2014 Castle Excavation Reports

Things are coming together with the post-excavation work for last summer’s castle investigations so I’m putting some stuff on-line here.

• I’ve submitted a paper detailing the main results to a proceedings volume for the Castella Maris Baltici symposium in Lodz back in May. There are no illustrations in the file, but you’ll find all you need here on the blog in various entries tagged ”Castles”.
• Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has completed his reports on the bones from the two sites (Landsjö – Stensö).

For the Dear Reader who doesn’t read Swedish, a short summary of Rudolf’s results is in order. As expected, there are no human bones: this is food waste. The material from both sites is dominated by youngish pigs followed by sheep/goat and cattle in roughly equal fragment numbers. Pig parts represented at Landsjö suggest slaughter on site. Chicken was also eaten at both sites. Both sites have fish species that would have been available in the body of water overlooked by the castle. Landsjö’s trench D has large parts of a fox whose femur shows a healed break. It’s from the top layer that probably represents post-Medieval, post-castle slope erosion, and thus doesn’t seem to have anything to do with courtly hunting.

Questions and comments on the documents are most appreciated!

Nine Years Of Blogging

I’ve been blogging for a bit more than nine years now, and today Aard turns eight! Traffic for Oct, Nov, Dec has been ~450 daily readers. Dear Reader, is there anything you’d like me to write about?

In My Earbuds Lately

GOAT: the new groovy weirdness from Gothenburg

Here are some good albums that I’ve been listening to lately.

• Dowling Poole – Bleak Strategies (2014). For all who miss the later Beatles and the Super Furry Animals.
• GOAT – World Music (2012). Eclectic psychedelia with screamy female vocals and bongos!
• GOAT – Commune (2014). Again!
• Mahavishnu Orchestra – The Inner Mounting Flame (1971). Proggy jazz fusion with violin and odd time signatures.
• Nashville Pussy – Say Something Nasty (2002). AC/DC rock with dirty funny lyrics.
• Soundtrack of our Lives – Behind the Music (2001). Classic rock updated.
• Starlight Mints – Change Remains (2009). Intricate queasy-sounding psychedelic studio pop.
• Voodoo Trombone Quartet — The Voodoo Trombone Quartet (2005). Brassy loungy ska funk.
• Voodoo Trombone Quartet — The Voodoo Trombone Quartet… Again (2009). Again!

Best Reads of 2014

Jon Peterson: Playing at the World. Highly recommended to gamers!

Here are my best reads in English during 2014. My total was 49 books and 14 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!

• In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Arika Okrent 2009.
• Redshirts. John Scalzi 2012. Space opera from the viewpoint of the nameless extras.
• The Bone People. Keri Hulme 1984. This novel has great strengths in the language and characterisation. And a major weakness in the almost nonexistent plotting. Very little happens in these 450 pages, and what happens is not well motivated either from the characters’ point of view or from a technical narrative perspective.
• Little Brother. Cory Doctorow 2008. A rousing, somewhat preachy story of young people fighting for civil liberties. Similar enough to the author’s Pirate Cinema that you needn’t read both. If you’re more into privacy issues, read LB. If intellectual property issues, read PC. Both make very good gifts for bright teenagers.
• The Crow Road. Iain Banks 1992. This novel is full of cunningly constructed motif parallelism involving glass and eyes. Reader, stay alert!
• The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong. William Somerset Maugham 1930.
• Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games. Jon Peterson 2012. As a late-80s teen, my main interests were role-playing games, choose-your-own-adventure books, boardgames, fantasy miniatures, text adventure software and fantasy fiction. I still have a love of all these things, and of history, and so it would be difficult to envision a subject matter for a book that would be better-tailored to my taste. And the execution — the scholarship in this book and the writing and the illustrations — are absolutely top-notch. Amazing stuff!
• Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. Olivia Judson 2002. An evolutionary view of how sex and procreation works in various species of animal.
• Johannes Cabal: the Necromancer. Jonathan L. Howard 2009. Humorous and otherworldly about a humourless wizard out to reclaim his sold soul from the Devil.
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond 2005. World-spanning investigation into why and how some societies collapse and others don’t.

Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?

Here’s my list for 2013.

December Pieces Of My Mind #1

There will be a spring after winter! They’re planting bulbs down at the Saltsjöbaden Centrum mall.

• Anglophones, why do you say “might” instead of “may” when expressing uncertainty? If you’re certain, you say “I’ll eat some bread”. If uncertain, you sometimes just say “I may eat some bread”. But usually you form a needless subjunctive, “I might eat some bread”. Sometimes you even use this mode to express certainty! I sometimes wonder if you aim at grammatical optimisation at all. Do you even know that ”may” and ”might” are the same verb?
• Some people are angry because they have no voice in public discourse. I sort of have. Instead I’m annoyed because public discourse mainly deals with topics I don’t give a shit about.
• I saw chewing tobacco marketed with the selling point that some of its constituent leaves are grown in Sweden. AFAIK that just lowers the quality of the product.
• Listening to a radio programme about Kafka’s The Trial I am reminded that personalitywise, I am almost completely incapable of appreciating or identifying with Kafka’s neurotic worldview.
• Somebody asked me if I wanted to bet on the outcome of the repeated parliamentary election. My first thought was “What? That’s an empirical issue. You don’t bet on it. You wait and observe it.” I never did see the point of betting or gambling.
• Who’s making a mashup of “Wrecking Ball”, “Balls to the Wall” and “The Wall”?
• With the current Swedish political situation in mind, I am particularly proud of my dad today. His Polish cleaning lady of many years’ standing was hassled by the building society about the constantly leaky/clogged drain in her apartment. My dad waded in with the big guns, including professional builder’s expertise, and got the whole thing sorted for her.
• Sweden’s biggest group of contract archaeology units is moving from the umbrella of the National Heritage Board to that of the Swedish History Museum. Because the Board is responsible for quality control in Swedish contract archaeology. And so shouldn’t also be the main undertaker of such work.
• Can we have some forward-looking scifi again please? I don’t want to hear another word about Star Wars.
• I left the sour dough out for too long. The current batch of bread smells like garbage can. Tastes fine though when toasted.
• A book reminded me of the exquisite childhood feeling when we’d been at the summer house for weeks and came home again, everything familiar yet strange.
• My wife just got out of bed over at the other end of the house. I know because she liked one of my Facebook posts.
• After being asked, and after thinking the issue over for about 0.25 secs, Andreas Viberg and I have decided not to give any interviews or image rights regarding our Viking Period research to right-wing extremist publications.
• As the husband of a woman who enjoys good male looks, I’ve come to realise lately that the orthodontist who fixed my protruding front teeth during adolescence had a huge influence upon my adult life.
• Suddenly reminded of Asterix’s Gothic buddies Rhet-Oric and Meth-Odic.
• You say “artefact biography”. I say “anecdotal ad-hoc explanation”.
• The 2nd Vice Chair of the Swedish Parliament said the other day that Jews and Saami aren’t real Swedes. He’s previously come down hard against the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. He needs to go.

The Aska Barrow Is A Huge Building Platform

It’s been a busy couple of days with a lot of publicity. Monday morning a paper I’ve co-authored with my friend, geophysics specialist Andreas Viberg, was published in the on-line version of Archaeological Prospection. For reasons of scientific priority (which I myself like to establish by spilling everything I do onto the blog immediately) I’ve been sitting on this since April of 2013, so it feels real good to finally blog about it. Here’s a brief summary.

• There’s a huge weird barrow at Aska in Hagebyhöga near Vadstena in Östergötland. It’s oval and flat instead of round and domed.
• My old teacher Anders Carlsson has suggested that this may not be a grave mound but a Late Iron Age building platform like the ones in Old Uppsala.
• Andreas and I drove down with a ground-penetrating radar device and surveyed the thing. We found the floor plan of an almost 50-metres-long mead-hall, very similar to one of the royal halls excavated at Old Uppsala.
• This lends added support to the interpretation I advanced in my 2011 book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats: Aska in Hagebyhöga was the residence of a Viking Period petty-royal dynasty in Östergötland that has left no trace in the written record.

Anyone who wants the (sadly pay-walled) paper, please email me!

November Pieces Of My Mind #2

• This chocolate praline contains something that looks and smells like shampoo. Apparently it’s flavoured with elderflower extract.
• Jrette prints out song lyrics and fixes them to the outside of the shower cubicle as aids to singing in the shower.
• I’m kind of OK with most subcultural dress codes. But I really gotta say: young men wearing oversize baseball caps or stocking caps indoors look like they’re in Kindergarten.
• I’m confused by the feminism that on one hand condemns the wearing of Hawaii shirts with beach babe cartoons, on the other hand organises proud plus-size burlesque shows. Would the shirt have been OK on a female Rosetta project member? What am I missing?
• Bought Jrette two warm cotton nightgowns from Polarn & Pyret.
• Manuscript reviewer: “Rundkvist criticises knowledge relativism, but still he proposes several weakly founded interpretations. He’s inconsistent!” Um… Do you even know what knowledge relativism means?
• Drives me nuts when students pad their exam answers with tangentially relevant info that I have to wade through to see if they’ve actually responded to the fucking questions.
• It’s snowing but the flakes melt before they reach the ground. I hate November here.
• The Linnaeus University has two campuses located an hour and a half apart. One thing its web site is not well equipped to tell you is on which of these sites a given employee’s desk and mailbox are.
• So weird reconnecting on Fb with an old school buddy after 25-30 years. I remember him as an adolescent. I have no idea what he looked like in his 20s and 30s. He now has a grey beard.
• The Romanian Gypsies who have taken to begging in Swedish towns in recent years have characteristic looks and style of dress. Sometimes I come across them just walking about town or riding the subway, and I think to myself, “There’s a beggar who isn’t at work right now”.
• Movie: Interstellar. Confused space drama with bad science, severe pacing issues and sappy emotionalism. Grade: Fail.
• The expression “a member in good standing” is almost too easy to make a joke of.
• Halfway through the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Dance of Maya” they break into a weird off-kilter blues jam that seems to be in 5/4 time. Love it!
• People sell a lot of vegetables around Tunisia. I saw a man holding a gourd today. I really wanted to throw stones at him until he dropped the gourd and ran away. Then I could have shouted after him, “Look at you man! You’re a disgrace! It’s barely lunchtime and already you’re stoned right out of your fucking gourd!”

Karate In A Hijab

Dania Mahmudi from Fisksätra has practised karate for years

Here’s an interesting case regarding Muslim women’s veils. They’re instruments or symbols of patriarchal repression, right? Well, check this out.

Dania Mahmudi is from my area, Fisksätra. She’s 14 years old and wears a veil. Mahmudi has been practising karate for years. Two weeks ago she went with her club to the district championship, eager to compete. But the umpire disqualified her – for her veil’s sake. It covered her throat, and karate competition rules state that the umpire needs to be able to watch for damage to each contestant’s throat. OK, said her coach after a heated argument, so she can’t do the hand-to-hand part of the competition. Surely the solo performance element, kata, will be no problem given this reasoning. No, she was disqualified there too.

Things are changing in the karate world. You couldn’t compete wearing any kind of veil until last year. When it became allowed, Iran’s women’s team immediately won a world cup medal at kata – wearing regulation veils.

My guess is that this problem will be solved a few years from now. But look at it from a repression perspective. I have no idea whether Mahmudi’s parents are forcing her to wear the veil. But I do know that they’re fine with their daughter practising karate for years at a dojo half an hour’s bus ride from home. Competition rules are apparently a bigger problem for her athletic career. Luckily, Mahmudi isn’t about to give up. She’s aiming for the world cup.

I wrote about the veil in 2006, comparing it to the bikini top, which is pretty much the same deal only in Western culture. This is what cultural relativism means, not the condoning of atrocities.

Exceptional Migration Period Excavation Crowdfunding Now

Pompeii situations, where daily life at a settlement has suddenly and catastrophically been terminated and the site has then been abandoned, are extremely rare and extremely informative. As has recently been discovered, the Sandby fortified settlement on the island of Öland offers a Pompeii situation from about AD 500. The settlement has been attacked, its inhabitants killed or abducted, and then the aggressors just closed the doors and never came back, leaving their victims and all their considerable wealth still inside the houses.

So far the Kalmar County Museum’s excavations at Sandby have been small and poorly funded. But now they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign for continued fieldwork! Their goal is 400,000 kronor ($53,700, €43,200), and with a month to go they already have pledges for 79,000 kronor.

Dear Reader, I’ve backed the project. Please check out their page and consider doing so you too! I know these people, and I know they get things done.

Side note: the dome-shaped gilded silver mount above features an unusually early example of a motif I’ve written briefly about 20 years ago. It’s the “warrior as beast”: a helmeted human face whose lower face extends into the long toothy snout of a wolf. It’s common on fine shield-handle terminals of the period 540-700.