albums from 1989 to 1999. Their method was to go for the most primitive acoustic instruments known to Swedish ethnic music and plug them into various exotic electronics, producing a sound heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix yet unmistakeably rural and Scandinavian. Most aficionados count the second and third albums (Kaksi and Trä), where two amazing Finnish traditional female singers dominate the sound, as the band's creative…
aardvarchaeology | February 7, 2008I got another job rejection letter today. Five out of 79 applicants (6%) got research positions in Linköping, 2.5 hours by car from my home. The five are two chemists, one neurobiologist, one environmental scientist and one gender studies scholar. At least I wasn't beaten by any colleague.
What bugs me is the way they trimmed those 79 candidates down to eleven that were interviewed. One criterion was that they only contacted people who have already had post-docs. This biased the selection heavily toward well-funded disciplines where post-docs are plentiful. It's much easier to get one in…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2008
As chronicled here in many entries over the past months, computer consultant, New Age author and homeopath Bob G. Lind has carved out his own niche in Swedish amateur archaeology with controversial interpretations of Scanian archaeological sites Ales stenar and Höga stenar. Another Bob Lind is a famous US folk singer. Yet now I've learned that Bob G. Lind is a singer and a song-writer too!
My Malmö colleague Ingela Kishonti has kindly sent me scans of the cover and labels of a 45-rpm vinyl single that Bob G. put out in 1978 on NCB/K.M.C. Records. (This does not appear to have been be the…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2008
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…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2008A miniature face on a gilded cast copper-alloy display buckle, 5th century AD
One of the many things us Swedish archaeologists envy our Danish colleagues is their numerous large and well-preserved finds of Iron Age war booty. Clearly people in modern-day Denmark had the custom of sacrificing war booty in holy lakes, and when they silted up and became bogs the anaerobic environment preserved many objects perfectly. Generally, the finds seem to be the campaign gear of invading armies, dominated by weaponry but also including tools, personal items and even a number of boats.
Sweden does have a…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2008Here's breaking news.
Many European archaeologists feel bad about Nazi archaeology in the past. In my opinion, this is usually way overstated: a few of our pre-War colleagues were Nazis, which was opportune at the time, but archaeology had (and has) nothing like the kind of political oomph necessary to take any significant part in actually giving the Nazis power. Archaeologists are political opportunists by necessity because we're so poorly funded, which is one reason that everybody in the field today is a humanistic liberal like myself. We are now in general neither more nor less good-…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2008
Conservation of the early-16th century sword I found back in August continues apace at Studio Västsvensk Konservering. Its preservation is exquisite, and as usual with conservation of metal objects, a lot of new discoveries are made in the lab. Check out Vivian Smits' photographs!
This is clearly a battle-worn weapon that has been lost during combat. The edges have several fresh parry nicks that would have made the sword hard to sheathe, damage that would have been seen to after the fighting's end. But the sword was most likely dropped into the sea.
Update 16 January: Vivian Smits adds, in…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2008Felicia, Tor, Jesper, Johan, Thinker, Paddy, Kai, Lars, Martin R, Martin C. Photographs by friendly man at nearby table, shoppery by Lars.
Our latest Stockholm after-work blogmeet was way back in September. It was high time for another one! Good food, good company, silly jokes. And Paddy K hatched a plan: we're setting up a one-off Geek Fashion Blog Carnival!
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2008The Swedish Skeptics Society (VoF) has just announced its annual awards. The Popular Enlightener for 2007 is none other than my friend Jonathan Lindström, the guy with the Neolithic kids' book! (I abstained from voting, being heavily biased in his favour.)
States the press release, "He receives the award for his pop-sci books where he relays, in words and images and with endless curiosity and stellar pedagogics, the latest advances in astronomy, cosmology, natural history and archaeology. Jonathan Lindström's books are a pure pop-sci pleasure for all ages to gather around."
The 2007…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2008
Here's something for lovers and collectors of classic science fiction. Häpna! ("Be Amazed!") was the seminal Swedish sf fiction mag, published from 1954 to 1966, with many translations of the US Golden Age greats but also much work by Swedish writers. Now the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Foundation is offering nearly the entire backlog of the mag very cheaply, and they have a healthy number of copies of each issue, all in pristine condition. Dear Reader -- even if you don't understand one word of Scandy, can you honestly say that your living-room table is complete without a fresh copy of a…
aardvarchaeology | December 28, 2007
I've known for some time from the local papers that the site of the old Tollare paper mill is badly polluted. It's only 1.6 km from my home, on the opposite shore of the Lännerstasundet inlet (one of the main historic shipping routes into Lake Mälaren). A couple of years ago, a large area in the water outside the site was fenced off with floating länsar to keep the bottom sediments from moving. Apparently, this was one of those paper mills that used mercury in a big way. They've recently started covering the polluted sediment with geotextile, cement and crushed rock. (Hope no interesting…
aardvarchaeology | December 25, 2007Town life in Sweden started small in the later 8th century with Birka. The country's capital, Stockholm, is a late town by Swedish standards, having been founded only in the mid-13th century. One of the oldest extant buildings there is the great church beside the royal castle, Storkyrkan. Here, Satan Santa was worshipped for nearly three centuries.
Most of Europe was Catholic until Reformation in the early 16th century. All Catholic churches are devoted to a patron saint, which is the reason that the urban parishes surrounding the Old Town of Stockholm are named St. Claire, St. James, St.…