The values in the term "Stone Age"

A dolmen from the Stone Age on Tjörn, Sweden

I have written two entries about the popular image of the Stone Age before on this blog, but based on a discussion in the chat of the ethnology class I am taking this semester earlier today I felt a need to write another one.

The popular image of the time period known as the Stone Age was created through colonial interactions with non-Western cultures in the Americas, Africa and Oceania. Like I wrote in the first Savage Stone Age post, this means that the popular image of this time period more than any others tends to bring out Western ethnocentric and evolutionistic contemporary biases both of the past and the present based in an imperialistic worldview. Indigenous groups were seen as the last remains of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, making the distant present become the distant past. This means that there are more to the term "Stone Age" than just being descriptive of a time period. It comes with a set of values and is often used both degradingly and evolutionistic.

Stone Age fishing-hook,
Skåne, Sweden

The popular picture of today has not really changed so much either. We still think about a less complex society populated by uncivilised beasts that could not speak, lived in caves and hit each other over the head a lot. And of course their lives was different from ours as I talked about in my second Savage Stone Age post. Their society was complex just like ours today are. However, because there are so very little material left from the time period and most of what we do have are artefacts made out of stone. We know next to nothing about their family constellations, their sexuality or their other relations and it is not so easy to use contemporary societies for comparisons and analogies. There is really no reason to think that the same livelihood means that anything else is the same.

Funnelbeaker pot

Comparisons and analogies between a society in the distant past and in the present degrade the latter society because they deny them a past just as adventurous and complex as our own. They also degrade the contemporary societies by implying that they are static and cannot change themselves but need a "more evolved" culture (like the Western one!) to help them. It acts hierarchically, putting the Western society higher than non-industrialised ones. And last but not least, it also puts the industrialised Western society as the norm for what a real society looks like and strive for.

Battle axe

This does not mean that you cannot use the present for analogies and comparisons however. In fact you can certainly find similarities between societies of today and societies in the past. We are, after all the same spieces and basic needs like food, sleep, love etc. is still ever present in our lives. However, we need to be aware of how we are doing it, because we are stuck with a racist evolutionistic and imperialistic past that can seriously hurt non-Western societies even though it is not intended.




All photos are from Wikimedia Commons.

Returning the pens

We have had some pretty intensive political turbulence in the last couple of days over here in Sweden. I am not even going to try to explain it all to you because I seriously wonder if I have understood it all myself. .

I want to concentrate on a certain non-political aspect of the whole ordeal in this blog entry though. All the ministers that had to leave have on social media posted photos of them returning pens. To the right you can see the former Interior minister Anders Ygeman's photo of this. I chose this one because it was the first one I saw and beause it provided me with important information to research the origins of this peculiar action. Aparently there are some different versions to the story, but I found a blog post (in Swedish) from 2009 from the blog Faktoider which is my main source for the background story to this.

After one of our former prime ministers Tage Erlander had left the Swedish parliament in 1973, his wife Aina apparently felt a need for return all of the pens and pencils marked that they belonged to the estate that had ended up in their home during her husband's long time in office between 1946 and 1969 to the Swedish parliament.

As an archaeologist I always get very excited for stories like this and also about the reactions from people seeing the former ministers's pen-photos on social media. Even in a world that gets more and more digital, materialities effect us even if these pens come in the form of digital photos for most of us. Small anecdotes tied to objects like the one about the Erlanders and the pens and pencils often creates a very symbolic value to similar objects. Ygeman writes in his tweet that he returns the pens with a warm smile thinking about Aina Erlander. He knows the anecdote and the symbolical nature of what he is actually doing. But it is not only the ones who know that that reacts to it. There have been lots of people asking about it on social media since all the photos started to occur. People seem to realise there is some kind of symbolism and/or tradition to this, but it is not common knowledge to someone not involved in the Swedish Social Democratic party. This causes curiosity and from what it seems also a sense of "I need to know what this is all about". Perhaps a little curisosity also comes from the fact that it is such a seemingly insignificant (and rather cheap) object that most of us does not really reflect so much on.

What Aina Erlander thought when she decided to return them to the parliament we will never know (She died in 1990 so it is a bit hard to ask.). Perhaps she had a strong sense of what is mine and what is yours and she could overlook having all of the parliament's pens and pencils in her home when he worked for it (I can imagine a prime minister always having to be ready to head into work if something happens.), but not when he retired. Or perhaps it was purely symbolic to her as well. Her husband had worked in the parliament for such a long time and been a very public figure as the prime minister for 23 years after all and she was relieved that it was all over. Anyway I am really glad that the former ministers invited us all to be part of the symbolism and tradition and I had a lot of fun doing the research for it. You learn something new every day after all.

Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born on this day (14 July) into a wealthy family in Washington New Hall in County Durham, England in 1868. Her mother died in childbirth three years later and Gertrude was very close to her mill-owning father Sir Hugh Bell who had held several government positions.

Her family's wealth gave her access to the universities and she studied at both Queen's College London and Oxford university. Her studied history which was one of the few subjects that was opened to women at the time. In two years she recieved a first class honours degree.

After graduating, she spent a lot of time travelling the world. During this time she developed a passion for archaeology and languages. Beside English, she spoke Arabic, Persian, French and German, Italian and Turkish.

Her heart lay in archaeology, but she was also a linguist, writer and the best woman mountaineer of her age. She gained interest in the Arabic world and its culture and made extensive journeys across the Middle East. Her knowledge about the Arabs also led to a position as a British secret agent during the First World War after first having volontered as a nurse in France.

After the war, she became focused all her research on Mespotamia and supported an independent Iraqi and became active in their politics. She supported Lawrence of Arabia's protege Faisal and used her connections to have him crowned king. After this, she acted as his advisor. In Iraq, she got the nickname Kathun which means fine lady or gentlewoman.

‘I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain,’ 

 ~ Gertrud Bell in a letter to her father

In 1923, she opened Bagdad Archaeological Museum (later renamed the Iraqi museum). Unfortunately, the museum was plundered during the Iraqi war in 2003.

On 12 July 1926 Gertrud was found dead after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. It is unclear if it was deliberate or not.

Göteborgs födelse - Göteborgs stadsmuseum

Poster of Göteborgs födelse

During my stay in Göteborg recently, I had time to visit Göteborgs stadsmuseum's (Gothenburg City Museum) new exhibition Göteborgs födelse (The Birth of Gothenburg) about life in the new town Göteborg during the 17th century.

Already when I first arrived by train, the day before my museum visit, I saw the poster (seen here to the left) and thought it looked interesting and cool. However, I was a bit sceptical since the museum could have put all the money into the marketing, but I decided to try it out anyway and I was not disappointed.

The symbol of the exhibition is a heart-shaped pendant made out of silver was found in a female grave dating to the first half of the 16th century in one of Göteborg's predecessors, Nya Lödöse. The town is situated in the district today known as Gamlestaden and has been the subject of a massive archaeological excavation in the last couple of years (The project has its own web site which can be found here. The site is in Swedish, but you can use Google translate in the upper left corner.). The excavation has revealed a lot of burials (many more than expected and what the written sources say should be there), but this one particular grave was excavated in 1916 and the skeleton reburied at Östra kyrkogården in Göteborg.

The exhibition catalogue

The heart-pendant has an interesting story which is told in the exhibition and also in the exhibition catalogue. It is decorated with symbols and letters and a coat of arms that might belong to a Dutch family. Inside it was a small packet of several layers of fabric wrapped around parts of plants. Pollen analyses showed that cornflowers and heather were at least part of the packet.

I just love it when museums really emphasizes one or more artefacts from their collections in their exhibitions. Yes, this might be because I am an archaeologist and my main focus is the material culture. We are most of the time unaware of how we are affected by materialities. How symbolical they can be, how we interact with other living beings (even they materialities mostly) through them and how we basically keep ourselves grounded in reality with the help of them. (This is really a subject that deserves its own entry some day, but I cannot help talking a little about it here as well.) Artefacts also often make history come alive in an extremely physical way. It can over-bridge time and both geographical and cultural space and can have us reflect on life both in the past, the present and the future. Emphasizing on one or more objects in an exhibition puts the focus on that particular object and it encourage you to reflect. This is really the case with the heart pendant in the Göteborgsfödelse exhibition.

The first thing that meets you when you walk into the exhibition is the sound of heart beats. It engages you and makes you curious. In the rest of the exhibition, I miss this engaging of other senses than sight. I really have nothing negative to say about the visual aspect of the exhibition. It really is great. The texts are mostly not too long and it is interesting when they tell stories about different inhabitants of the town.

The exhibition stands in stark contrast to the one about the 18th century. It is obvious that they have thought a little about making the material and information fun. Some attempts at interactivities have been made, but it really does not work nearly as well as the new exhibition. This is particularly sad because the material from 18th century Göteborg is just amazing. This was the time of the Swedish East India Trading Company and the museum is even lodged into its house so there are real potentials in the material of the time period. Did you know that the biggest collection of Chinese 18th century china that is known from outside of China is in Göteborg? I cannot find my notes from the lecture about it now, but there are tens of thousands only from the museum's courtyard and than from the East Indiaman Götheborg who sank as it ran aground in the Göteborg archipelago on its way home from its third journey to China 12 September 1745. Based on the knowledge of this and all the other amazing things the museum has in its collections, I do hope they make an exhibition just as amazing as Göteborgs födelse about that century too soon.

Salve. En medeltidssaga

About a week ago the twitter account Svensk Historia tweeted about the Nordic king Erik of Pomerania. I retweeted it saying it always makes me think about the Swedish children's show Salve from 1997. This was read by a host at the Swedish radio music show Klassisk morgon and we started talking about the show and its music. Later that day I was contacted by the producer and they wanted me on the show, so this morning I made my radio debute. It can be heard here but since it is in Swedish and since I have much more to say than I had time for on the show, I thought I would make a blog post about it as well. One of the characters, Katarina Örnfot, has her own post in my My Heroine series. It can be found here and I will try not to repeat myself too much.

I was 12 years old when Salve was first broadcasted and already a history nerd with a massive interest in knights. So this was really the perfect show for me and I started recording it on tape every morning already from the start. A year later, the show was cut down to an eleven episode long TV series which was then made into two VCRs and later on also to a DVD. (And of course I have both and yes, I do still watch the DVD from time to time.)

The plot revolves around Nils Svensson who normally is from 1997. He travels to the Swedish town Kalmar to celebrate the 600 jubliee of the union between all the Nordic countries set up by Danish queen Margaret that normally goes by the name The Kalmar Unionen. He tries to call his mother with his mobile phone, but the display just says 1397. He tries it anyway and gets transported to Kalmar 1397. There he befriends Katarina who is the daughter of a knight and works in the bathing house helping the elderly women Rodwy. Later on he becomes a squire to the rather clumsy knight Rosenstråle. The new 15 year old king, Erik (of Pomerania) is bored in the castle and runs away, out into town and becomes a friend of Nils and Katarina as well. At the end he is officially crowned king.

I cannot over-estimate how much this show has meant to me! It really is historical fiction at its best. It has an overarching frame that is the happenings in Kalmar in 1397 and there also seems to be a structure of what and how they wanted to convey facts. This makes the show take the facts seriously, but is not too serious in how they teach the children making it fun to learn. They had question times where children wrote in questions about the Middle Ages to the show, but most of it was told through the fictive plot. The fact was more showed (or played) into the viewers than taught into them.

Nils is the character through whom the viewers learn and just like me during the time I watched Salve, goes from a rather stereotypical image about knights, to learning a great deal about the period itself. What I find to be one of the best aspects about his character is the fact that he is never seen as stupid like is so often the case with characters the viewers are supposed to learn through in TV shows in general and children's shows in particular. Nils just does not know so much about the Middle Ages when he gets to 1397 because he is from 1997 (The scene before he time travels in the beginning of the first episode also has him imagining a rather stereotypical picture about how he, as a knight, saves a princess from a dragon.).

I have already talked about Katarina, but I cannot stress enough how great she is as a female character. She is not reduced to a steretypical medieval woman or a tomboy who gets to play knight. Neither is she overshadowed by the boys. She is independent, complex and colourful and certainly no damsel in distress.

Based on how popular the show was, I was sad to not see it getting more of a follow up than a shortened version in the autumn the year after. I think it would have been so perfect to make a winter holiday show (or a julkalender) so we could see how the people during the Middle Ages celebrated christmas and handled the colder climate of the season.

I rewatch the show from time to time and even though it is a bit childish from time to time and there are some plotholes, I can overlook its flaws because it is aimed at children and it shows how much fun you can have with real facts. It does still hold up extremely well, 20 years and a master's degree in archaeology later. It had me interested in the Middle Ages as a time period and I am still building on that knowledge in my work as an archaeologist today.

Vere Gordon Childe - Phryne's archaeologist friend?

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog, my digital baby. And in what better way can I celebrate than write a post about two of my favourite subjects: Phryne Fisher and archaeology. The former was actually the subject of the first real blog post I wrote on this blog, a couple of days after the introductory one.

My view on Phryne has changed a little as I have had more time to think about her as a character, but since I started the books I have also started to gain new knowledge about her, so I think an update is needed. However, this post will not be so much about her character as it will be about a mentioning of a friend of hers in the book version of Blood and Circuses. We do not get to know much about this friend other than it is a man and he is an archaeologist who have been bitten by a lion.

Phryne had been told that the moment before the prey was seized by the predator, it went limp. It ceased to fear or care. An archaeologist friend had talked about the moment when a lion's teeth had closed on his shoulder. Dreamy he had said. The world had ceased to matter. The last mercy, he had said to creatures destined to be dinner was that they went down sweetly and gently to death, reconciled to their place on the menu.

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses

As an archaeologist myself, I have been wondering about her archaeologist friend and I think I have found a male archaeologist, contemporary with Phryne, that would fit quite well even if I have no clue if he was ever bitten by a lion.

V. Gordon Childe

His name is Vere Gordon Childe and he is viewed as one of the most prominent archaeologists of his generation. He was born in Sydney in Australia in 1892, but througout most of his career he lived in Great Britain.

Childe came to study classics at the University of Sydney, before moving to England to study Classical archaeology at the University of Oxford. During his time at Oxford he became a socialist, active in the campaign against the First World War which he saw as coerced by imperialists and which hurt the European workers.

In 1917, he returned to Australia, but due to his socialist engagement, he could not find work in academia and engaged himself in the Australian Labor Party. However, working for them, he became critical towards their politics and took another step to the left on the political scale and engaged himself in the left political movement called Industrial Workers of the World.

Childe emigrated to London again in 1921 where he got work as a librarian at the Royal Anthropological Institute and he also travelled the European continent and brought home the notion of culture from German archaeology to British archaeology. In his book The Danube in Prehistory from 1929, he defined it as:

We find certain types of remains - pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms - constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a "cultural group" or just a "culture". We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call "a people".

How the notion of culture has been used and is still used (both implicitly and explicitly) in archaeology is a subject I love to discuss and I do think Childe's definition still has more relevance for how archaeologists treat the concept today than contemporary archaeologists in general would like to admit. To express my thoughts on the subject would make up at least ten other posts. One thing about his archaeological influence do I need to clarify though.

There are three major theoretical paradigm that usually come up in archaeological publications and classes and Childe sort of has a foot in all three of them. I will here use a lot of -isms that might be tricky to understand if you are not used to an academic language. In those cases, I have linked to the Wikipedia articles about them. If you have any questions about it, please feel free to ask in a comment or on the link post for this entry.

• Chronologically, the first one is usually call Culture-historical Archaeology, Culture Archaeology or simply Traditional -archaeology. This paradigm has a less explicitly defined theoretical base than the later two, but in short the foundation can be found in evolutionism and diffusionism. The notion of culture (pretty much as it was defined by Childe in the quote above) was central to understand the archaeological material. Bruce G Trigger in his book A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) divides up this paradigm between one earlier he calls Evolutionary archaeology and the later Culture-historical archaeology, but most archaeologists do not seem to make the same distinction and the Culture-historical archaeology is very much based on evolutionism also.
• Because of the misuse of Culture-historical Archaeology in Nazi-Germany, archaeology went into a crisis after the Second World War and came out of it by combining a positivistic philosophical theory with a functionalistic view on society and culture into what is normally called Processual Archaeology or New Archaeology. American archaeologist Lewis Binford is normally considered to be the founder, but Childe actually did "experiment" with a functionalistic approach to archaeology before him.
• Postprocessual Archaeology is the newest of the three major theoretical paradigm in archaeology and does not only contain one single theoretical approach but many, for example structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, gender theory and marxism. The main thing they have in common is their critic of the rigid positivistic approach of New Archaeology and even here you can glimpse the influence from Childe. He turned to marxism to help him in his studies of European prehistory shortly after his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1935.

This is only a short account of Childe's contribution to archaeology. Describing it all would make this entry far too long, like I said above. Therefore I have decided to focus on his personal life.

In 1927, he became Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and took an interest in the Neolithic period on the Orkney Islands. He did some excavations there, the most famous one of the Neolithic village Skara Brae between 1928 and 1930. From 1947 to 1957 he also worked as director of the Institute of Archaeology, London and together with Stuart Piggott and Grahame Clarke he founded The Prehistoric Society.

Upon retiring, he moved home to his native Australia, where he settled down in Blue Mountains for awhile before commiting suicide there in 1957.

Kerry Greenwood uses real life aviator Herbert Hinkler in Ruddy Gore so she is not opposed to the idea of using real life people in a fictional setting. It is, however, very much unclear if Greenwood even knows about Childe (even though he is one of the more influential archaeologists, he might not be known outside of the field). Considering his nationality, where he was active and when, however, I think it is a possibiltiy that Phryne would actually know him.

As I have said before, I am not so found of the comparisson between Phryne and Indiana Jones and to be honest I think the annonced title of the upcoming Miss Fisher film, The Crypt of Tears to fit much better with the latter than the former (which worries me immensely, but I still hope my worries to be unjustified!), if you see Phryne's archaeologist friend as Childe, they do, in fact, have something in common. After all, I have long thought "Indy" might have read too much of Childe's work and he is mentioned by him in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from 2008.

Edit 27 April 2017: Someone on Facebook made me aware of the fact that the person who was bitten by lion that was referenced in Blood and Circuses was none other than David Livingstone ("I presume.") (1813-1873) and linked to this article about the incident. However, he was not really an archaeologists, mostly considered to be an explorer and missionary.





References

• Bjørnar Olsen 2003. Från ting till text. Teoretiska perspektiv i arkeologisk forskning. svensk översättning: Sven-Erik Torhell, Lund
• Bruce G. Trigger 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe 

Photo of Childe was borrowed from here.

Tutankhamun. The tomb and the Treasure

Carnarvon: "Can you see anything?" 
Carter: "Yes, wonderful things!"

On Tuesday, I visited the travelling exhibition about the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in Stockholm. It was all made up of replicas and as someone working in the heritage sector, I think it is a great idea. Not everyone has the money to travel to Egypt, but is still in love with its history and the amazing artefacts I think we can safely say that everyone has seen at least once in a book or on TV.

I really enjoyed the exhibition. They really had tried to put all the artefacts into a context, which was a pleasant surprise. I thought it was going to be, like it often is with travelling exhibitions like this. Especially when it comes to really famous objects. But it is important for the understanding of the objects to have a context to place them in.

The objects are of course amazing in themselves, but there is much to be learned from them as well. Ancient Egypt is really a very different culture (even from today's Egypt) and to create an understanding of it, we much put all those treasures into a context to really understand it.

Even though I have had an interest in Ancient Egypt for years (I have also studied Egyptology at the university for a year.), I still think I have lots to learn. This also became pretty obvious at the exhibition. For the first time, I really understood what a so called corn Osiris looked like. (See picture bellow.)

Corn Osiris

It is really a frame shaped like the god Osiris (He is a god connected to the dead king.) with lots of corn inside and here I have always thought of it like one of those dolls which you are supposed to grow hair on.

The first part of the exhibition was a short introduction to ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun and had a glass (or some kind of see-through-plastic) model of the tomb and how it was situated in the Valley of the Kings. You got an audio guide which you could use to listen to people talking about the objects. This could be used throughout the exhibition. There was a film about Howard Carter and how he discovered the tomb in 1922 and afterwards they had put all artefacts together like they were placed in the tomb when Carter got there. It was a great way to sort of set up a scene for the part where you got a closer look at the artefacts themselves. Especially good was the fact that there were no talks about aliens or curses. Just a mention about the Egyptian workers who worked for Carter during the excavation getting scared when Carter's canary was killed by a cobra which was a symbol of the protection of the kings of Ancient Egypt.

I missed a mummy, even though I totally understand why it was not possible to have one. The had a wall explaining research that has been done on the mummy and different theories of how he might have died. Underneath had they placed a table with a picture of the mummy. This was actually quite a good way to sudstitute, even though I do prefer real mummies. (Yes, I am somewhat obsessed with death and burials!)

While you walked around among the artefacts after this view of the tomb itself you could choose if you wanted to listen to more or just walk around and I was really amazed by it all. It had me thinking a lot. For example how the outer chapel of the coffins were built. The replica was placed on a podium the size of the burial chamber and the builders can not have had much space to move around as they built it for sure. And how do you actually move coffins of solid gold that weigh over 1 000 kilos?! Because I refuse to say aliens, I am going for a lot of block and tackles and hard working workers (No, Ancient Egypt did not keep slaves! In fact the first known strike in history is of Egyptian tomb workers who fought for higher salary.).

To sum it all up: I loved the exhibition. More should be made like this.

Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Caton-Thompson

Gertrude Caton-Thompson

While thinking of my Historical Women series, I also thought about how many amazing female archaeologists I know of and who also deserves a place in the spot light. Though technically, they can also be viewed as "Historical Women", I have decided to give them their own category. Not least, to present a more varied picture of my own profession.

Dwelling into the research history of archaeology, one actually find rather a lot of different women who worked on excavations with or without men (mainly their husbands). It seems to have been particularly easy for American, British and French women to do archaeological work in the colonies. They also seem to have had it easier if they had worked with something that their contemporary society (late 19th and early 20th century) thought of as fitting for a woman. There are quite a lot of nurses among them for example.

Many of these female archaeologists worked in their shadows of their husbands and have become marginalised in the research history because their texts were published in their husbands's names. There were also quite a few women working in archieves and museum storehouses who's work never really classified as archaeology wherefore they are never mentioned in research historical overviews. Quite a few of them, however, did have an obituary. Not least the archaeologist I intend to devote the rest of this post to. Her name was Gertrude Caton-Thompson and she was born in London in 1888. Her interest in archaeology was founded when she visited Egypt together with her mother in 1911 and afterwards also visited Sarah Paterson's on Ancient Greece at the British Museum. She inherited money in 1912 which made her financially independent and studied both a Cambride and University College London from 1921 onwards. Among her teachers were Margaret Murray, Dorothea Bate and William Matthew Flinders Petrie. She participated in quite a few excavations in Egypt during the 1920's. Not least in the Faiyum oasis with geologist Elinor Wight Gardner in 1925.

Part of Great Zimbabwe

Her most famous excavation is that of the remains of Great Zimbabwe close to Masvingo in what was then known as Rhodesia, but that we today call Zimbabwe. The remains had been known by Europeans since the 16th century when Portugese soldiers at the coastal fort in Sofala in Moçambique heard tales of great remains deep inside the heart of Africa. The first European to visit the remains was the German geologist Carl Mauch in 1871 and Gertrude's countryman J. Theodore Bent was the first to do any archaeological work of the remains at the end of the 19th century. Bent interpreted the remains as too sophisticated to have been built by any known "African race". Instead he sought parallels with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, not least with the Phoenicians.

Aerial view of Great Zimbabwe

In 1905, the British Association for the Advancement of Science sent another student of Flinders Petrie to Great Zimbabwe, David Randall-MacIver. He debunked Bent's migration theory of Great Zimbabwe being of African origin. The was not really what the British Association for the Advancement of Science or the white population of Rhodesia wanted to hear. Not least since they used the remains to legitimize their imperialism in the area.

Therefore the association sent Gertrude in 1929. She did, however, confirm Randall-MacIver's theory of an African origin. Not least since she could find similar objects being made among contemporary native craftsmen. For this she became very impopular among the same crowd as Randall-MacIver's but she stood her ground, publishing her results in 1931. She was not totally unbiased though. After having established that Great Zimbabwe had African origin, she talks about the remains in a rather degrading way, but there is no way to deny that her research was important. She used stratigraphical methods and artefact chronology to date the site to the Middle Ages. Dates that have actually been confirmed by carbon dating today.

Gertrude died in 1985.



References:

• Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth 2003. Genusforskning inom arkeologin, Högskoleverket, Stockholm
• Palmer, Douglas & Bahn Paul G. & Tyldesley, Joyce 2006. Arkeologins största upptäckter, Swedish translation by Kjell Waltman, Historiska media, Kina
• Renfrew, Colin & Bahn, Paul 2012. Archaeology. Theories, Methods and Practice, Thames and Hudson, London
• Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Picture from here, here and here.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt

"We cannot find our future if we forget our past."

~ Alaa Awad, modern Egyptian artist

I have been watching this three part documentary called Treasures of Ancient Egypt where art lover Alastair Sooke discover ancient Egypt through 30 art pieces and what he finds is very intriguing.

At a first glance, ancient Egyptian art seems schematic and static and everything is supposed to be the same over thousands and thousands of years. Sooke, however, finds that there are a lot of things that interupts the static and schematic pictures, making them full of life. Some art pieces also goes more or less against the schematic style. I loved the so called ostraka Sooke finds in the worker's village Deir-el-Medina. They are much more free-styled and a lot of them are also parodies on the official style.

As someone who has studied colonialism/imperialism/cultural meating for awhile I do not really see it as strange that the invaders in Egypt after the New Kingdom tried portraying themselves as Egyptian, but also incorporating their own style, creating a hybrid. This is something I have tackled before, here and here but it might be time for a recap. To me, we are thinking too biologically about the concept of culture, one of the many things we have not been able to shake from modern imperialism of the last two centuries. It is extremely seldom that invaders go in and force their own culture on the colonized groups. This is an idea sprung from imperialism during the last two centuries and only one form out of many types of colonialism. Everyone of them were about power, but not everyone of them has been as devestating as imperialism during the last 200 years. Sooke says that maybe the Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies were not so powerful so they could introduce Greek culture into Egypt. I, however, would rather say that they were smart. They seem to have a much better understanding of cultures and how they interact than we do today. By using history and the old expressions of power in Egypt, they legitimized their right to rule over the Egyptians. They sought to build on the sense of eternity and stability presented in ancient Egyptian art, but like all cultures do as they adopt new traits, they interpreted it through their own cultural logic. This is why we actually can see some Greek influences in Egyptian art from this time. It really is like Egyptian artist Alaa Awad said to Sooke and which I qouted in the beginning. We all must look to the history to find our future.


Picture was borrowed here.

Terry Hayes - I am Pilgrim

I cannot recall anytime when I have been as confused by what to feel about a book as I was about I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (I read the Swedish translation by Örjan Sjögren.).

The plot surrounds "the Pilgrim". He is a super rich white American secret agent traveling the world catching bad guys. His "archenemy" is an islamist that he has to capture. Both of their backgrounds are explored in detail. I mean, there are even backstories to the backstories!

I had a teacher once who had worked as a taxi driver. He sometimes told us anecdots about the clients he had had during those days and what he had learned about people from them. One of them, reagarding male and female conversation did I find particularly interesting for a description of the writing in I am Pilgrim.

My teacher said that, based on conversations he had overheard from the backseat of the taxi as he was driving people around he could decipher two types of conversations. One could generally be ascribed to men and the other to women. The male one can be seen as a pretty straight line (one topic). It might from time to time deviate from it, but always got back to that first line pretty soon afterwards. The female conversation however is rather unstructured, meaning women tend to jump much more between topics and might also be discussing many topics together at the same time. If ever they do go back to the original topic, it can take quite awhile, when every other subject has been discussed. Since he told my class this, I have thought about it watching others have conversations and often find it to be true. What is interesting about I am Pilgrim is that it is written rather much like a female conversation. There are a lot of different anecdots from different times in the main character and his archenemy's lives, not always told in chronological order and after a while you start wondering when it is ever going to return to the bathroom with the dead girl that opens up the entire book.

One of the back stories within the backstories turned out to be the most interesting part of the book for me. It is when the Pilgrim tells us a story of how he and his adoptive father visited a lesser known concentration camp, Natzweider-Struthof, on the border between France and Germany in his youth. The Pilgrim talks about how emotional he got by a photo of a mother and her children as they walk to the gas chambers and I think we can all relate to that. Photos of the Holocast tend to leave a sense of horror and emotions in most of us. As an archaeologist however, I find his adoptive father's reaction to the pile of everyday items even more intriguing. The adoptive father says something about he never knowing how powerful simple things can be (Because I read the Swedish translation of the book I won't quote it because as can be seen by Google Translate Sings on Youtube, translation back to the original language might not work so well.).

Archaeology is all about researching how people are interaction with materialities. We have always interacted through them and we continue to do so. They are history in physical form. They make us remember. They make us reflect. They make us feel emotions. They can even make history more human and close! In a word that turns digital and immaterial more and more by the minute, I think it is important that materialities are used to keep us grounded in "the real world". I am not against digitalization. I think there are a lot of benefits. However it happens too quickly and unreflectively. I rarely blog about my profession, but this is something I think even non-archaeologists should be aware of and reflect upon from time to time.

But back to I am Pilgrim. Even though it got me hooked, I still cannot shake the fact that it is very much a tale about a white man written by a white man. Even the title indicates as much! It is good that Hayes tries to make him more "human" by having him react to a photo of Holocaust victims and he says he has no problems with female being the hitmen and he shows sympathy for the Romani people (Because I read the Swedish version I have no idea if the more degrading term for them was used in the original book as it was in the Swedish.). Hayes also give the islamistic sort of "archenemy" a (too) well-described backstory with a thoroughly explored motivation for going all extremist. It felt refreshing against the all too normal Hollywood "because they are evil"-approach. However as he describes himself as a super rich, super intelligent, super competent super secret super agent who makes a lot of mistakes (seriously every other chapter ends with him telling about a new one), but who people still think is the best at his job and who is the youngest boss the super secret super agent bureau has ever heard of, I cannot help thinking he would be completely dismissed as a Mary Sue character had he been a woman.

International Day of Archaeology

Apparently it is International Day of Archaeology today. I had absolutely no idea until I saw it around the Internet. I have to admit I have a lot of questions about this holiday. How did it come about? How are you supposed to celebrate it? Are you supposed to have cake?!

I have celebrated it by handing in a grad school application. I do not know if I have any chance at getting it, but I hope to at least get some response on my project plan this time. The picture to the right show some of the books I have been using.

As might have become evident by many of the entries in this blog, my greatest interests are Vikings, cultures and colonialism. So of course I am trying to mix them together into one research project, trying to discuss how the Vikings viewed the concept and how the research tradition being caught up in nationalism of the 19th century having applied to the period making it more of a Viking version of the 19th centry than anything.

Anna Lihammer - Medan mörkret faller

Today is my birthday and even though I have other things I really need to do, I spent all morning reading.

I have long thought about reading the mystery books by Anna Lihammer because people say that they are good and Medan mörkret faller (While the darkness falls) was elected best mystery debute of 2014. Beside, Anna is a colleague of mine, being a Swedish archaeologist and Medan mörkret faller is set in 1934.

The time setting in the 1930's made me draw lots of parallels to the books and TV series about the Honourable Phryne Fisher. Mostly the episode The Blood of Juana the Mad, because Lihammer's book is about somewhat the same themes and is also about a gruesome murders among medical staff in a university milieu.

The story is a reaction to Lihammer gaining the knowledge about skull collections in Sweden, but also the fact that in 1934 the Swedish parliament voted for a law about compulsory sterilization of people who weren't considered fit enough for "carrying on the Swedish race". The law remained in place until 1976.

I really enjoy this book and I think it is very evident that Lihammer is an archaeologist. She dwells into the time period, making it come alive just like in the books/TV series about Phryne Fisher.
She also talks about how human bodies (both alive and dead) are treated like objects. Of course this is something archaeology deals with all the time and which I think we need to discuss more than we do.

Det var inte första gången någon reagerade på hans utseende, det hände ofta och det var inte alltid negativt. Men intresset brukade inte så tydligt göra honom till ett samlingsvärt objekt, uppmätt och liksom klart för sortering (Not for the first time, did someone react to his appearance, it happend often and not always in a negative way. But the interest seldom so obviously made him into a collectable, measured and ready to be sorted.)

~ Anna Lihammer, Medan mörkret faller

The book also reminded me of an episode of History Cold Case. It also dealt with human bodies as collectables and study objects and discovered a story about a child who probably was killed because of human bodies being coveted for the study of medicine. It is a terrible, dark side to the more recent past of Sweden and many other Western countries. Evil done in the name of science. One might wonder how people can become so cold blooded, but I do not think it is so strange somehow. It all has to do with who you define as human.

Den nya tiden. Den moderna tiden. Han undrade hur många av besökarna som skulle passa in där. Och vad som skulle hända med dem som inte gjorde det, för visioner brukade förr eller senare leda till att de som inte kunde uppfylla dem sorterades bort. Ju storslagnare visioner, desto hårdare sortering.  (The new time. The modern time. He wondered how many of the visitors would fit in there. And what would happen to the ones who did not, because visions sooner or later used to led to the ones who could not fulfill them being sorted out. Greater visions led to harder sorting)

~ Anna Lihammer, Medan mörkret faller

The Swedish law of compulsory sterilization is actually one expression of this sorting, scientific racism another and Lihammer builds up the book plot surrounding this question of who are defined as humans. It is dark and gruesome and really horrible. A dark past that is poking on the present still.

Ötzi, the Iceman

Ötzi

25 years ago today (19 September 1991) the body of a man turned up in the Alps. He was dated to c. 3 300 BC (The Chalcolithic period) and had been mummified in the ice of a glacier. Today he can be seen at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy.

This find was actually one of the reasons for why I chose my profession. I was seven at the time they found him and he was one of my first real nerdy subjects. The finding of him was led to a massive interest from the media and one of my school teacher brought lots of them with her and we looked at the pictures and read all about him and talked about him and the Stone Age. He really made history come to life from me.

He seemed to have had a hard life, his body having many healed fractures. Isotope analysis of his tooth showed that he came from there area of either Eisacktal or Pustertal. Among other things he carried a copper axe and an unfinished bow. His tattoos have been discussed a lot. I, myself wait for the day someone comes up with the idea that he made them while he was drunk...


Picture from Wikipedia.

Some thoughts about Cultural Heritage

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

~ George Orwell, 1984

Monument of the Vendel Age boat burials in
Vendel, Uppland

This blog post might be containing quite a lot of rambling. I read an interview with the Swedish riksantikvarie (National Antiquarian) Lars Amréus, about the usage of the Cultural Heritage in Sweden. It is a topic I think about daily in my work. Therefore I thought I should shared with you some of my thoughts on the matter. The interview is in Swedish, but I intend to write this post in English as always. The focus will be mainly on Sweden though, since that is the cultural heritage I have most of my experiences from both as a professional archaeologist and as a visitor to different cultural heritage sites throughout my home country. All the photos except the last one in this entry are taken by me on trips to more or less famous cultural heritage sites throughout Sweden.

Gamla Uppsala, Uppland

To define the term cultural heritage is not as easy as one might think. The definition varies a lot between people and also throughout time. A general definition would probably be that it involves everything that humans have shaped throughout time but which in turn also shape us. It can be buildings, places and other types of milieus, but also traditions, crafts, artefacts, folklore, music, literature, art and oral stories. The common thread between all these categories is the stories they can tell about us both in the present and in the past.

Stern of the Vasa ship

Contrary to popular beliefs, a cultural heritage is never static nor is it powerless. It can be extremely political and be used both to include and exclude. The traditional view of a nationalistic cultural heritage has been seriously questioned and challenged in recent years. Recently even more so, due to the uprising of racism in many countries throughout the world, not least in Europe.

I have talked about my view on the term culture in many previous entries to this blog (most notably in this and this) and I don't intend to repeat myself too much in this one. However I want to state that my definition of the term culture is that it is entirely a social construction. It is never finished and it is under continous negotiations. It has all to do with what is socially acceptable in different social contexts.

St Olof's church ruin,
Sigtuna, Uppland

The traditional view of cultural heritage is just as much a product of the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century as the term culture and also the Nation state. The thought of a monocultural nation with one collective culture and history has been strong since then and is still fundamental in our view of the world. In its construction, the museums's (and bascially also the rest of the cultural heritage research) main task was to reflect this monoculturalism.

In my entry about the Stone Age I talked about how European encounters with other social groups through the Western colonialization of the last few centuries pretty much created the whole time period. Analogies was used to the contemporary "hunter-gatherer" societies to show that they belonged to a stage of development the European countries had left behind a long time ago. Just like the Stone Age was created based on a focus of difference, so was the Nation state created through focusing of what it was not.

Rune stone U161, Risbyle
Uppland

The creation of a glorious past was a very important part of the nation building process and therefore ancient monuments (in Sweden for example the mounds of Gamla Uppsala, seen in the second picture in this entry, or the rune stone like the one in the picture to the left) became important.

However, this perspective was very excluding. It excluded certain groups of people (in Sweden for example the Samis) but also parts of the past that was not glorious at all. For example, the Age of the Swedish Empire (Stormaktstiden) during the 17th and the 18th centuries was portrayed as bellicose, heroic and not least masculine. One did not talk about the rather catastrophic results of those war and values: Sweden itself was about to destruct due to the wars and a lot of people, both in Sweden and abroad, suffered greatly because of them. (Sweden would totally have been destroyed if it had not been for the women, but that is a story for another time.)

This is not so much a thing of the past either. We still tend to view our history through "romantic nationalistic glasses". To take the example of the Age of the Swedish Empire again, the Swedish newspaper Expressen as late as last year had a magazine about Sweden's "bloody history" in which one could read:

"Karl XII ärvde en stormakt från pappa Karl XI och de andra lyckosamma regenterna från 1600-talets krigiska epok." (Karl XII inherited a super power from his father Karl XI and the other successful rulers of the bellicose epoch of the 17th century.)

I didn't really know what to think about this quote and the fact that they this summer had a similar magazine devoted to the Swedish war kings made me realise even more how important investments in public outreach really is.

Microlithic flint blade, dated to the
Mesolithic that I found at Kanaljorden,
Motala, Östergötland in 2013

Not everything is bad though. Another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter had a series of articles about the skull collection of Anders and Gustaf Retzius last year. This is actually really what I think we need to talk about more. Not many Swedes today know that Sweden sort of invented scientific racism (Statens rasbiologiska institut opened in Uppsala in 1922, the first of its kind in the world) This also at the same time as we had the Folkhemmet ideology which managed to be both open and including (the part mainly focused upon) and racist and elitist (the part mainly forgotten)...

There is another example, which might sound even more strange and I realised just how strange it is that we emphasize it because I went to a show by the American ventriloquist Jeff Dunham in Copenhagen a couple of years ago.

He came directly from Stockholm where he had visited one of the major tourist attraction of the Swedish capital and by far the most visited museum of the country: the Vasa museum.

Vasa is a Swedish warship (The stern of it can be seen on the second picture in this entry.) which is mostly famous because it sank after barely having left the harbour in Stockholm on its first journey in 1628 and because it was salvaged 1956-61.

The DC-3, Flygvapenmuseum, Linköping

In his show, Jeff Dunham joked about the fact that the Vasa ship is really a big failure and why do we make a museum of a failure? It really got me to realise that the Vasa museum is kind of brilliant just because of that. It is something that went totally wrong, but still we are proud of it. We really should be proud of both our tragedies and our triumphs. They both make us part of who we are and I think it is really important that our cultural heritage actually portrays both.

Why do we need a cultural heritage then? Well, I think mostly because it seems like a basic instinct inside of us all to seek our history, but also to be able to orientate ourself in time as well as in place wherever we are really. The important thing is that it needs to be including. We need to focus more on what makes our own cultural heritage similar to anyone else's than differences.

Last, but not least I want to show you a photo I found on Tumblr called “Globalization is beautiful sometimes”. It was taken in the Stockholm underground by Ninni Andersson in 2015.

The girls seem different at first, but once you start to really look at them they have very much in common all the same: they have the same colours in red and black, they sit in a similar manner and they both are looking at their phones. I find the picture to be a beautiful illustration that we all are both different and similar at the same time.

PS. Om Ninni Andersson eller någon av flickorna på bilden ser detta: Det är en underbar bild! Jag hoppas det är okej att jag lånade den. Tack!

About chess - or the other inspiration for my view on culture

Not much is known
Of early days of chess
Beyond a fairly vague report
That fifteen hundred years ago
Two princes fought, though brothers
For a Hindu throne

~ Chess, Story of Chess

The Eddan Queen
Photo: Historiska museet i Lund

I read a blog post from 2014 on the blog of the contract archaeological company then called Riksantikvarieämbetets uppdragsverksamhet (Now Arkeologerna.). It was about a chess piece from the 13th century turning up at the excavation of the Eddan block in Linköping in Östergötland, Sweden. Therefore I think it would be perfect opportunity to tell you about the history of chess and why I think it is perfect for understanding both how cultures interact and what the game can tell us about early Medieval Europe. In many ways it is a continuation of the entry I made a while ago about the Sami hat.

My grandfather taught me to play chess when I was five. Even though the blog post about the Eddan Queen is very imformative, there are some problems with it. For example it uses a direct translation to Swedish of the English names of the pieces and I will tell you why I find this problematic later on in this post, but first som back story.

Chess originated in India and is said to have been spread to Europe via the Arabs in the early Middle Ages. The oldest known written sources of the game and its rules is Versus de scachis dating to c. AD 1000. The blog post about the Eddan Queen says that it probably came to Scandinavia during the 12th century. However, as always with written sources, I think there are reasons to be cautious saying this dates the first use of the game in either Europe or Scandinavia. It might have been used for quite some time before that, just that no one had thought about writing it all down.

Part of the Lewis chess set.
Photo: National Museums Scotland

The Silk Road was, after all, very important to the Vikings and they tended to pick up whatever they liked and brought back home to use it as their own. An indication of when the game was first introduced in Sweden, might the name of the pieces actually provide wherefore I found it sad to see that a direct translation of the English names was used in the blog post about the Eddan Queen.

Like so often when different cultures interact and pick something up from one another, changes need to be made to accommodate the new social context. This also happened to the chess set. In the blog post about the Eddan Queen, it was explained that the army of the Indian and Arabic game turned into representations of the social classes in the European feudalistic society. I, myself, would actually not say that that was really the case.

The Medieval army of the European countries actually did consist of both kings, pawns, knights and bishops and sometimes even women (like queens). However, there were ceveral changes in the pieces collection anyway. The king kept his title, but his advisor, the vizier of the Indian/Arabic version turned into a queen. In Swedish she is normally known as Dam (direct translation: Lady). The battle elephant turned into a bishop in the English version of the game. In Sweden those same pieces are known as Löpare (direct translation: Runner) and the horses where never turned into knights as in the English version. The name normally used in the Swedish version is an older term for horse: Springare. In the Indian/Arabic chess, there were also two wagons that became castles in English and Torn (towers) in Swedish and also the foot soldiers turned into pawns (This is actually the only piece that can be directly translated in Swedish: Bönder.).

Why is this so important to me? Because chess is actually an excellent way to see how far Christianity had spread throughout Europe and which of the "classical social classes" of the Medieval period that had been established at the time the game was introduced.

More stilistic chess pieces

England seems to have already had an established medieval society with knights, kings and queens and the Church seems to have had much more influence there as evident by the bishop's name, than it had in Swede, when the game was introduced there. The names of the pieces reflect this.

The rules of the games also changed when it came to Europe, giving the new queen a much more active role in the games. Today she is the most valuable and piece.

But how about the Arabs? Did they find a need to change the game from its Indian roots? Yes, they did. The older, more naturalistic pieces contradicted the Quran's prohibition of portraying humans and animals. Because of this, the game pieces were transformed to more abstract versions. Today you can find them both while looking for chess sets.

King in a set of game pieces for Hnefatafl
from burial BJ750, Hemlanden Birka, Björkö, Mälaren, Sweden
Photo by SHM 2001-09-26

Another board game that seems to have been popular among the Vikings is Hnefatafl and I just have to show you the one to the left from Birka since I think the pieces are so beautiful. Game pieces turn up in elite Viking burials from time to time. There are some similarities to Chess with both being played on a checkered board and both have the purpose of defending a special piece called "king" which, just like in chess is actually pretty weak. An interesting aspect considering both games illustrates Medieval power structures...


Pictures were borrowed from here, here and here and here.