The Swedish Osteological Association’s annual seminar 2009

The Yangshao project year 6

We’ve made the news
Today we were part of the headlines in Norrtelje Tidning (article in Swedish). It’s me holding the Rover. Magnus Reuterdahl

Final week at Mellingeholm
This week will be a GIS kind of week for me, a lot o f measuring with the rover and the total station and processing the data and in between helping out in the search pits. As winter’s approaching the days are getting shorter, the weather in itself posses small or no problem but the light does, as the time with sufficient working light becomes shorter. It also means that we start early, I getting up at 05.30 which is not my preferred time to get up; I just seem to want to curl up under bed sheets and sleep for just a little longer. Well off we go Magnus Reuterdahl

Ancient find lito
I collect things; books, comics, art, wine etc. One that I really dig is historic maps and anatomy lithos (osteology), a few weeks ago I stumbled upon this lithography, originally from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. 5. Auflage. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig und Wien 1897 that I just had to have even though its not a map and there’s no bones in it (well I guess there’s probably some cremated bones in the urn within the Danish mound). Kultur der Metallzeit II (Jüngere Periode) (Iron Age)  

Mellingeholm part 2
A new week in the field awaits. Last week we managed to do a lot of work but there’s still plenty to do. We’ve dug a lot of search pits, ca 5-10 m in length 1,5-2 m in width and 0,4-0,5 m in depth, to delimit two grave fields. Between these grave fields earlier archaeological investigations has identified urn graves, urns filled with cremated bones, charcoal etc and dug into the ground. We’ve rediscovered these and found a few more. One thought was that these two grave fields might have been one but there seems to be an area ca 50-75 m in between with no graves, though this is just a preliminary assessment as we still have some search pits to dig before we are done.

Mellingeholm
Now what is that and perhaps more important where is that? Mellingeholm is a property ca 65 km northwest of Stockholm and a few km south of Norrtälje in Frötuna parish. At the moment I participate in a archaeological preliminary investigation, step two in the Swedish archaeological process. During which our aim is primary to delimit monuments and relics and to determine their function by excavating and surveying. We are also asked to answer certain questions such as the age of a certain monument or to map a monument in detail or document it etc. In Mellingeholm there are several monuments and relics such as graves from the Iron Age, settlements from the Iron a