Ossamenta

After much irritation due to a probably collision with online forms and office firewall, and last minute editing (I need this reference - oops, it's in the office), the Ph.D. application is handed in. I ought to work on the leg warmers tonight, to get the pattern finished so I can start on the left one. However, my brain has already decided that this will be a relaxing evening, with takeaway and a good book.

One of my favourite authors, jo_graham has a new book out later this year and Michelle Moran, who apparently is a big historical fiction writer in the US, is going to blurb it. And since the idea of blurbing is to get fans of the blurber to buy the book, I figure this could go in the other direction too. So now I have a book on Madame Tussaud (the one of waxwork fame) in my bag. Since Graham's book also takes place during the French revolution and Directoriat, it will be interesting to compare them.

The year started out on a sad note, as an acquaintance of mine took his life in February, and my world got a bit darker and emptier. Workwise, I finished a few bigger projects and had a whole month of field work. I applied for three Ph.D.s and one osteo job, but got neither. But I did go to an environmental conference in Poland, where I presented a paper, which was great fun. All these applications and paper preparations took time, and consequently I read less books and did much less crafts. However, I went to a dance class once a week and I have started to learn to knit, as every winter I get grumpy about the almost non-existant availability of wool accessories. Just need to take that bit of extra time to work on it, and I'm sure I'll get the hang of knitting.

I hope 2012 will be a good year. There is a Ph.D. position coming up at Uppsala University in Sweden (deadline 16 Jan) so I need to get going and finish the application. On a less positive side, so to speak, there is a huge report deadline this spring, so blog posts might be very scarce for a while. If only we could have got a bigger time budget, as the project really deserves it. I hope I will have time to go to some dance events and perhaps have a holiday abroad (i.e. an abroad which is not home in Sweden).

It’s cold and dark now, and there aren’t as many Christmas lights in peoples’ windows and gardens as I would like to see. I guess it’s a combination of bad finances and that many people in Oxford live in rented rooms (less storage for seasonal items, and of course you usually go elsewhere for Christmas). In times like this, it’s nice to be able to recall warmer times.

Six months ago I was sent out in the field, to a Roman settlement site not very far from Oxford. It’s a gravel quarry site, and as the quarry expands, we get called in again. It’s the site that never ends, or at least if feels like it. I really like it, as it’s rather easy to dig (unless the ground is very dried out) and there’s usually no difficulties in distinguishing the archaeological feature from the natural ground it’s been dug into (as opposed to other sites I’ve been on). At first it was great digging weather - not nice summer weather, but I didn't care - but as the weeks went on it got hotter and on the breaks we tried to sit in the shade of the vans and the site hut, trying to catch a breeze.

( Cut for pictures )

This one is not for me, as I have to do a Ph.D. first. But there might be a reader who's interested? Naomi Sykes at Nottingham has done some interesting studies on fallow deer in Britain and their connection to the Roman and Norman invasions, and I'm curious to see what more information is lurking in their bones.


The University of Nottingham is advertising for a 33 month post-doctoral research fellowship, focusing on isotopic and osteometric analysis of fallow deer remains (ancient and modern). The closing date for applications is 2nd December and the interview date will be 15 December. The post will start on 1st February 2012. Further details about the post and application procedure can be found here:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/jobs/currentvacancies/ref/ARTS06455

Information about the wider project can be found here:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/current/fallow-deer.aspx

I can't believe it's already November. At least here in England it's still quite a nice autumn: leaves in many different colours and it's not too cold yet. I shouldn't complain. Although I still feel time is passing too quickly. Christmas decorations are up in the larger shops, and I guess it'll only be a short time until they start pumping out the Christmas music too...

For extra fun and joy I'm now working on four sites: I got an evaluation that needs to be in very soon, and that must take precedence over the other sites. Evaluations are "pre-excavations", where we set out trenches across the entire development area and then see what we find in these. That way we can estimate how much archaeology there will be in the development area, which then influences how much it will cost to properly excavate the area. This will then get tendered on, so if you estimate too high, you are not very likely to get the job. On the other hand, if you estimate too low you will either do a rush job which English Heritage/the county archaeologist will not like and force you to do a better job (but for the same low cost...), or you risk losing money if it turns out that there was more exciting and costly things below ground that you originally expected and costed for. It's fine line to walk between doing a good job and actually getting the job contract.


In case you wonder, I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, or the blogging/short story/knitting/whatever equivalent. I'm writing a lot in my job and both the ph.d. applications, the job application and the conference talk have kept me extra busy this year. Technically I could tackle the UFO* pile, but I think that will be a "slowly but surely"-project rather than a focussed "let's keep all evenings very busy"-project. Best of luck to you who are giving NaNoWriMo a go.

*: UnFinished Object


There has been more info on the spindle whorl I linked to in last post: the back of the piece is also decorated and shows some wear, indicating that it's been made from another artefact. The archaeologists are unsure whether the decoration would be runes or a Sami pattern. There are also small holes on the back, two of which contain small bits of iron.

And since I assume only a few of you read online horse magazines, here's a link to an article on the new evidence for horse domestication in Saudi Arabia and in Kazakhstan. (Thanks to Lee Broderick from the ZooArch list)

Close-up on some of the Swedish finds that are going to be in a touring exhibition on Vikings in 2012. pearl, this is relevant to your interests.

Work has been intense lately, but soon I'm off home for a week's relaxing, sewing (for a steampunk Halloween event), testing a couple of new cookie recipes, and meeting friends. I can't wait!

But first, a couple of quick links:

- “An Atlas of Medieval Combs from Northern Europe” by Steve Ashby. Published online on the open access journal Internet Archaeology.
Summary: As an aid to understanding chronology, economics, identity and culture contact, the early medieval bone/antler hair-comb is an under-exploited resource, despite the existence of an extensive literature borne out of a long-standing tradition of empirical research. Such research has been undertaken according to diverse traditions, is scattered amongst site reports and grey literature, regional, national, and international journals, and is published in a number of different languages.
The present article provides a general synthesis of this data, together with the author's personal research, situated within a broad view of chronology and geography. It presents the author's classification of early medieval composite combs, and applies this in a review of comb typology in space and time. It makes use of recently excavated material from little-known and unpublished sites, as well as the classic studies of familiar towns and 'emporia'. The atlas is intended for use as a reference piece that may be accessed according to need, and read in a non-linear fashion. Thus, it may act as a first port-of-call for scholars researching the material culture of a particular spatio-temporal context, while simultaneously facilitating rapid characterisation of freshly excavated finds material. It should provide a useful complement to recent and ongoing question-oriented research on combs.

- The UK based Medieval Dress and Textile Society (MEDSAT) has their autumn meeting Saturday 22nd October in the British Museum, London. I would have loved to go, as the theme of this meeting is "Reconstruction, Living History, Re-enactment" (programme). There are some interesting talks, and some interesting people - of any of you readers go, please let me know how it went.

- Keeping in the textile theme, the Smithsonian has developed a less destructive technique to date silk items, using the natural deterioration of silk’s amino acids to determine its age by calculating that change over time (a process known as racemization). Only a tiny millimeter-size sample is required, takes 20 minutes, and consumes only nanoliters of the amino acid mixture. The process is accurate within 50 to 100 years of the silk’s creation. How awesome is that! Even if it's not possible to do exact dating (for the Medieval and Post-medieval periods checking changes in fashion may be a better option), the small amount of silk needed makes it a far better dating method than radiocarbon.

Blogposts with links are often called linkspam, but personally, I think that's the wrong word. Spam is something I don't want, whereas interesting links will brighten up my day. Therefore, I will call these posts linksoup, since soup is delicious! :-)


I found an interesting blog today: Powered by osteons, written by a human bone specialist in Italy. Lots of Roman posts, but also a great variety of interesting stuff, such as the use of sulphur isotope analysis to research fish consumption and the age of weaning.

Contagions is a more specialised blog, about historic infectious disease. I had only time to poke around a bit, but found posts on trench fever and the black death. As some of you probably already have heard, dna from Yersinia pestis has been extracted from several skeletons from a plague pit in London, thus confirming that Yersinia was (at least one of) the bacteria that wrecked havoc in Europe in the mid-14th century. (More info, and some background to the debate)


Yersinia pestis: Isn't she cute!


On a Mesolithic site in Sweden, archaeologists have found human skulls on stakes, placed in a shallow lake near the settlement. For once, the use of "ritual" doesn't seem far-fetched. I can't wait to read the report on this site. The Mesolithic has a special place in my heart, ever since I studied prehistoric archaeology in Lund. So many rich sites in Scania and Denmark, with not only bone and antler but also wood. On the other hand, Mesolithic sites that only yield flint scatters, as is the case in most of Britain, is rather boring.
(More detailed information on the site and ceremonial deposit in the site blog - only in Swedish, though)

Going even further back in time, dinosaur feathers have been found in amber! Unfortunately I didn't see any when I was on the lookout for nice amber in Gdansk.

For those of you who are based near London, or a planning a winter visit, the new exhibition
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination will be at the British Library from 11 November-13 March.

And don't forget to put a note in the calendar for 2013: a big Viking exhibition at the National Museum in Denmark (Copenhagen), the Museum für Vor- und Frügeschichte (Berlin) and the British Museum (London). The National Museum in Denmark has a blog on the ongoing work with creating the exhibition (Danish only).

Keeping on the historical side, I must recommend Reel history: a blog series on the accuracy on various historical movies. On a related note, the fabulous Isis* wrote a post on how the present fashion is reflected in historical movies.

*: I adore 18th century fashion (the movie Dangerous Liasons, anyone?) and someday I will get around to make a 18th century outfit.


Various useful sources I found online:
- Abstracts from the 15th meeting of the ICAZ fish remains working group in 2009 (pdf)
- London lives 1690-1800: crime, poverty and social policy in the metropolis. Digitised and searchable primary sources focussing on middle and lower class Londoners. The sources include over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects.
- A ph.d. thesis which is right in my interest sphere: Marianne Erath, Studien zum mitelalterlichen Knochenschnitzerhandwerk : die Entwicklung eines spezialiserten Handwerks in Konstanz (Studies on Medieval craft of bone-turners: development of a specialised handcraft in Konstanz) (pdf)
- My colleague Jessica Grimm's thesis Animal keeping and the use of animal products in medieval Emden (Lower Saxony, Germany).
- Another interesting ph.d. - on medieval textiles and fashion rather than bone: Eva I. Andersson (2006) Kläderna och människan i medeltidens Sverige och Norge (Clothing and the individual in Medieval Sweden and Norway) (pdf)

It's been a good week. As expected, the conference was dominated by eastern europeans and archaeobotanists (sometimes one and the same), which skewed the talks somewhat. Evenso, there were lots of interesting talks, ranging from the Roman period to the post-medieval, from Aberdeen in the north-west to Istanbul in the south-east. I think the most interesting for me were Sabine Karg's A cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the diversity of useful plants during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in the Baltic - taste preferences, purchasing power or climatic limitations? and Norbert Benecke and Peggy Morgenstern's Food economy in medieval urban centres of Berlin - the archaeozoological record. The plant study has been collected in the book Medieval food traditions in Northern Europe, but unfortunately there has not been a corresponding study on the animal bones from the Hansa sites. Hopefully I can can find out if/where the archaeological studies from Berlin are published. My talk went well, and I think most people were interested in what I had to say. From a purely palynological point of view, it was probably rather irrelevant. :-)

As the plant, animal bone and human bone specialists in eastern Europe mainly come from the natural sciences, rather than the humanist faculties, as they do in Sweden and the UK (the bone specialists at least - not sure about the plant specialists), discussions were slanted thereafter ("we scientists must talk to the archaeologists") which irritated me and some of the other archaeologists there. Not sure what to to about this, apart of course to talk to the "other side" as it were, so everyone can be aware of where we (and they) are coming from and how this can bias our thinking. I wish that it was easier to do cross-faculty studies. From a Swedish point of view I'm limited in what I can study at university level since I did the economics/social science branch of the gymnasium (the last three years in school, technically optional) and not the natural science/technological branch. For most, if not all, courses in various natural sciences I have to do three years of physics, chemistry, biology and natural science level math, as I otherwise would not meet the qualifications for entrance. Which, needless to say, suck. While multi-disciplinary studies is clearly the way to go, it's not possible to do all disciplines by oneself. Therefore, in my ideal world, we would talk to each other, go to multidiciplinary conferences and learn what the other fields can do to help my field. My next project is a study of university diet, and for that I will not only need archaeozoology, but archaeobotany, history, and probably lots of other fields that can tangentially help me find patterns.

Gdansk itself was lovely. I had planned to post lots of pictures, but as I can't find the camera cord, this will have to wait. :-(

Now, this really fills me with confidence:

"This is a digital copy of a book that was prcscrvod for gcncrations on library shclvcs bcforc it was carcfully scannod by Google as pari of a projcct to make the world's books discoverablc online. "

At least I can make out the wrong letters in that sentence, but when I was after stuff that was written pre-standardised spelling... I was very glad the Bodleian had the original book.

Winchester is an interesting town. The ”first” settlement was an Iron Age hill fort, then at c. 70AD the Romans came and established a town there. In the early and mid-Saxon period there seems to be a decline of the town, but in 662AD Winchester becomes the site of the bishopric, and then becomes the capital of the kingdom of Wessex. After the Norman invasion London takes over the throne (so to speak), but Winchester remained the site of the bishopric. And not just any bishopric: the See of Winchester was one of the wealthiest in Medieval England.



The Northgate House, Staple Gardens and Winchester Discovery Centre (formerly Winchester Library) sites are located in the north-west corner of the Roman and Medieval town, within the walls*. The Saxon (and Medieval) street Brudene Stret (nowadays Staple Gardens) separates the sites. There is plot continuation throughout the Late Saxon, Anglo-Norman and High Medieval periods, which lent itself to comparisons between the plots both spatially and chronologically. However, in the early 13th century, the buildings on the northwest side of Brudene Stret were demolished and the area formed part of the Archdeacon’s residence.

The book gives an introduction to the sites, including documentary evidence from the Medieval period and land use over time. The next few chapters discuss the two sites by period: Prehistoric and Roman, Late Saxon (c. 850-1150), and Anglo-Norman/Medieval (c. 1150-1550). The latter two chapters are discussed by property, which would facilitate easy chronological comparison. Thereafter follows a discussion of the site in a wider context, again by period. Here the Late Saxon and Anglo-Norman/Medieval periods are combined and form a substantial chapter, discussing the creation of the town, building development, water supply, pit function, industry and craft (metal working, textile working, skinning and furriering**, bone and horn working), and the Archdeacon’s residence.

There is a short chapter on the scientific dating evidence, i.e. radio carbon dating and archaeomagnetic dating, a method which was chosen since there was an abundance of fired hearths in situ throughout the Saxon period. A large number of dating samples were taken to form a detailed phasing of the site, trying to find out whether the properties were laid out at the same time, or grew more organically. Other research aims included finding out whether the settlement existed before or after the ”official” foundation of the burh, and trying to calibrate the pottery dating sequence.

That’s half the book. The other half is devoted to the finds. Lots of pottery, from prehistoric to post-medieval, much building material such as tile, stone and painted wall plaster, 305 Roman coins, several ”small finds”, i.e. metal and bone objects, glass and shale. The small finds are significantly summarized in the book (a shame, as I found lots of worked bone mounts when I did my analysis, and I haven’t got around to check the cd yet - mea culpa), and the full report is included on an accompanying cd. In fact, all specialist reports, including scientific dating, are included in full on the cd. The finds section in the book also includes the ecofacts, i.e. animal bone (a lot, including evidence for a furrier’s workshop), molluscs (not many), charcoal, seeds and other plant remains (a lot, including evidence for dyeing, probably textiles), as well as human bone (mainly a small number of Roman infant burials), intestinal parasites (very few). There’s also a summary of an analysis of soil micromorphology, chemistry and magnetic susceptibility.

As with the Lankhills book, there are plenty of drawing and colour photographs throughout the book. I would recommend the book to anyone with an interest in urban archaeology from these periods.


*: The layout of the town wall didn’t change much over the centuries. Waste not, want not, I guess.
**: This is one of the sites I use for my tawyers and furriers talk at the conference in Gdansk in September. It’s (AFAIK) the second site in Britain where they have found dumps of bones from squirrel feet - one of the most common fine furs in the Medieval period and subject of a huge industry and trade. The other site is much later in the period: The Bedern in York (14th century).

B.M. Ford and S. Teague, 2011. Winchester - a city in the making. Archaeological investigations beteeen 2002 and 2007 on the sites of Northgate House, Staple Gardens and the former Winchester Library, Jewry Street. Oxford Archaeology Monograph No. 12.