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Digging in Wales, Watching Sb Crisis
I’m in north-east Wales for a few days’ work on a Universities of Chester and Bangor dig. We’ve had a rainy day, which meant that we couldn’t work effectively for very long. But I did some metal...
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Wednesday in the Trenches
Professor Nancy Edwards and associates take stock of the western trench at the end of the day’s work. Today offered much better weather, but due to permit trouble very little metal detecting. Instead...
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Teaching and Going Home
Spent 5.5 hours on site in Wales today and 7 hours by car, train and plane to get from there to Skavsta airport. I’ve got another couple of hours by bus and train before I’m home. The trains I rode in...
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Newish Finds from Old Uppsala
[More about archaeology, metaldetecting; arkeologi, metallsökare, Uppsala.] The view from my second investigation area. The great barrows were erected about AD 600. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday...
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Lost On A Fieldwork Gamble
Success and failure in archaeological fieldwork is a graded scale. I wrote about this in autumn 2008: My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I’m not feeling particularly down about...
View ArticleMy Check List for Metal Detecting
Once I went metal-detecting without my GPS. Luckily the site was not far from my home and I found only one object worth collecting, so I could mark the spot with a stick and return after dinner to get...
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Lead Seal and Engine Spec Plate, 20th Century
Today I did four hours of metal-detecting at a site in Vårdinge where a Wendelring bronze torque from about 600 BC has been found. Reiner Knizia’s popular card game Lost Cities has a thinly applied...
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Boggy Test Pit
In the Lake Mälaren area of Sweden, you rarely find any large pieces of Bronze Age metalwork in graves or at settlement sites. When the beautiful larger objects occur – axe heads, spear heads, swords,...
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Three Days Digging in a Cave
Few Swedish caves contain any known archaeology, and those that do mainly feature Mesolithic and Neolithic habitation layers. The Pukberget (“Devil’s Mountain”) cave near Enköping is a rare exception....
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Viking Farmer’s Rest Disturbed by Badgers and Potatoes
Spent the day digging with my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell like so many times before. I like to join them on their sites for a day every now and then (2007, 2008, 2010). The two are...
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Starting Up At Stensö
Stensö castle, trench C, the part along the perimeter wall. Note the ashlar.Drove down to Vikbolandet on Sunday night with my excellent colleague Ethan Aines from Stanford, and we were met at...
View ArticlePrinciples Of Wall Erosion, And Our Pulley
Medieval walls are usually shell walls, where you construct an inner and outer shell of finely fitted masonry while filling the space between them with a jumble of smaller stones and mortar. Usually...
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Found Two Walls And A Strange Disc
After four days of rubble removal in trench A, we found the south wall of Stensö Castle’s northern tower. Note how the wall facing (left) ends, and a pale mass of wall core (lower right) emerges out of...
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Brooch and Ruin Dwellers
With two days of digging and one day of backfilling left at Stensö Castle, trenches A and B have already given a rich harvest of new information. The northern tower was a green ruin mound when we came...
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Ruin On An Islet
Christian Loven’s plan of Landsjö Islet with letters marking on-going fieldwork. Landsjö castle is on a high islet in the lake next to the modern manor house. Nobody ever goes there. The ruins are...
View ArticleGuest Digging At Birka
When I tell people I’m an archaeologist, they often ask ”So have you dug at Birka?”. As of yesterday I can finally proudly reply ”yeah, a bit”. ”Birka” is a Latinate attempt to write Biærkey, ”Birch...
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First Week of 2015 Excavations at Stensö Castle
This year’s first week of fieldwork at Stensö Castle went exceptionally well, even though I drove a camper van belonging to a team member into a ditch. We’re a team of thirteen, four of whom took part...
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Second Week of 2015 Excavations at Stensö Castle
Balancing available labour and a pre-decided excavation agenda against each other is not easy, particularly when you’re doing investigative peek-hole fieldwork on a site whose depth and complexity of...
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First Week Of 2015 Excavations At Landsjö
2014 trenches A-E and rough locations of 2015 trenches F-H.Like Stensö, Landsjö Castle has half of a rare perimeter wall and is known to have been owned by a descendant of Folke Jarl – or rather, by...
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Second Week Of 2015 Excavations At Landsjö
2014 trenches A-E and rough locations of 2015 trenches F-H.I write these lines on the day after we backfilled the last two trenches at Landsjö, packed up our stuff, cleaned the manor house, hugged each...
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