My rolling and turning in the bed was caused by the fact that the floor itself was moving beneath me in what - at 4.7 richter - was one of the more powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Denmark. There have been no reports of serious material damage (Jyllands-Posten has a report in english).

[Technically speaking the epicentre was in Sweden, but earthquakes know no boundaries.]

The last time a similar earthquake was felt was in 1985. An earthquake in the northern part of the Kattegat Sea in 1904 had an estimated magnitude of 5.5. Estimated, because seismic activity in Denmark has only been recorded in a reliable way since 1927.

Earlier Earthquakes in Danish History

On April 3rd, 1841, a very strong earthquake was experienced around 4.30 pm in the district of Thy [map] . In Arup Church the local priest, a certain mr. Obel, was marrying mr Anders Ingvardsen and miss Bodil Marie Jensdatter, when suddenly the entire church was shook and moved, as if the Lord himself were trying to prevent the marriage. The church tower was wobbling dangerously, but as the attending public fled from the church, the good priest and the young couple carried on the with ceremony. Afterwards he made a dry remark in the church register that a ‘marriage was conducted in Arup Church during an earthquake’ on that day. The church tower eventually collapsed during restoration works around 1920 and had to be rebuilt.

Going further back, Annales Essenbecenses (da. Essenbæk-årbogen) reports an earthquake on November 9th in AD 1349 (i.e. two nights before the day of St. Martin) - apparently thats the only remarkable happening in Danish history that year?

One of the most dramatic seismic events in recent Danish prehistory must have been the huge earthquake in Kattegat around 2.500 BC during which the entire island of Læsø was swallowed by the sea, not to reappear for another 1500 years. The Danish State Geologist Jens Morten Hansen has conducted comprehensive research which shows that the entire island tipped over and sank into the sea during the violent movements of the ground.

Luckily, the earthquake this morning was a wee bit softer.

References

Lars Henrik Aagaard. “NÃ¥r Jorden gÃ¥r amok: Skælv, tsunami, vulkan, orkan“. 2006.

Apparently, what we see here is a (female?) shaman ‘feeding’ a stone. But what is going on in the picture? Is that a stone circle in the background? From which direction is the sun shining and is it actually shining at all? What’s with the pirate skull on the standing stone? Where was this picture taken? When? And why?

The picture was originally lifted from a russian website a few years ago by ethnographer Roslyn M. Frank, Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa.

I have corresponded with Professor Frank and she has kindly allowed me to post the picture here in the hope that my learned readers may contribute to solving some of the riddles connected to this picture.

Actually, what’s going on in the picture?

I will admit at once that I know next to nothing about shamanism, the origins of the picture or the people depicted in it.

But I did notice at once the rather fake light in the scene which gives it an overall appearance of a ’staged production’ or, indeed, a silent movie.

The shadows of the stone and the two persons clearly visible on the ground indicate that bright sunlight is coming from behind the left of the observer, and yet the right hand side of the stone as well as the back of the shaman(ess?) are brightly lit, as if another (even brighter) sun is shining from the far right of the observer. How many suns are there?

If you look closely on the lower right hand side of the stone (click above pic to enlarge), you’ll see a narrow, dark stripe where two shadows cast by the shamaness overlap. So, by implication, there must be two suns to the right hand side of the observer, slightly offset from each other, and then the aforementioned sun to the left. Right?

One may notice that the (right hand side of the) back of the sitting person is not quite as clearly lit as the shaman’s back, rather it lies in shadows as would be expected with light coming from the first (left hand) sun.

In the background, just behind the tree, the ground seems to give way to a painted backdrop of some kind. To me, the stone circle behind the tree is clearly a painting. And isn’t it a bit strange that the sun should shine brightly (from three directions, no less!) on such an overcast day?

What really riddles me is the fact that someone has carved a rather large skull relief into the upper right hand side of the sacrificial stone. Is this indeed a traditional siberian shaman stone carving? As I said, I know nothing about this subject, but it looks rather Mickey Mouse to me.

All in all I get the feeling that this is indeed a still picture from a movie production from, let’s say, roughly sovjet era before 1970? If it was hollywood I’d maybe say first half of the 20th century.

Do you know this picture?

Is this a movie still? Is it sovjet propaganda? Does it speak for or against shamanism? Dear reader, you are welcome with any suggestions, interpretations, facts and speculations on this picture!

It’s intellectual, because it’s made for academics - in a broad sense: Anyone from the most distinguished professor to the most miserable undergrad can join the ranks of online brains. I’ll get to the decency.

You can share your papers and read others’, find people who share your research interests, spot potential collaborators on future projects, heck, you can even date someone if you dare!

Everything is arranged around a ‘university taxonomy’, the idea being that you add yourself to your institution or department, and there’s even a place for independent researchers. Besides that it’s a neat tool to keep track of research in any area you like.

It’s a bit like Facebook, but without all the fudge. No ‘boxes’, no 3rd party apps (yet) who’ll collect your personal information. Not too much annoying silliness.

Copyright

And the decent part? You maintain the copyright to all your stuff. If you look hard at the Facebook Terms of Use you might discover stuff like this:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This means that Facebook can practically do anything with your content. Contrary to the Facebook flocking birds (oops, that’s me too), the guys behind academia.edu figured that users might actually read the terms of use before they post their nude pics.

Academics are used to reading huge amounts of written matter and we generally try to understand the implications of these texts. That’s what we do for a living. So when you read the terms of use you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the fact that your copyrights are not cropped and mangled beyond recognition:

Academia.edu does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, papers, books, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the Academia.edu Services. After posting your Content to the Academia.edu Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose.

And further:

By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the Academia.edu Services, you hereby grant to Academia.edu a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the Academia.edu Services. The license you grant to Academia.edu is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to Academia.edu), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that Academia.edu is not required to pay you for the use on the Academia.edu Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that Academia.edu is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the Academia.edu Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the Academia.edu Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the Academia.edu Services. The license does not grant Academia.edu the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant Academia.edu the right to distribute your Content outside of the Academia.edu Services.

There’s no ‘irrevocable, perpetual’ license here and no right for the company ‘to prepare derivative works [...] and to grant and authorize sublicenses’ of your stuff. Of course there’s the usual internet legal newspeak here and there - these people have a business to run, after all - but the terms are very compliant, and contrary to Facebook they actually take the time to explain the legal terms. Basically, you still have control of your content when you post it on academia.edu.

Come and play!

In the big picture academia.edu opens new ways of connecting and collaborating across institutions, continents and scientific disciplines. It still has a long way to go before it’ll be as addictive and smooth-running as Facebook but I think it’s worth giving the place a chance.

Come over and let’s play at academia.edu!

[Disclaimer: Let's just be clear about a few things here before the flame war and the court trials start: I'm not affiliated with or paid by academia.edu or Facebook. This is not an advertisment, but rather a review of the academia.edu service. I have no interest in the succes or failure of either service.]

1. The grave goods would be thougt to be useful in the afterlife, that is, the deceased person would somehow bring the grave goods with him/her into ‘the other world’.
2. The grave goods reflect the social order the living society - the more lavishly furnished the grave, the higher the status of the deceased.

I will assert that a) this may not be entirely so straightforward, and b) that in a way this may be right, but for quite the wrong reasons. I shall start with the latter point.

The majority of persons found buried in Viking Age graveyards are often not equipped with any grave goods at all, or sometimes just a small knife, a whetstone or a few pearls. Most of the time we are indeed just talking about ‘dead bodies dressed up for funeral’, meaning that the knives and pearls are actually just a part of the dead person’s clothes.

Some of the more impressive graves are furnished with lots of stuff, notably weapons, riding equipment, furniture, boardgames and jewellery. Some of them contain animals like horses, dogs and hunting birds, some even ships and servants; some the bones of sheep and cow (i.e. food) and some of them are covered with barrows. It is the interpretation of these conspicuous ‘aristocratic’ graves which will have my attention in the following.

Upon further examination it turns out that actually very few of the people buried in the Viking Age would get anything useful with them to the presumed afterlife. This, so the explanation goes, is because the differences in grave goods - or indeed grave furnishings - reflect similar differences in the stratified society that was Viking Age Denmark.

The Development of the Graveyard Through Time

In most litterature on the subject burial grounds are seen as ’snapshots’ of the living societies which produced them. I infer from this that the underlying assumption of almost any archaeologist who has so far studied the Viking Age society by means of burial grounds is that all the burials happen at one specific point in time. This is obviously not so. Even in cases where each burial can be dated (for example by carbon isotope dating or typological seriation of grave goods) in relation to other burials, the entire graveyard is still sometimes taken to be a mirror of a living society. This requires the archaeologist to close his eyes and ignore the obvious.

There is one simple observation which will demolish this kind of explanation: Time passes.

Graveyards, I claim, must be assumed to develop, spread and increase in size and in the number of burials over time. People die, they are buried, and thus the graveyard grows. From this simple observation follows that the Viking Age graveyard (in fact any abandoned graveyard) can be said to be the accumulation of burials happening between two very distinct points in time, namely the point of establishment of the graveyard and the point in time at which people decided to change the site of their graveyard for whatever reason.

Consider that a lot of the Viking Age graveyards in Denmark were situated on slopes or even hilltops and often centering around a barrow, either a contemporary ‘aristocratic’ burial mound or an older (often Bronze Age) mound. From this vantage point the graveyard would then most likely spread down through time and space, the older burials near the top, the most recent graves being dug closer to the foot of the hill.

Sadly, the lack of relative datings of the burials in most published Viking Age graveyards prevents us from establishing this pattern with certainty. It has however been observed in other periods of prehistory where grave goods have been more precisely dated.

Now the interesting part is that most of the lavishly furnished graves, die Prunkgräber so to speak, are often located in or at the hilltop monument - be it as secondary burials in a Bronze Age mound or in their own mound proper. The typical pattern is that the quality and amounts of grave furnishings decrease rapidly, as we move downhill and away from the central ‘founding’ burial(s). It follows that these conspicuous central burials are also often the older ones in that particular graveyard.

But if we accept that the graveyard develops over time, as I have described above, we must also accept the disappearance of the upper strata of society with time. Or, as we move down the hill, we must discard the interpretation that the graveyard faithfully mirrors the living society.

Who Buries The Dead?

What really happens here is not the disappearance of a stratified society. Rather, I think, it is a marked decrease in the need to express social difference through the elaborate furnishing of burials as time goes by. The initial need to ’show off’ when establishing a new graveyard will begin to make sense if we consider:

1. Who is buring the dead?
2. What do they gain from spending huge amounts of food and commodities on the burial?

The dead do not bury themselves. This is as obvious as it is trivial, and yet it may pay to reconsider the implications.

Let us assume a stratified society in a state of internal and external competition. For whatever reason it is decided to commence burial at a certain place. Let us say that the local leader dies, old of age. Clearly he does not bury him self, but we can assume that his family, his heirs, will take care of the burial.

On one hand this is a period of potential crisis - a liminal phase in the words of van Gennep. But on the other hand it is a great occasion for said heirs to assert their inherited status. I will speculate wildly here, that they grasp this opportunity to invite their peers from other parts of the country to a splendid wake. Also I will assume that the local townspeople will be present to witness the spectacularly wasteful behaviour about to take place.

The reason for this speculation is, that the conspicuous consumption involved in burying their deceased ancestor requires a large crowd of spectators. A crowd that will be impressed by the wealth being destroyed during the feast and burial rituals, a crowd that will accept the claim of the heirs to their newly inherited status.

If the heirs succeed in claiming this status by means of conspicuous expenditure, there will be no further need for other families in the local community to compete for lordship. There simply will be no question of who’s the big man.

But it needs to be done. If we imagine, that the heirs just sit back and ignore the opportunity to assert their right to status, other groups might grasp the chance to move up the ladder and compete for the title. So really the rightful heirs have no choice but to spend the ressources needed to destroy any potential competition.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Further, the burial of the deceased ‘big man’ in the above example coincides with the establishment of a new burial ground. So the heirs need not only assert their claim to rank and status towards their peers, but also they have to secure the new order in the local community.

Now that everybody has witnessed the transfer of status and power to the heirs, no further statements of status will be necessary. It is my argument that the need for conspicuous expenditure on burials decrease immediately once this new order is established. For as long as the current order is maintained, everybody will know their place in society and no one will have reason to question the superiority of the local lords. They in turn will have no need to continue the exaggerated consumption associated with establishing inheritance through the conspicuous dedication of expensive grave goods.

The grave goods reflect the social order of the living society only at a time when that very order is being questioned - the more lavishly furnished the grave, the higher the degree of crisis at the time of interment.

Let us return now to the initial explanation of the usefulness of the grave goods in the afterlife.

We can look to Beowulf and get an idea of the importance ascribed to expensive grave goods in the period. But we can also look at the actual burials and most of the time the quality of the grave goods will not relate directly to a social structure. They will simply fail to convey a coherent picture of both social status and Viking Age ideas about the afterlife.

As we cannot demonstrate a continuous display of wealth in ‘aristocratic’ burials it follows that some of the ‘aristocrats’ are passing to the afterlife with all sorts of niceties - horses, ships, jewellery, dogs, food, ale, servants and the like - while others have to make do with little more than a knife and cloth pin.

How then, can we claim that the grave goods were indeed the equipment needed in the afterlife? To me they rather produce a picture of intentional expenditure directed towards the spectators at certain critical times.

At most other times, when things are peaceful, we can detect no serious social differences. There aren’t a lot of grave goods, and therefore not a great deal of useful commodities for the presumed afterlife.

Concluding Remarks

It might be that the ideals of aristocratic burial in Viking Age Denmark would have followed along the lines of the funeral pyres in Beowulf, the rationale being to honour the memory of the deceased with gifts and commodities for the afterlife. This might well have been the explanation employed by spectators at contemporary upper class funerals.

But the archaeological remains simply do not support the interpretation that the upper strata of society needed anything in particular on their travel to the afterlife - indeed we can’t even glean much useful information about this presumed afterlife from Viking Age burials, not even when we do make dubious speculations and anachronistic inferences from written sources.

The current established explanations hold that grave goods would have been useful in the afterlife, that the deceased person would somehow bring the grave goods with him/her into ‘the other world’. This explanations has little to offer for a period in which only few people were in fact buried with other goods than the fittings of their dress.

Further, the assumption that the few, but very conspicuously, furnished graves should reflect the social order of the living society will not stand to scrutiny. They may indicate the claims to rank and status put forward by the descendants or heirs of the buried person. The commodities expended at these burials may be a very real and tangible indication of wealth, influence and social stratification, but not for the reasons normally assumed.

Hit me with your comments!

Pic: M. Pedersen, Sydvestsjællands Museum.
Lifted from: kongensborge.dk

The shield was found during test pitting around the late 10th century ring fortress Trelleborg in West Zealand. It has now been brought to Moesgård Museum in Jutland for further analysis and conservation.

Although all kinds of weapons and war related equipment has been found in Viking Age burials all over Scandinavia, shields or even fragments of such are extremely rare.

To my knowledge this is the first ever Viking Age shield to be recovered by archaeologists in Denmark, probably only paralelled by one similar shield previously found in Norway.

Trelleborg - Show larger map

Read about it at the King’s Foretresses project website.

It’s time for indoor work and I’m currently looking for a part time job in the general field(s) of Computers and Archaeology. I can do all sorts of things with computers and soil, and hey, I make good coffee too!

Interested? Drop a comment with your wonderful job offer!

There are numerous burials inside the former south wing of the cloister or ‘ambitus’ south of Ribe Cathedral. This is the first well preserved children’s graves that we have excavated. It is a very young infant buried sometime around 1700 AD. The grave is about 30 by 60 cm, the body itself less than 50 cm.

In this close-up of the lower body (seen from the north) you can see remains of a wooden coffin lid with the remains intertwined metal string and some needle pins on top.

It’s not clear what exactly we’re looking at here, but it is quite possibly the remains of a decorated piece of garment. Obviously someone dressed the grave with great care.

Small bronze pins are found lying around above the skeleton as can be seen in this picture of the head. Againg we see curled and twisted metal strings and a few pins:

The bones of the skull are not even close to growing together into one piece which reveals the very young age of this individual.

Usually, the number of infant burials in pre-modern societies don’t correspond well with the demographics of such societies, that is you’d expect a lot more child burials than are actually found by archaeologists. Taphonomic processes may alter and destroy biological remains after they are buried in the ground. Some remains survive better than others over time and can therefore heavily bias the excavated collection. As the bones of children are small and fragile they will often decay faster than the bones of adults.

But the lack of children in medieval graveyard can only partially be ascribed to taphonomy. The degree of preservation can vary enormously - even within the same grave - and so it becomes clear that there must be something else going on (yet I’m not completely convinced by Langers claim that infanticide or ‘exposure’ (a euphemism for leaving the newborn child to die out in the wild) was practised “on gigantic scale with absolute impunity” and “noticed by writers with most frigid indifference” ).

Rather, I like to think of the burial of children as something which is still poorly understood by archaeologists.

Today I’ll share a little goodie with you: We’ve found an early modern coffin emblem in situ on the collapsed coffin lid of this (most likely) early18th century burial who goes by the name of X1007.

The iron was very decayed and it turned out to be impossible to remove in less than about 300 pieces, so we decided to uncover and clean the piece in situ and document it at once. It took me almost two hours to clean the very fragile metal in order to take this photograph.

So far all attempts to decipher the swirls and turns of the ornament have failed, but it could be some kind of mirrored monogram. Or maybe it’s just flowers…

One of the features that we discover repeatedly in the early modern graves in the former cloister in Ribe is large iron coffin handles.

In the pictures you can see the iron coffin handles in situ around the skeleton X1016. As usual there are eight of them - two in each end and three on each side of the coffin. Below Troels and Helene are busy preparing X1016 for photography:

It seems that these coffin handles are just normal furniture handles like the ones used for chests and other furniture. Below is an example of a similar handle on the side of a wardrobe from 1802. It is of a slightly different type but it gives a decent impression of what 18th and 19th century coffins would have looked like on the outside:

Not a mere ornament, these handles could actually be used to lift and carry the furniture and coffins on which they were mounted

It appears that some of the older (pre-1700) coffins are mostly fitted with iron rings - probably for lowering the coffin into the grave with ropes. It is not clear to me whether this does indeed show an older burial practice or if the change is merely in coffin style?

Dear reader: Your opinion is welcome!

When preparing the site for the Excavations in Ribe we found loads of 19th century rubbish - broken stuff and household waste.

Quite a lot of faience sherds had found their way to the site and among all the other stuff we found these nice romantic pieces. Broken and discarded more than 150 years ago these lovely images still tell their silent tales.

All in a similar technique, the pieces have all been decorated with a printed motive - propbably by means of rubber stamp. They’re all probably english made or maybe of local danish produce - it’s hard to tell with this kind of industrial ware which was produced in huge quantities and copied over and over by different factories.

The sugar bowl above sports a rather sad looking young lady collecting water from a fountain.

I rather like the couple in this one. All set and ready to take a sunday stroll through town.

Perhaps some of you perceptive readers can identify which factory mad that last one? It looks like the number ‘4′ printed on the backside. I think it is part of the middle of a small plate or saucer.

A certain Mr. Rnmxceyb surfing from Rambla Republica de Mexico 6125, Montevideo, Uruguay (IP:200.63.42.81), has commented on this old post from october 2006.

Mr Rnmxceyb seems to have some rather psychedelic opinions on my writing. I’m quite surprised by his claim that “Beth mourned hat handkerchi breastfeeding and dilantin has unusual ultravate generic strongly”, although I can imagine that “After weeping connecting the naltrexone forum turned away extract psilocyn psilcybin dea wheels”.

It happens to all of us.

But that last paragraph in which “Nikolaevich unexpected nor your desk reference accupril and grabbed shudder” has made me uneasy about this whole business. I wish Mr. Rnmxceyb from Montevideo would tell me what this is all about.

I have a vague feeling that he is trying to sell me something…

The Comment in full:

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Nikolaevich unexpected nor your desk reference accupril and grabbed shudder.

Spelling and punctuation as the original comment. Links replaced with a link to this post (I’m not that stupid, Mr. Rnmxceyb!)

By the way Akismet has caught 48,000 spam comments for me - or 47,999 if we discount Mr. Rnmxceyb’s contribution to modern litterature quoted above.

Jensen and his colleagues in Scandinavian Network for Crusade Studies have argued that:

Not until the 1980ties did it become it generally accepted by historians that in the Middle Ages crusading was not a peripheral and questionable activity but widely accepted, and indeed decisive in creating and unifying medieval Western European Latin culture and defining it in relation to infidels, pagans and schismatics to the north, east and south (…) As yet these aspects of crusading have only to a very limited extent been studied in relation to medieval Scandinavia.

But wait, the crusades more or less ended after the 1290ties, right? Wrong. In fact, the rethoric of crusading was applied to quite a few political situations and in quite different places during the following centuries, even long after The Holy Land had been lost to the Saracens:

[Crusading was] not the sole reason for making war, but on the other hand no major war could be waged without taking the concept into consideration and invoking it. In the case of Denmark this still applied as late as 1520 when king Christian II’s conquest of Sweden was based on a papal crusading bull(!)

Enigmatic Sources

During their work with the scandinavian material in the 1990ties, some of the more puzzling sources have been nagging the researchers again and again. One example is the so called ‘Broderliste’ (en: List of Brethren). This enigmatic addendum to the (ca.) 1231 Liber Census Daniæ (also known in danish as ‘Kong Valdemars Jordebog’) lists the names of prominent ecclesiastical and lay magnates and the king.

It was copied in the middle of the thirteenth century together with important royal fiscal lists and was thus deemed of great importance to royal policy. But there is no indication in the manuscript of the purpose of compiling this list of fratres.

Since then the group has published a book in which various authors put forward their best guesses on and interpretations of the puzzling source, but they’re still looking for european parallels (or just explanations!) to the ‘Broderliste’.

Dear reader, if you happen to know any parallels to the ‘List of Brethren’ you can contact the Scandinavian Network for Crusade Studies at their website

But first of all, let’s agree where in the world Ribe is anyway. Follow this link to see the Google map of Ribe - you’ll be hovering right over the spot.

Alternatively load this kmz-file in Google Earth (if you have it) and take a flight to 55.327664N/8.761736E …

The image below shows part of a 17th century drawing of central Ribe with the Cathedral (seen from a northeasternly direction); the red overlay marks the excavation site:

Next, here’s a plan of the Cathedral from 1737 showing ‘LindegÃ¥rden‘, the ‘ambitus’ or courtyard south of the church. Again the red shape marks the 2008 excavation:

The Courtyard has been destroyed except for a part of the west wing still standing which can be clearly seen in the background on this photo:

The building has been very heavily ‘restored’, but at least still stands in the right place!

Below, the same (norhtern) part of the dig, only seen from the west:

Note the remains of a wall in the upper right corner; that’s the graveyard wall from ca. 1737-43 which was built on the spot where the south wall of the courtyard’s south wing used to be. To the north (left of the wheelbarrows) a row of large, irregular holes probably indicate that a number of quite large stones have been removed. They may have served as part of the foundations for the north wall of the south wing.

And finally, a view from the south towards the cathedral:

That’s all for now - drop me a comment below if there’s anything you want to know!

OK, so I was reading Martin’s post on/against theoretical archaeology when I followed a link to Seed Magazine’s Revolutionary Minds and then it came to me:

Psychoarchaeology

Take a short moment to taste that word. Enjoyed it? Good.

Psychoarchaeology could (briefly put) be the application of classical psychological theories to the interpretation of old/dead/(pre-)historic societies with special regard to their social and spatial qualities.

Example: Take Freud’s structural model of the psyche (you know, the id, ego & super-ego) and apply it to the functions of a society - and I’m not here simply suggesting to analyse the world as divided into three distinct classes directed by primitive desires, realistic self-awareness and moral superiority (however much tempted). No! We’re linking the degree of intentionality (agency) at a functional level in society to the levels of Freud’s notions of anxiety and impulse control here.

“An ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.

[Read: Indulgences will cost you a fortune (or have you walk all the way to Jerusalem to pray - and back) but you'll really, really enjoy it when you take the fast lane in purgatory.]

What insights, for example, can we gain from viewing the way norms, taboos and traditions interact with agency and intention through the looking glass of psychological theory?

Ok? Then I’ve got another one: What if we take Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and turn it into a structural or spatial model of living spaces? Let’s say for instance, that the rooms of a house can be organised in a private/public hierarchy that’s related to to the basic need/self-actualisazion hierarchy that governs the society as such. I’m quite sure the connection has already been made, and that some relevant examples it can be extracted from a paper by Anders Andrén (but I’ve kind of lost my A.Andrén Fan-Gear, so no footnote for you here).

So you think that’s all? Well, we then we have Reverse Psychoarchaeology. Yup, you’ve guessed it:
Hook it all up with some old anthropological theory of power-play and taboos and whatnot and voilà: Archaeopsychology!

This was all very well until I googled the terms Psychoarchaeology and Archaeopsychology. Try for your self and see: It seems that the psychologists beat me to it. The world is sometimes madder than we think.

Alright, I’m off to bed.

Partial solar eclipse (27%) as seen from Ribe, Denmark, on August 1st @ 11.35 am local time. Note the little green lens flare - it’s a reflection of the eclipsed sun inside the camera!

The excavation will cover about 200 sq.m. of the former graveyard south of the Cathedral.

We hope to obtain important information about the early history of medieval Ribe; the Viking Age origins of the city are reasonably well understood, but a lot of questions about the medieval city are so far unanswered.

The current excavation, the which is the first major archaeological undertaking in the close proximity of the 11th century Cathedral, has been running for a few weeks now and will continue for the rest of this year. The continued excavations will produce a lot of knowledge - especially about the Cathedral and it’s graveyard in the 11th-13th centuries.

In the coming months I will be blogging finds small and large, pictures from the excavation and background information about Ribe, its Cathedral and its every day life

Also, I’m now using lightbox - feel free to flame me in the comments if you don’t like it.

This could be the beginning of a (new) beatiful friendship with my blog!

During my recent 6 month stay in Syria quite a few things went wrong with this blog. Due to technical problems I was unable to update the blog and completely unable to salvage it, when it went bonkers around november ‘07.

This will be all for now - I will return with more goodies from the crusader lands at a later stage. Right now I’m just happy that I got the thing working again.

Yours sincerely,

Henrik

This is so because I am currently on a dig in Jutland (Denmark) and I actually live in a shack on-site. So when I get up in the morning I step right out into the archaeological record!

Here a couple of my norwegian colleagues Geir and Terje are taking drastic measures.

Just about 20 metres from my temporary home there are several sunken floor houses (da: grubehuse) and a few Iron Age long houses.

My days are spent boxing postholes, drawing up plans and sections and going through finds.

Here’s a loom weight we found yesterday in one of the sunken floor houses:

As you can see the loom weight has been marked with a peculiar stamp. Could be a fishing hook or an anchor - or perhaps a palm tree?

Today we found a strange stone in one of the sunken floor houses. It has eight depressions, six of which are actual holes.

Apparently the holes have been drilled into the surface of the stone - perhaps it is some kind of tool or aid used for pressing againtst a drill?

In a few months the whole area will be recycled, as yet another generation will settle here and build their houses. Even though they could easily be subjected to typology, these houses will be of minor interest to archaeologists for the first few centuries.

This entry was written for the Nearest Archaeological Site Carnival at Aardvarchaeology.

Archaeologists from my local city museum have unearthed a gold and silver treasure from the 5th-6th cent. AD. During the excavation of a large Iron Age settlement on the eastern outskirts of Odense in Marslev, 5 kms east of Odense, the metal hoard was discovered hidden in the floor of an Iron Age house.

Apart from several pieces of silver jewellery and a handful of silver bars, the find contained pieces of a cut-up roman silver dining plate and a roman solidus (a gold coin) with the portrait of Theodosius the Great coined in Milan in the 380ties. The solidus had later been fitted with a hoop or hole to wear as jewellery.

Furthermore the hoard yielded a very large gilded cast silver brooch, with ornaments in the shape of animal heads and a human face.

Judging from the general condition of the pieces, the archaeologists think that the treasure was intended as raw materials destined for recasting by a local goldsmith.

Odense in the 5th and 6th Centuries AD

From the period in question, treasure finds with precious metals on Funen are otherwise only known from the famous Gudme-Lundeborg Area in the southern part of the island. By the settlement at Odense Marslev several very large houses have been recently uncovered - among them a very large house with a length of 41 meters!

Considering the size and character of the settlement it is clear, that the Odense area deserves some of the attention which has previously been mainly bestowed upon Gudme.

It’s always very exciting when archaeologists find precious metals. Our ‘inner Indy’ gets to brag and boast. But even more exciting is the fact, that such finds can help modify the prehistory and add a little more complexity to the sometimes too simple and straightforward archaeological interpretations of an area.

Happy digging, y’all!

Links:

Museum of Odense City via local newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende and local radio DR P4 Fyn, today june 12th, 2007.

No reading, you ask? Well, alright. Actually there are lots of books to be read, but now that it’s summer, I get to choose which books! Ha!

And summer, in the world of Archaeology, is digging time! It’s the time of year when the pale potbelly proffessors, petty postgrads and fumbling freshmen get a delicious bronze tan and loose 10 pounds.

This is the time when we read all the exciting books that just didn’t fit in the coursework. This is when archaeologists get out of their caves and into the sun. This is a time for cold beer and hot women, not the other way round. This is when we all of a sudden love contract archaeology again.

This is the time where you, Dear Reader, contact me, if you have a paid field work position.

I am so going to enjoy this summer break!

Happy digging/drinking/reading/barbecueing/sleeping to all of you! See you all in a few months!

-Henrik

The RSS feed for Recent Finds has been updated. Please change your bookmark accordingly.

The new feed is at: http://www.henrikkarll.dk/recent-finds/feed/rss2/.

Kind regards

Henrik

By the end of the paper, those of us who were happy to do so were moving towards a conception of territory almost entirely without linear borders, except at points of confrontation that had forced some definition, and I was wondering about mapping medieval power not in zones but with spider-webs of radiating lines from centre to lesser centre. This fits quite well with my way of looking at power as links between persons, and I’ve drawn diagrams of social phenomena in similar ways, but for some reason I hadn’t thought of doing the geographical layout like that.

I immediately come to think of the scandinavian runestones of the viking age/early middle age which are thought by some to mark out territorial borders and to have been used as claims for inherited land, rights, whatever.

This fits smoothly with the observation that a lot of 11th (in Denmark) and 12th century (in Sweden) runestones was erected at some sort of transportation ‘nodes’ - bridges, road-crossings etc. — that is; not in a central place such as the village or the burial ground (although some runestones are found in connection to burial sites and monuments), but at points of confrontation.

Following this line of thought, you could potentially map out viking age territories, not by drawing borderlines, but by connecting settlements and runestone ‘nodes’ in a kind of ‘territory web’

Wow! Some kind of revelation there!

Full post at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

The Viking Age (c. 800-1050AD) is an essential and distinctive element of the Scandinavian identity. During this period Scandinavians played a decisive role in many parts of Europe, a role which encompassed raids and trade along German, French and Russian rivers; the conquest of England and much of Ireland and Scotland; voyages to the Mediterranean and America; the colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and much, much more.

This intensive course will consider Viking-Age Scandinavia as an interdisciplinary area study, with a focus on archaeology.

Subjects include: society, economy and culture; kings and fortresses; towns and trade; ships and travel; village communities; rune-stones, weapons and warfare; art and ornament; pagan religion, conversion and early Christianity — all in one week!

The course also includes ���hands-on��� demonstrations of original artefacts including tools, ornament, weapons and objects used in everyday life. That’s right! Viking weapons!

Oh, and there will be field trips too!

Details

Course details: http://www.aal.au.dk/en/presentation

The course is aimed at undergraduates and MA students in archaeology, history, literature and related disciplines. It takes place on August 27th through September 1st, 2007.

Application deadline is June 15th, 2007.

Next the question of authenticity. This is to be a show piece and I don’t want to glue the original onto the cardboard background, I hence had a colour photocopy made for the purpose.

I glued the copy onto the backframe thingy and then left it to dry. All I needed was something heavy to press it down so the paper wouldn’t wrinkle. And this is where the heavy scholarship came in handy!

As I didn’t want to challenge the gods by stacking all 22 volumes of Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordisk Middelalder on top of the little innocent cardboard frame, I selected the second heaviest books in the shelves to do the pressing - and these turned out to be Jørgen Jensen’s fabolus four volume work on Denmark’s prehistoric archaeology - Danmarks Oldtid.

Itself a work of considerable scholarly weight, the four tomes of Danmarks Oldtid also happen to:

1. exactly the same size as the degree document
2. printed on 130g ‘Gallery Art’ paper, which makes them
3. extremely heavy

So there you have it: Completely squashed by danish prehistory!

How wonderful to find that archaeology can be put to good use in the real world!

XXVII hwræ lengi man ma sløkefrit haue meth sich
hwa sum hau√¶r sl√∏kefrith i gard meth sich oc ganger openbarhe meth at sou√¶ oc hau√¶r las oc lykki · oc s√∏ker at√¶ oc dryc meth openbarl√¶k i thre winter hun skal w√¶r√¶ athelkon√¶ oc ret husfr√∏

The above text (which is in medieval danish) was transcribed from fol.13r, lines 4-11 of Codex Holmiensis 37, the oldest known manuscript of Jydske Lov (The Law of Jutland) presently in the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm.

In modern english the above passage reads:

27 How long a man can have a sl√∏kefrit with him
he who has a sl√∏kefrith with him in his house and openly goes to bed with her, and she has lock and key · and she eats and drinks with him openly for three winters, then she shall be considered his wedded wife and his lawful housewife

A body of secular laws for Jutland and (nota bene!) my home island Funen, Jydske Lov was given by King Valdemar II ‘Sejr’ (the Victorious) on the 28th of march 1241, and it was effective until 1683 when it was abolished by King Christian V, who replaced it with Danske Lov (The Danish Law) which (as one might guess) covered all of Denmark.

Now why am I quoting this obscure 766 years old danish law?

Well, it so happens that three winters ago, I made out with a wonderful girl who is now my girlfriend (or, perhaps, my sl√∏kefrith?) on this very day.

The point being that had it not been for King Christian V, you could have considered me a married man as of today! Yay!

Denmarks finest popular archaeological journal turns 50 today!

For half a century SKALK has published richly illustrated articles about Danish prehistoric and medieval archaeology, history, and related topics.

Extremely popular ever since it’s inception in 1957, SKALK today has a stunning readership of almost 24,000 subscribers!

Although published exclusively in Danish with no foreign language summaries, footnotes or references, SKALK is still considered one of the best european archaeological journals around.

“If you wish to study European archaeology, you will have to start by learning Danish. The leading European magazine is called “SKALK” named after a Danish giant”
(Current Archaeology, March 1992)

Edited for four decades by the late Harald Andersen (∗1917, †2005) SKALK has always been a conservative stronghold when it comes to layout and typeface.

Not only has the classic SKALK layout inspired numerous other journals of popular science such as SFINX (mediterranean culture), KASKELOT (biology), MÅL OG MÆLE (languages) and VARV (geology); it also hasn’t changed more than once — and that was in fact only minor typographical adjustments because of a transition to dtp.

The present editor Christian Adamsen (himself born in 1957!) intends to keep the high standard. Said Adamsen on friday to the intellectual weekly newspaper, Weekendavisen:

You will find no Knights Templars riding across mysterious ‘groove stones’ in our pages!

Till this day, 11,613,066 SKALKs have been distributed to the hungry readers — let’s hope for another eleven and a half million to come!

References

• Christian Adamsen: SKALKs Jubel√•r. Skalk 2007:1, pp. 3-8
• SKALK official website.

(Above picture borrowed from www.skalk.dk)

In short, Caramelle is a milk based vanilla jelly smothered in a clear caramel sauce.

The Caramelle is cooked in a pot, then poured and set to cool on top of a layer of caramel sauce in a bowl. When it’s stiff you turn the whole thing around which in theory causes the jelly to drop on a plate and the caramel sauce (now on the upper side) to run down over the sides of it.

Oh! Havoc!

Though found on the ‘traditional desserts’ shelves in any English supermarket, the traditional englishness of this dessert is not very clear to me. The taste and feel of it reminds me of german Wackelpudding and french Crème Caramel (even the name sounds strangely french).

The only thing british about Caramelle is the bland taste which secures this darling a status as an everlasting english classic — in blandness it only has two serious competitors: Mashed potatoes with cabbage and the sad, tortured, fried, unsalted cod in breadcrumbs which together with potato halves (also sad, unsalted and cooked in oil) makes up the very british form of belly torture known as fish’n'chips.

Adhering to tradition we first had a gentlemens meal of much cheese, involving cumin spiced brandy, crackers and 5 kinds of cheese. Ahhh!

Then we congregated in the common kitchen and performed uncommon acts of cheese grinding. Old Chief Torben cared for the spirits and actually donated a generous amount of french cognac (XO no less!) to the project.

In short, we produced the venerated Potkäse (of previous Recent Finds Weblog fame).

Oh, and the camera didn’t work. I’m very sorry, but it seems that my cheap-o-matic digicam has lost it’s geist.

All I have is two pics of my fellow cult member and long time cheese addict Lars showing the finished masterwork:

It doesn’t look that evil, does it? Well, it is. Take a closer look… 99 percent stinking ancient cheese and a few drops of cognac and spiced brandy:

Stinky!

Among the goals of the Cult is the spread(ing) of Potkäse and the initiation of further members. Normally this happens by way of bacteriological contamination by exposure to Potkäse.

In the picture I am presented with a piece of very old cheese from Torben, a chieftain from the local Potkäse terror-cell in Holstebro.

Weird Ritual Behaviour

Normally the strongest grade of killer cheese available in Denmark is Gamle Ole ['Ancient Ole'], but cheif Torben has been so lucky as to obtain quite a large amount of the only cheese notably worse than Gamle Ole; a cheese known to connaisseurs as Gamle Oles Far (Father of Ancient Ole) !

I cannot begin to describe the stench of this piece of biological nonsense. The texture is that of a soft cheese so ancient that is is crumbly and runny at the same time!

The cult code demands the following when handling ancient/living cheese. These rules apply to both Ancient Ole, Father of Ancient Ole and the venerable Potkäse itself:

The Code of The Deadly Potkäse Biohazard Cult

1. When you open the jar, you must eat from the cheese! End of discussion!
2. When you eat from the cheese you will replace any film, tin foil or other related safety devices and/or remedies of hygiene.
3. If the cheese is too much alive (e.g. it tries to escape from the jar when opened), feed it a snaps or a whiskey to keep it calm.
4. If the cheese starts to take it easy (e.g. doesn’t smell that bad, afterall, or lies completely still in the jar) add some more old cheese - preferably of a smelly variety. And drink the whiskey yourself.

Anyway, one of these days we’ll be making a Potkäse out of that ancient artefact provided by chief Torben.

Stay tuned for more cheese gory!

It was a nice spring day in London town but once inside the museum I felt centuries of illness weighing down on me. The thick pathological atmosphere could almost be scraped off the walls.

In fact the Wellcome is more about pathology than anything else. The people who made this place obviously had an unnatural obsession with pain, deformity and the macabre in the human body.

As the Museum is not open to the public I thought I might give you all a brief description of what actually goes on in there.

Wandering around the exhibition it is actually hard to find ‘normal’ or healthy specimens, as everything evolves around the sick, diseased and deceased.

In here, every thinkable part of the human body is cut and sliced, dissected, bisected, drilled open, cut in half, preserved in spirit, canned, cooked, boiled, spread out, propped up with glue, lit from various angles, stuffed with plastic and marked out in bright colours.

Quote the dry museum prose: Many of the pathologies are in an extreme form, which fortunately occur rarely today, but the specimens are therefore irreplaceable. (!)

At a point it becomes some kind of carnivalesque art exhibition. As if the hundreds of people chopped up and dissected gave their life not to science, but to an eternal carnival of suffering in a sculptural arts museum.

And this is the kind of art that engages you on a very personal level. You can almost feel the arthritic pain as you watch bone and joint diseases cut out and preserved in yellowish glass vessels, not to speak of the tumors and swollen organs served in jars of all sizes. And the skin diseases. Oh.

I can give you one example of what a specimen might look like:

Caption:

Congenital absence of gallbladder and bile duct.

History:

From a baby boy, aged 8 months, who was admitted to hospital with obstructive jaundice of six months’ duration. Cholecystgastrostomy was attempted but proved to be impracticable, and the child died two months later.

Specimen:

The stomach and duodenum with the pancreas and the posterior part of the liver. The right margin of the lesser omentum has been dissected, and the blood vessels are indicated by glass rods, but there is no trace of the common bile duct. The ampulla appears to be present, but transverse sections of the pancreas show no evidence of a duct. The liver is shrunken and deeply bile stained, and there is a deep groove in the situation of the gallbladder, of which there is no evidence.

I for one couldn’t help feeling a bit dizzy after half an hour of suffering from severe leprosy, elephantitis, rheumatoid arthritis, bilateral Dr. This-and-that Disease, countless bladder stones and a chesty cough (tuberculosis?).

The Lady finally felt confident abouth her teeth and I was released out in the London afternoon. Afterwards, the London smog was quite like a fresh breeze in spring compared to the heavy atmosphere of the Wellcome Macabre.

The Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology is located with the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The museum contains a modern anatomical and pathological teaching collection and is used to support the education, training and examination of surgeons. Access is restricted to fellows and members of the College and to qualified practitioners and students of medicine, nursing and allied health professions. That means: if you study something vaguely relevant to human pathology just go there, register at the reception - and enjoy the illness!.
(Taking photographs in the museum is strictly prohibited, so of course I found the pictures for this blog post somewhere else. Erhm.)

It all began with a trip to the local museum in Holstebro. In the exhibition hall for recent city history I noticed a nice wooden travelling chest that had apparently belonged to the Lind family, a line of local goldsmiths. The chest bore the initial of one Mathias Lind and the year 1656 and it has been used by generations of Linds on their travels through Europe as journeymen, or as we say in danish: navere, travelling craftsmen (I myself am some kind of travelling craftsman, only I’m an archaeologist).

Then it struck me, that not only is my mothers family name Lind, but she is in fact a trained goldsmith, as were both her paternal grandparents, and their parents before them. So I went home and called her, thinking that even though she is from Copenhagen (which is in the exact opposite end of Denmark) there might still be some kind of family ties to Holstebro.

Indeed! It turns out that my great great grandfather was a goldsmith named Mathias Lind, and that he came to Copenhagen from, you’ve guessed it: Holstebro. His mother, another goldsmith, was named Olga Lind and her father (his grandfather) was in turn a goldsmith named Mathias Lind, and some of their silver work is actually on display in the Holstebro Museum.

And we all share a common ancestor, one certain mister Mathias Lind from Holstebro, who in 1656 set out from Holstebro as a journeyman goldsmith, sporting his beautifully carved and brand new travelling chest.

Then another thing struck me: Until the churchyard in Holstebro was abandoned in 1865, every single deceased person in the parish would have been buried there. I’m excavating that very churchyard. Hey, wait a minute - am I digging up my ancestors!? This must be some kind of bizarre joke!

Well, now that i know about this, it is as if I do my job just a little more carefully than I used to…

After all, it is not that often you get to exhume your own family!

And that is not a medieval church in the background. In fact that church was built in 1907 and it’s parly the reason why we’re digging. You see, the church council would like to pave the area around their nice big pseudo-romanesque church for its 100th anniversary but (un)fortunately, this very church is built on top of a 15th century parish church that was demolished with dynamite(!) in 1906. That church in turn had replaced an older 12th century granite church. So the new church and its future pavement is right on top af what was the city graveyard from the 12th century till 1865.

The future pavement requires that the top soil is replaced with stabilizing sand in a depth of 85 cm (that’s almost 3 feet) beneath the surface. The archaeological survey done in connection with the work yields a lot of information about the graves and the use of the graveyard.

A few inches of snow actually helps to keep the soil from freezing during night time, but it’s a heavy job shoveling snow in the morning to clear the field, even though we keep it covered in rockwool mats and plastic blankets.

Once the soil is exposed to the icy morning air it immediately starts to harden from the cold. This means we only get to draw small sections at a time, always working against the clock and the weather.

In the picture you can see how much ground three archaeologists can cover in one freezing day (It’s the area where the snow has been removed).

In the picture below you can see the grave of an infant child. From the coulur of the fill I would guess that the individual was buried somtime in (roughly) the 18th century.

Showing no traces of a coffin, the grave fill only contains a few fragments of the skull. These bones are probably too fragile to collect and will decompose completely in a very short time. All we can do is to draw, measure and take pictures of the remains and then excavate the grave carefully. In the picture north is up.

The grave is about 55 cm long (less than 2 feet) and judging from the size of the grave and the bone remains the buried child has died sometime in the first few years of it’s life, my guess is it died before it turned one year.

This is not a complete excavation and most burials will be will be preserved in situ meaning they will not be excavated. Most of the buried individuals lie further down than 3 feet so we only see the outline of the grave; the expression ’six feet under’ isn’t far off in this case.

However, some of the graves are not that deep and they must be excavated and documented in more detail because the construction workers would have to destroy them. The skeletal remains are collected and subjected to further research by biological antrhopologists.

Digging in the midst of winter was never my idea of archaeology. It’s nice work and it’s paid. But its neither elegant nor beautiful.

For the last two years I’ve been living in an allotment house outside my home city of Odense, Denmark - first and foremost with the clear aim of saving money and stretching my dwindling funds. Begun out of pure necessity, the project has over the seasons both turned into a way of life and turned out to be very addictive. In this post I will discuss some of the anthropological experinces and eye-openings I’ve had living under primitive conditions over the last 18 months.

“The Experience Is In The Mind”

This is where it gets anthropological! You see; one notable feature of our allotment house is the absence of a loo.

So the lighter part of relieving yourself takes place in a corner of the allotment itself

I’m not going into much detail here, but pissing outdoors has really opened my eyes to the changing seasons!

Watching the Sky

It has become routine to check the sky when I’m out for leak in the evening. One very practical effect of this is knowing how cold it’s going to be in the night.

If it’s cloudy and still, the heat of the day will stay for most of the night. If the sky is clear or if it’s windy I will have to put on another duvet and turn up the fire before turning in. And if I’m clever, I will make sure to have some extra firewood for the cold morning.

Reading the sky like this is fairly easy to learn, but still it is something most people with central heating (and in Denmark that is most people) will never have had the need to do.

It has made me very aware of the seasons’ changing and the usefulness of a thermometer and a barometer. Predicting the weather and managing the firewood supply also makes you think about older times. How it really felt to live a hundred or a thousand years ago.

Shooting stars are another nice thing that you can appreciate when you’re out there. Again, people who live in “boxes” and spend their time in front of Aunt Telly seldom get the chance to admire such phenomenons.

In the past, however, recurring meteor showers such as the Perseids and the Leonids would have been spectacles admired by young and old. I can recommend it highly!

Fun With Cooking

Sometimes, when I’ve forgot to buy more cooking gas, dinner is prepared on the firestove in the living room. Cooking like that is not much different from cooking on an electrical stove.

But the gas stove is cool. In fact, I have come to consider the gas stove as a technological peak in human history!

At first this is was a surprise to me, but it makes sense once you consider that among professional cooks - people for whom a stove is the major tool of the trade - gas stoves is the standard. Not because is cheaper or easier to clean, but because it lets you control temperature in a way and at a speed that no electrical stove can achieve. Simply put, it’s a superior tool.

Anyone who has ever switched from gas to electricity will know what I mean!

The ease with which modern coffee making devices can produce a hot cup o’ caffeine is what I miss the most. I’m not being religious about living under primitive conditions and would really really wish that my solar electricity system, had in it the power necessary to run one of those nice italian quality espresso machines!

Gardening

Most people do their gardens as hobby. I really don’t like gardening. Not at all. But living among herbs, flowers, fruits and nuts gives you a nice supplement to buying foodstuff.

The planning involved with growing vegetables is another point where I have had a taste of life in earlier times. You don’t just plant something and then hope it grows up to be edible.

Rather you try and err, then try again and either fail or end up with faaaar too much of something. Although they have a nice name, I strongly recommend that you never, ever, ever, ever plant Jerusalem Artichokes in your garden! Ever!

Plant’em in your neighbours garden instead. I’m quite sure he’ll let you have all that you can eat if you ask him!

The art of making ‘kryddersnaps’ (spiced schnaps) has held very high regard in my family for centuries. Moving to the allotments have given me lots of opportunities for collecting the herbs and berries for making ‘kryddersnaps’; sloe, elderflower and walnut being but a few.

What I Have Learned?

With the danger of sounding like a ‘hippie’, I will have to say that I have reached a closer connection to nature and the seasons. The influence of the seasons and the weather on animals and plants is huge and it’s something I didn’t expect at all, when I first chose to live in an allotment house.

Also I have learned alot about the use (and usefulness) of a lot of old artefacts, many of whom I have known for years without realising how important they have been to generations before me. When you can’t just turn on the heating, having enough firewood (and matches, mind!) is essential to making a fire and staying alive and warm throughout the winter.

Does such learnings influence my studies? In short: Yes.

The lengthy answer would be that this way of life has shown me the strength of an ethno-archaeological approach to the material culture at the time of, say, my great grandmother.

But I have also grasped more firmly some of the weaknesses of this approach:
Even though I expose myself to the material conditions of the early 20th century, my mind’s not entirely ‘with’ that period. I still blog and I call up my mother to tell her I haven’t died from the cold yet.

I still go to the supermarket when I need some modern convenience: I don’t actually live entirely form stuff grown in my garden.

On the strong side, however, I have had my eyes opened to some of the troubling conditions of everyday life just 60-70 years ago.

A Few Thoughts

Carrying water to the house through 2 feet of snow every day for 2 months last year (not because it was fun, but because I bloody had to) made me think a lot about how we’ve ‘convenienced’ our lives. Likewise, cutting firewood, mending holes in the roof and generally feeling miserable and poor has largely added to the experience.

Next winter, I will probably be living in a decent, modern apartment because I’ll have to stay closer to University. I will miss the freedom of having my own (medium crappy) house, and even though I probably won’t regret turning up the heat and turning on the electric lights, it will not be the same as making a fire and heating spiced wine on the stove!

Whadd’ya Think?

I would like you to comment on this piece and part one, if you will. You’re welcome to share your experiences with living under primitive conditions, or your thoughts on “the experince in the mind”.

If you know Danish, you can read more on my danish website, where I have blogged about life in the allotment house. Here’s the link.

Leave your comment below.

For the last two years I’ve been living in an allotment house outside my home city of Odense, Denmark - first and foremost with the clear aim of saving money and stretching my dwindling funds by not paying a rent. Begun out of pure necessity, the project has over the seasons both turned into a way of life and turned out to be very addictive. In this post I will try to relate to you a little of that lifestyle, focusing on the material and physical conditions.

A Very Short History of Allotments in Denmark

For the last century or more, allotments have been an integrated part of urban working class culture in Denmark.

Intended as a way of supplementing your income with self-grown vegetables and fruits, allotments have always been very popular with people of low income. During and after WWII a lot of people probably survived more or less because of crops grown in their allotments.

Though taking a prominent place in the public mind, allotments have in recent decades been associated more with holiday getaways than a way of sustaining life on a limited budget.

Allotments are usually organized by private democratic societies, membership is open and a set of rules and laws regulate the use of the gardens.

Though you can have a house or shed in your allotment garden you’re not supposed to live in it as your home. The building and maintenance of allotment houses is not subject to the usual building regulations, which normally spawns an abundance of very bad craftsmanship.

Wikipedia on Allotments.

My Reason for Going Lo-Tek

In August 2005 I quit my apartment in Århus and moved to Odense. My girlfriend was going to study in that city and I myself had come to a point in my studies where physical attendance at the University wasn’t required but once or twice a month (which doesn’t mean that I didn’t study!).

Inspired by several aquaintances who had done it, we decided to try living in an allotment house.

Another reason for doing it, is not having to pay the deposit and rent for an apartment.

Paying a rent doesn’t leave much money when you’re surviving on students’ loans and different kinds of government funding.

When you live in an allotment, you rent the garden, but you buy the (usualy very cheap) house, which means you’re free to alter it and even demolish and rebuild it. Yay!

Living in your allotment house is not quite the idea and it’s not quite according to the rules. But boy is it cheap!

The Physical Conditions

Living in an allotment house has had a huge impact on our everyday life.

First of all, living “off the grid” (i.e. without electricity) changes a lot of the things that used to be quick’n'easy, mainly vacuum cleaning and using electrical kitchen appliances.

Living Like the 1920’s

Now you mustn’t imagine that our house is a shabby shed in the corner of a cabbage field. Actually, it’s more like a real house, albeit on a small scale.

30 square metres in all, it has double brick walls and stands on a concrete foundation, and it even sports an insulated roof. There’s running tap water (except during the coldest winter months), but no proper sewage.

Heating is provided by a stove in the living room. The bricked chimney runs up the wall in the bedroom and thus providing some heating in there as well.

Cooking is done partly on a gas stove in the kitchen and partly on the firestove in the living room, to save gas and make better use of the firewood.

Lighting after dark is done by candles and oil lamps. End of story. And yes, you can read and study by candlelight.

Electricity - It’s The New Fad!

No electricity you say?. Er, well, in fact we do have a little. Last summer I installed some photoelectric (solar) panels on the roof. Since then, the system has provided enough current for us to charge 2 laptops, 2 mobile phones, as well as listening to the radio and occasionally using it to provide sourround sound for watching a film. Also, I run a nifty little antenna which connects to a radio mast about one mile away, meaning broadband internet without a telephone line. Very useful!

As you can see, some things are run “the modern way”, but the main systems we rely on on a daily basis can run on petrol, firewood or muscle power.

Outdoor Activities

Speaking of muscle power, cutting firewood with an axe is an activity that takes up quite a lot of time. This is not necessarily a bad thing though. When you wake up in the morning to a livingroom temperature of, say, 8°C (c. 46°F), getting outside and cutting firewood for a quarter of an hour really gives you nice warm start on the day!

Collecting vegetables and herbs for dinner is another outdoor activity, as well as fetching drinking water at the tap half a mile away.

Shower and Laundry

One thing I have learned is taking a bath in a bucket.

When living under these rather primitive conditions, you worry less about showering every day. Still, you wouldn’t want other people to think you’re dirty.

Washing yourself becomes an activity that can take 1 hour or more - from you put the large pot on the stove till you’re done bathing.

Doing the laundry becomes tiresome, as it involves riding the bike for a few miles with all the dirty clothes and then paying an obscene amount of money in a worn down laundromat.

I haven’t seriously considered doing the laundry in the house, but it might be a realistic possibility.

Economy

Not paying a rent has seriously improved my personal economy. On the other hand restoring and improving the house has swallowed quite a lot of money.

After about 12 months in the house, we had used as much money on fixing the house, as we would have used on the rent for a decent appartment.

The last five to six months, though, have been very very cheap and comfort can’t be increased much without “getting on the grid”.

Part Two:

In the next part of this post I discuss what this way of life has done to the inhabitants.

Comments:

If you would like to leave a comment, please do so in part two, which you can find here: http://www.henrikkarll.dk/recent-finds/i-live-in-an-allotment-house-part-two.

So far, 75 burials have been excavated, all dating to the 8th and 9th centuries AD, but jewellery and other artefacts found on nearby fields indicate, that the cemetery can turn out to be three or four times larger than that.

Says arhcaeologist Lotte Sparrevohn: ‘As we haven’t found any Viking Age settlements nearby, the cemetery may have been of a regional scope and serving a larger area’.

For the interest of one of my keen readers, i can mention a few interesting finds: One man was found buried together with his dog. Several pieces of fine jewellery amongst the grave goods indicate some wealth and international connections, most notably a bronze fibula originating in the eastern swedish island of Gotland.

In spite of low funds, excavation will continue for another couple of months, as the archaeologists will try to determine to what extent family members would have been interred close to each other.

Here’s a combined map and airphoto of the general area.

And here’s the link (cave: in danish).

Oh, and Martin: Don’t pay attention to the caption at the top of the article saying “Ark√¶ologerne har fundet en vikingegrav, der kan vise sig at v√¶re den st√∏rste p√• Sj√¶lland” - what they mean is the single largest “gravplads”, not the largest grave. Journalism isn’t what it used to be.

Via danish radio, translated, edited and commented by yours truly.

I haven’t figured out what exactly the site is about, or who Rud Kjems is, but it appears to be a rather sober and informative site about archaeoastronomy.

In reality, of course, it is yet another hoax by Alun Salt, cunningly designed to give the impression that archaeoastronomy is a superior blog which simply deserves more readers. Which it is.

Oh darn! I buy into the hype, too!

In this year’s show, Absalon’s Secret, the star is the late bishop Absalon (∗1128 †1201) who being Bishop of Roskilde 1158-91 and Archbishop of Denmark 1177-1201 is known as one of the (if not the) major driving forces to establish Denmark as a modern european and christian state in the late 12th century.

12year-old Absalon’s Secret heroine “Cecilie” and her family.
(Picture borrowed from the official website)

The series has featured an evil female archaeologist and contributed excessively to skewing and misleading of the general public opinion on archaeology in Denmark.

I have so far given the telly series the benefit of doubt and I have not ranted about it. Until now.

I will acknowledge that said television show has actually spurred an interest in medieval history and archaeology amongst younger people. That being said, I must however distance myself sharply from the views on archaeology and archaeologists implicitly and explicitly expressed in the series. I realise that the main antagonist “evil archaeologist” must be sour and evil so as to create dramatic tension. And its great fun for the kids.

Evil Archaeologist — the sign says: “No entrance”.
(Picture borrowed from the official website)

No, what really really pissed me off was the live phone-in show before todays actual show (I managed to grab some stills from the web stream — see hilarious pictures below).

At one point the two young imbecile TV-characters had Archbishop Absalons episcopal staff delivered by a police car — sirens screaming and everything.

Delivery for you! (Live television screengrab).

Having carried the package into the studio they continued to unwrap the staff and (sporting pink housecleaning rubber gloves, no less!) handle it in a very casual way.

Notice the pink rubber gloves! (Live television screengrab).

There is a picture of the very beatifully carved ivory staff at the official National Museum Absalon website (top centre picture)

Was that actually Absalons 800+ years old episcopal staff? Did they actually get to lend on live television and handle it with rubber gloves on christmas eve? And why rubber gloves? I’m at a loss here… Perhaps it was a replica? I couldn’t tell. What so infuriates me is the way they handled it, be it a replica or not - they certainly acted as if it was the real deal. At one point they almost set the staff on fire by accidentally holding it very close to a christmas candle!

Uh-oh! Almost setting the darn thing on fire! (Live television screengrab).

A few moments later the staff broke in two!

*Crack* (Live television screengrab).

“Oops! I think I broke it!” (Live television screengrab).

Words don’t come easy, err… Kids! Don’t try this at home!

Waving goodbye to the nice policepeople… (Live television screengrab).

Luckily they only had it for about 5 minutes. They returned it to the police who apparently transported the thing back to the National Museum. I have had quite enough archaeological action for this Christmas!

Links:

• Danish National Museum
• The official Danish National Museum Absalon website.
• Danish National Television Absalon’s Secret website.
• Danish National Television “Absalon Live” website.
• da.wikipedia on Absalon.

-And a merry archaeological Christmas to all of you!

Aarhus will be the host city for the IX Nordic TAG Conference, which will take place on 10-12 May 2007.

The Nordic Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) is a recurrent Scandinavian conference with the aim of debating central theoretical questions and perspectives within archaeology. The conference is directed toward archaeologists and archaeology students in all branches of the discipline at Scandinavian universities, museums and other institutions concerned with antiquity.

More information is available at the conference website (yes, in english).

Are you writing your Masters Dissertation and do you want to share your experience with others on the web? Would you like to tell people about your daily work and add ‘weblog author’ to your CV? A few lines from your day-to-day work can help others, both dissertation writers-to-be and other colleagues catch a glimpse of the life of a graduate student.

Wow! I want to do that! Yes! Weblog author? You bet! And then it goes on:

We are looking for a couple of graduate students currently working on their dissertation and who will about once a month write half a page about what’s on their minds. Perhaps there’s computer trouble or you’ve been fined by the library. Or you could write about what makes a good dissertation workday for you?

Hey, wait a minute guys! Once a month? As in a blogging interval of roughly 30 days? That sounds suspiciously close to static website to me…

Just email your text, and we’ll collect the entries and put them online

Hey! That is static web content! Let’s party like it’s 1994! Oh and then we haven’t talked about the actual webdesign of the so-called blog.

This is my University? *headdesk*

If you want to contribute or need more information, send an email to: men@hum.au.dk

Well, no thanks, I’ve had just about enough information. I think I’ll just email this to my department secretary and make her upload it to the faculty webserver… er, no! Wait! I’ll just blog it!