Birka Grave 959 Reinterpreted

Here’s Hjalmar Stolpe’s plan of grave 959 at Birka, dating from the AD mid-900s. It has repeatedly been interpreted as the grave of a decapitated woman buried with rich jewellery and a pig jaw across her chest, which would make it unique. Slaves, mostly men, were decapitated and buried as furnishings in rich peoples’ graves. This grave makes no sense.

I think I’ve untied this knot. In an upcoming paper, I argue that what we see here is a rare combination of two different customs involving skulls that we see at numerous sites.

a) This woman was buried with someone else’s cranium in the crook of her arm as a grave gift.

b) At the time of burial her head was still on, as shown by the in-situ cervical vertebrae. After decomposition, someone then dug into the grave and removed her skull — note the displaced right-hand clavicle and the pig jaw.

Sadly the human remains from Birka 959 can’t be identified in the Swedish History Museum today. This reflects the fact that many bone containers from the 19th century excavations at Birka lost their provenance or became mis-provenanced after the fieldwork, mainly in the early 1900s.

March Pieces Of My Mind #1

The Nordic Museum’s big new exhibition People of the North is rich and beautiful, but the reading tablets at each big display case can’t deliver info to everyone and there are no labels.
  • You know 1:72 plastic airplane models? I was really pleased as a kid when I figured out that at this scale a tallish man would be one inch.
  • Fortinbras = strong-in-arm.
  • Wonderfully bizarre Dutch-Swedish pirate: Henrik Gerdtsson Siöhielm (obiit 1668). Dutch naval officer becomes Swedish admiral, then privateer with royal funding, goes to the Indian Ocean for this purpose in 1663–65, fails to take any prizes, loses one ship, is wind-swept to Goa, mortgages his other ship there, goes home to the Netherlands and never returns to Sweden to explain himself. Fun detail: Siöhielm fought in the Battle of the Sound in 1658 alongside my old buddy Nils Mattsson Kiöping, the South Asian travel writer!
  • The opening tune on my upcoming power metal album has wildly baroque, completely unironic lyrics about passionate airborne sexual intercourse between a dragon and a Zeppelin.
  • Why are Mexican people so shapely? Is it because they have superior Aztec?
  • German man seeks out covid vaccination and receives 217 shots of eight vaccines — “for personal reasons”. Then agrees to be studied, and is found to have no apparent damage to his immune system.
  • Working with the catalogue in Sellevold et al:s 1984 book Iron Age Man In Denmark, I am surprised to find a lot of information about whether the crania are brachiocephalic, mesocephalic or dolicocephalic in their proportions. On p. 184 the authors explain why they do this. It’s because the measurements and indices in an influential 1928 study “are still routinely used by most anthropologists”. Oh, right then?
  • I wonder how marine life reacted to the biochemical environment in the wreck of a sunken East Indiaman. Huge concentrations of caffeine from the tea and zinc from the calamine ingots.
  • We’re not living through a period of gradual climate change. That’s just an artefact of our fast time perception. On the proper geological time scale we are shrapnel being thrown around by an explosion. We’re mayflies with no conception of autumn.
  • As 80s kids we knew exactly how nuclear war and global warming would work out, but we were only worried about nuclear war actually happening.
  • I didn’t see much violence growing up. The ugliest fights I saw were between the twin brothers who lived down the next street when we were like ten.
  • Sudden insight: the edge of the woods is very rarely natural. It’s a feature of the cultural landscape, often identical to property boundaries, roads and the edge of fields.
  • Movie: Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982). Affectionate parody of film noir that interleaves clips from period films with new b/w footage, creating new dialogues and interactions. Grade: good!

Dever & Chalk’s Lone Wolf After 35 Years

I really loved Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf game books as a 12-13-y-o. I strongly preferred them to Fighting Fantasy, thanks in large part to there being a fleshed out world from the start, and to the story being so epic, not just one dungeon after another. And I love Gary Chalk’s illusions! (Though Russ Nicholson certainly wasn’t bad either.)

Yesterday I played the first LW book, Flight From The Dark (1984), for the first time in maybe 35 years. It went quickly and I did well. Today, of course, I see that the fantasy world of Magnamund is extremely cliché-laden, but the adventures were never intended for people of upper middle age who have read far too much fantasy. Something that stands out as strange, though, is how non-adventurous this solo adventure is if you play sensibly and strive to win.

The task you take on in the book is to travel a bit more than 100 km through a war-torn countryside southeast from the Kai monastery (a kind of military academy) to Sommerlund’s capital, Holmgard. There you have to inform the king that the Kai Order has sadly been wiped out by an air raid. You get many chances to go in the wrong direction. You get many chances to seek out danger. But why would a scared, traumatised teenager with something he views as an important task do that? You always have good opportunities to go in the right direction and avoid the dangers you encounter. And if you do that, you win in no time.

I only ended up fighting twice. Once when I stumbled into the fringe of a pitched battle and fought a large lizard man who threatened to kill the heir to the throne, Prince Pelathar (§97). The second was when I took a shortcut through one of Holmgard’s cemeteries towards the end of my journey and fell through the roof of an underground vault. Down there was a magical statue of a winged snake that for some reason wanted to fight. Perhaps it was placed there as protection against grave robbers.

The end of the book is a bit silly. “Oh no,” says the king, “has the entire Kai Order been wiped out? The organisation that trained all the officers in my army? Is this boy the only one left alive? Now, goshdarnit, we need the magical Sommerswerd, which is in long-term storage in the neighbouring kingdom! Who shall I send there? Well, why not this kid?! He has undeniably managed to travel more than a hundred klicks in a given direction and fled from a lot of dangers! Let’s send him!”

February Pieces Of My Mind #3

Villa Nygren from 1892 was the first of the large summer houses built in Saltsjöbaden where I grew up.
  • Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf game books: wonder if there’s an Easter-egg island in one of them. A 20-paragraph story that isn’t linked to the main adventure.
  • Movie: The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). Scientific expedition to the Amazon encounters amphibian humanoid. This is a high-end techno thriller with lots of great scuba diving scenes and a gorgeous monster. Its decade’s Alien or Jurassic Park, not a cheap creature feature. Grade: good!
  • We all have our specialities in archaeology. I don’t have any experience of directing a multi-hectare contract excavation and bringing it to the final report (arguably the most important professional task in all of archaeology). And most colleagues who do have that experience haven’t spent years looking at finds, reading about them and writing about them. So in excavation reports you will quite often find references for the classification and dating of finds, not to the literature, but to “pers. comm. Old Guy/Gal”. It is with mixed feelings that I note that I have become that Old Guy.
  • Swedish academia practices protected in-house staff recruitment to an unusual degree. A particularly overt and bizarre method, seen from an international perspective, is that in the rare case where a Swedish humanities PhD gets a post-doc at all, it’s often at their home department.
  • A quarter century ago, The Soundtrack of Our Lives were a young band that sounded like an extremely good reunion of a 60s band. Now they are on a reunion tour sounding like an even better reunion of a 60s band. The original 60s bands, meanwhile, are mostly too old to tour anymore.
  • In the era of alternative facts and news that is sometimes fake, often just proclaimed fake if unpalatable, we get a pro-Ukrainian propaganda exhibition at the Army Museum in Stockholm as ordered by politicians, and co-funded by the arms industry. A lot of inconvenient facts are omitted, such as Sweden’s off-and-on alliance with Russia. And I’m reminded of the post-modernist era in 1980s and 90s academia. This is when Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley and Bjørnar Olsen among others wrote that it’s impossibe to reach any objective knowledge in archaeology, so we should all just create narratives that further our lovely Leftist political goals.
  • The next Disney movie is going to be about a brave Chinese Communist girl who fights the Japanese forces in the 1930s, with lots of cabaret-style musical numbers. The title is MULAN ROUGE.
  • Saw the Moulin Rouge musical at the China Theatre in Stockholm. It’s an amazing production. Extremely lavish. Such an enormous amount of work and talent and stage resources put in by such a huge group of people. And all of this in service of a story that was completely cliché and hackneyed already at the time when the musical is set. You need to be ten years old or less to follow it with interest. I was simply embarrassed.
  • I knew about cardamom in Turkish coffee and I knew about ginger in tea. But my scifi fandom buddy Mohammed explained to me that the correct Somali flavourings are the other way around.
  • Movie: Meet the Feebles (1989). Violent, dirty, profane and chaotic parody of the Muppet Show. Grade: OK.
  • Book: Erin Morgenstern 2011, The Night Circus. Much of this long novel consists of descriptions of magical art installations. It is not eventful or suspenseful. I found the going quite slow, and felt some of the writing bordered dangerously on the twee. Perhaps cynical middle-aged men are not the target audience. But despite a few dashes of romance writing, it is not a romance novel.
  • There are complex reasons for why recent immigrants don’t vote to the same extent as more established citizens. But a common reason they give when asked is that politicians don’t seem to pay much attention to their housing areas. This makes me want to shake them by the shoulders. Dude, you may not be happy with what’s on the menu, but by not voting you are handing power to politicans who actively fucking hate you. Also, my friend, there is one type of people that politicians really do ignore. You know who they are? People who don’t fucking vote.
  • Google Docs keeps messing up the footnotes when I download in .DOCX format. .ODT works correctly though.
  • It’s a cold, misty, overcast morning. But the birds are calling and chattering like they didn’t just a week ago. Spring is coming!
  • Yes, Facebook. I am interested in scifi. No, Facebook, I am not interested in Trek or SW.
  • Mastodon is largely populated by Twitter refugees. What kind of people have made the leap? A recent poll of 5082 users revealed that a whopping 46% run Linux.
  • Snowdrops sighted!
  • Movie: Dune II. The son of the betrayed duke unites the desert tribes, ascends to Messiah status and takes control of production of the space pilot drug that holds the galactic empire together. Classic scifi novel made into another classic scifi film! Grade: good!

February Pieces Of My Mind #2

Facade mosaic, Igelboda school, 1950s, by Alf ten Siethoff (1919-2015)
  • The magpies are renovating their big nest outside our kitchen window! Spring!!!
  • Dear Americans — you have no idea how much it pains me that “data” and “beta” rhyme in your various dialects.
  • Drives me nuts when historians omit any structuring bird’s eye view of the period and issue they are surveying in a big book, and just spout myopic detail from start to finish. Start by laying down just two pivotal dates during your period, and give us three clear maps of the initial state, the mid-state and the final state. Then you can get into specifics.
  • Sure capitalism has created enormous wealth and won the Cold War. But crucially, it has caused severe environmental pollution. Meanwhile on the other hand in Russia and China, planned economy created shortages and famine, while also causing severe environmental pollution!
  • The Grognard Files just taught me that TTRPG is pronounced TITTER PIG.
  • Told an elderly lady I know that when I turn 85 I plan to keep a dog and try acid. Replied she, “Can’t stand dogs. I’ll just have the acid, then.”
  • Movie: Police (1985). Violent mid-30s vice cop in Paris tries to break up a heroin gang while doinking teenage prostitutes and gangster molls. My French hearing comprehension wasn’t up to this, the Spanish subtitles only helped a little, and I wasn’t interested in all the slobbering on teenagers. Grade: Don’t Know.
  • Imagine the villagers of North Frisia who survived the Black Death in 1350-52. Ten years later a millennial storm surge obliterated 42 church parishes, turning them into featureless tidal flats. Life’s a bitch, huh?
  • Robert Barbour Johnson’s 1939 story “Far Below”, unlike almost all Lovecraft fan fiction from during and after the man’s lifetime, is actually really good! More dramatic monologue than narrative, it is a neatly restrained response to “Pickman’s Model”.
  • Study archaeology and Medieval history! Become completely unable to believe in D&D dungeons AND in adventuring parties!
  • In “Norwegian Wood”, John Lennon offers a really valuable life lesson to young men. Boys, if you’re invited home to a young woman after a night out, and she ends up telling you she doesn’t want to have sex, here’s what a gentleman does. He does not beg or nag, he certainly doesn’t try to coerce the poor girl. He just goes off quietly and good-naturedly to sleep in another room. Then the following day he burns her house down.
  • We reuse plastic food containers. Saves us money, saves on plastics in the environment. It’s great. I just filled up a jar with cold soup and leaned a little on the lid to get it tight, and it turns out this particular plastic jar had gone through the dishwasher a few times and had become brittle. Fucking jar collapsed and the soup EXPLODED all over me and the kitchen. But generally speaking, reusing plastic food containers is great.
  • Excited because I’ve realised a key distinction in my Viking Period skull manipulation study. Sometimes (rarely) they deposit skulls with mandibles, that is, freshly severed heads. Mostly they deposit skulls without mandibles. The latter cases must mark the end point of an exposure & display period when the flesh is removed by scavengers and the mandible is lost.
  • Funny thing about language history. We tend to think our home language is a homogenous unit, with just a few recent slang additions. When in fact some words and pieces of grammar are over 5000 years old, others were made up 150 years ago.
  • It’s difficult to follow how the fascists think about Jewish people. On the one hand, they’re international bankers who control everything behind the scenes. On the other hand they’re also Commie revolutionary intellectuals who want to overthrow the international bankers who control everything behind the scenes.
  • Man, 70s and 80s fantasy book cover art is just panic-inducingly awful. Woodenly posed, plastic-looking, air-brushed abominations.
  • Movie: Restore Point (2023). Big-budget slick near-future techno thriller about a backup and resurrect technology with several contrived plot-serving limitations. Grade: OK.
  • Last Night On Earth is 17 years old this year. Such a classic! All the zombie movie clichés in one lavishly designed boardgame!
  • Movie: Dawson City – Frozen Time (2016). Documentary about a gold boom town in the Yukon and the unique cache of silent film on nitrate stock found in a permafrozen landfill there in 1978. No narration and almost no interviews, mainly just sound design and a really annoying dirge-like funereal score. Grade: OK.
  • It’s really astonishing to me how bad the streaming movie offerings are compared to streaming music. I have these 50 movies on my watch list, only a few of them are available, and they’re strewn across a bunch of film services that all want me to subscribe. Just give me pay per view for $5 and comprehensive coverage! It’s 2024. I never ever sit down in front of the TV and watch opportunistically whatever “is on”. We have a broadband connection. Movies are digital. Everything could “be on”.
  • Excellent news! Sweden’s premier research journal for archaeology and Medieval art, Fornvännen, has just been liberated from its half-year wait period for OpenAccess publication online! Well done, Royal Academy of Letters!
  • Wonder if the song title “Slice Me Nice” started as a mistranslation of Schneide mich fein.
  • Count Jacob de la Gardie’s 1642 palace “Nonesuch / Makalös” stood on what is now Carolus XII’s Square across the water from Stockholm’s Royal Castle. On the property was also a two-story kitchen-bakery, a stable, a wagon house with a smithy, a sheep house, a chicken coop and a kitchen garden. Early Modern town life even for the top aristocracy was quite rural.

February Pieces Of My Mind #1

Sigtuna’s new manhole covers depicts local coinage from the AD 990s onwards.
  • Movie: Dream Scenario (2023). Dull ineffectual college professor begins turning up in people’s dreams, briefly becomes a celebrity, then his dream-persona starts torturing and killing people in their dreams and he becomes an outcast. Finally the movie goes surrealist and we no longer know what’s real in it. Grade: OK.
  • “We need funding for staff, not the legal means to get restraining orders against people who misbehave in public libraries”, said the Swedish Library Org when the new law was discussed. The outcome for the first full calendar year that the law has been on the books? Seven restraining orders in a country with 1072 municipal libraries.
  • Sweden is the No. 1 country for affordability, safety and overall quality of life.
  • Chamonix was Campus Munitus in Medieval Latin, “the fortified plain”.
  • It’s a lot of fun but occasionally confusing to be able to study whatever I can get into a good journal. The past few days I’ve been putting the finishing touches to a paper about the Bronze Age while revising one about the Early Modern Period for acceptance after peer review, while also proofreading an accepted paper about the end of the Middle Ages.
  • I’m 51 and my youngest child is 20, so obviously I don’t know what music kids like these days. But I listen to a lot of music, I learn about new bands all the time, and I consider myself a music nerd. Still, I feel something strange has happened after the pandemic. In late 2019 the gig posters were still a mix of oldies acts, acts I knew about and new acts I didn’t know about. Now it’s all unfamiliar acts. I feel like I’m on a movie set when I walk past ten gig posters for what are obviously just fictional acts that the props department made up.
  • Commenting on Krazy Kat in a 1926 essay, H.P. Lovecraft called the comics character “malformed decorative trumpery”.
  • H.P. Lovecraft was not a huge fan of free verse. “The second or wholly erratic school of free poets is that represented by Amy Lowell at her worst; a motley horde of hysterical and half-witted rhapsodists whose basic principle is the recording of their momentary moods and psychopathic phenomena in whatever amorphous and meaningless phrases may come to their tongues or pens at the moment of inspirational (or epileptic) seizure.” (“The Vers Libre Epidemic”, 1917)
  • Movie: Ester Blenda (2016). Documentary about the restlessly energetic journalist, writer and globetrotter Ester Blenda Nordström (1891-1948), a local Nacka girl who finally found peace in the old cemetery near where I grew up. Grade: good!
  • Spanish aceite means “oil” but looks confusingly like it might be cognate with “acid”. Spanish was spoken for a thousand years before anyone knew about fatty acids. Turns out it’s an Arabic word, azzayt, and has nothing to do with Latin acidus.
  • The Danish 1960s word for garage rock was pigtrådsmusik, “barbed wire music”. This is probably why black metal and death metal were not developed in Denmark. The Danes had already run out of cognitive mapping space for extreme music around 1965.
  • Reading news about phone fraudsters preying on old people. Reminded of this one time when I needed to find out something about land ownership or tenant farming for some archaeological fieldwork. Called a landowner who turned out to be old and confused, and her husband was shouting at her in the background to hang up because I was clearly a phone fraudster.
  • I prefer to wobble and dangle as a lifestyle choice. “The word bamboleo means ‘wobble’, ‘sway’ or ‘dangle’ in Spanish. The song’s refrain, ‘bamboleo, bambolea, porque mi vida yo la prefier* vivir así’, translates to: ‘Swaying, swaying, because I prefer to live my life this way.'”
  • The new law about fashion style as probable cause to allow the Swedish police to frisk people who are not material suspects is of course a fascist disgrace. But it is interesting in its potential to change fashion. Will the crime gangs start to dress like the professional middle class? Like the financial upper class? Like… me?
  • Through its extremely long etymological history, dwarf referred to a dangerous underground spirit long before it came to denote a short person. It is not a polite way of referring to short people today, but I don’t think this is because anyone remembers what it used to mean.
  • Found what looks like a blooper in Erin Morgenstern’s novel The Night Circus. We’re in Dresden in 1891. And this German man is drinking bourbon.
  • Happy Chinese New Year, everyone! We enter a year of the Wooden Dragon.
  • There’s no free will and we all just do exactly what nature and nurture decides for us. In my case they have decided that I have to feel extreme exasperation every time I think of my buddy’s relative and her partner. This man can’t keep a job and can’t stay in education, so she mostly supports him on a meagre salary. But he has a lot of visions about careers he’d like to try, so she saves up to send him on expensive training courses. He always flakes out of them right after the no-refund date. It’s a fault of mine that I can’t feel very charitably for these people. That’s sadly just what nature and nurture made me.
  • My gaming buddy has taken on a challenging job. She’s translating two of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories — into Easy Reader Swedish for children. The horror…
  • 2019: book reviewer says in a journal that there was no reason for me to write my new book in English, since it’s just a regional study, of regional Swedish interest. 2023: same dude cites the same book in an international English-language paper, for my regional survey of his own preferred source material. Winning, I guess.

Remembering Honey is Cool

Listened to Fredrik Strage’s interview with Karin Dreijer, was reminded that I used to like their 1990s band, Honey is Cool. They’ve later had global success with The Knife and Fever Ray. I wasn’t really sure when I had been into HiC or why I lost track of them, so I checked my diaries.

I first heard the band when they opened for Mercury Rev at Münchenbryggeriet on 2 February 1999. M Rev were touring with their album Deserter’s Songs. I enjoyed the opening band: “excellent rock in the tradition of The Pixies and The Sugarcubes, fun!” This was indirectly a momentous night, because there I made friends with a certain Anna who would introduce me to my future wife.

I heard TiC again on 23 May of the same year at Fritz’s Corner, in an underground squash gym, where they played with Åsa Cederqvist’s band Revlon 9, apparently also really enjoyable. Two weeks later I met this very interesting Chinese journalist at a party thrown by my acquaintance from February.

Though Honey is Cool released two discs in 1999 and one in 2000, they disbanded officially in July 2000. The first The Knife album appeared the following year and just passed me by.

January Pieces Of My Mind #3

I like the unostentatious modernism of how my neighbours’ 1972 houses form a visual rhythm.
  • Norway’s Minister for Higher Education resigns after her MA thesis has been found to contain copy-and-paste plagiarism. It’s the same thing as the countless German politicians who have been caught with diploma-mill PhDs or plagiarised dissertations. To people with actual honest PhDs, it shows an abject weakness in someone when they have to resort to this behaviour to pass the humble MA degree. But maybe there is something in solid academic skill that makes a person less likely to want to become a government minister. And conversely.
  • Facebook’s memories feature demonstrates to me how settled my lifestyle is. Same activities, largely the same friends. So many happy years that blur together!
  • I just sold a broken Star Wars toy from 1978 for $72.
  • Movie: Tideland (2005). Little girl with unhinged imagination is left alone in a decrepit prairie farmhouse with only her dead dad and the insane taxidermist neighbours for company. This is Gilliam making an effort to be trippier, more grotesque, grimier and weirder than Gilliam. Grade: Good!
  • So funny how “liberal” means “Commie” in US discourse, “Ayn Rand” in UK discourse.
  • Sometimes I have this irrational fear that I will lose the ability to finish projects efficiently. Because I don’t know where that ability came from or how I could get it back if it went away. Then I finish some more projects efficiently and forget that I worried.
  • Work with me here. What is the real reason that the police closed down an early-morning Gothenburg fish-catch auction, when the reason given was a clearly nonsensical bomb threat?
  • The French Crypto-Fascists are distancing themselves from the German ones after these started to push forced deportation. Interesting times!
  • We knew on 80s BBS modem forums that online flame wars were pointless. We could not foresee that public access to online media would one day turn mainstream politics into a flame war.
  • Facebook has decided that since I took an interest in the sauna club boardgame, I should also receive ads for gay-men-only hotels in the Mediterranean. 👍
  • German-speaking 50ish friends! I named a hotel owner in our fantasy Venice game Madam Bartolotti! Who remembers where this name is from?
  • Writing tip for anyone regardless of age who wants to come across as being 85: put quotation marks around expressions that have not been considered slang since 1985. Try it, it “totally” works!
  • Càc is teaspoon in French. Cacophonie is music played on teaspoons.
  • It shouldn’t be possible to become an alumnus while still believing that it’s correct to say “an alumni”.
  • Many of the questions that archaeology has developed strong answers to relate to pottery. It’s super common, it has lots of informative technical traits and design characteristics, and it preserves really well. But until just a moment ago, I didn’t know what the correct way to deal with broken pottery is in my own society. Gothenburg municipality explains: “Some of our household waste can neither be recycled nor can energy be extracted from it. Examples of this type of material are porcelain, ceramics and mirror glass. If you have a broken coffee cup or a small flower pot, these can be thrown in the normal garbage bag. But you should leave larger quantities and bulky items at a recycling center in the container for ‘non-combustible’.”
  • Did you know that the unwieldy 15-megabyte PDF file you receive of your article can usually be compressed by more than half without image degradation? Most book and journal editors clearly do not know this.
  • Holy shit, Poul Hounsvad’s recent BA thesis on crested Vendel helmets across Northern Europe is a 125-page professional-quality monograph! I published mine as a seven-page journal paper. Remember this young fellow’s name, Scandy archaeology folks. H O U N S V A D. I have a feeling it will be showing up a lot.