My lovely colleague Mattis Hensch (who has the Schauhuette blog) has done it again and made a wonderful video-blog that is really worth watching. It's the first part of a time-lapse of how a skeleton is dug out.

The grave is in the choir of the previous church, a Romanesque building, of St. Vitus in Utzenhofen (Lkr. Amberg-Sulzbach). They have found a grave in the place where the altar would probably have been situated, and they are uncovering the skeleton now, hoping for some help in dating it.

The text is German, but you can watch it even if you don't understand the language - you will still see actual archaeological work. Click this link to see how it's done with trowel and vacuum cleaner!

There will be a second part of the excavation documentation coming up soon, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it.

I'm back from two weeks full of exciting things to do and new things to learn and wonderful people to meet, and accordingly I spent most of yesterday asleep, catching up on the hours lost to discussions and work.

We had a small, but very intense and very successful Textile Forum in Mayen, with a dyeing experiment that surprised us all with the outcome. After the Forum, I got to spend some more time with friends that had come to the Forum from Netherlands, Germany, England and Sweden, visiting Maria Laach in lovely weather.

After this, I went to see the new abode of my friends from the Wollschmiede and helped them a little bit with their renovation. It's a lovely old house that now has a new roof and will soon be their home and workplace, with much better opportunities for both dyer and blacksmith than the old apartment could offer.

And to top off all of this, I then was part of the programme for the opening of LEA in Mayen this last weekend, demonstrating wool preparation and spinning techniques to a very interested public. We had immense luck with the weather - it rained on Friday evening and night, and it was a little cool on Saturday morning, but then the sun came out and we had a wonderful time both Saturday and Sunday.

And now I'm looking forward to a few days here to reorganise myself and catch my breath before going to the traditional season's end market - Tannenberg. This year, however, I'll have to go without the most patient of all husbands, who ruptured his Achilles tendon last Saturday and now moves around on crutches... and those are not very compatible to the uneven and possibly muddy Tannenberg grounds.

Archaeologists may be immensely interested in the past, and they are often also interested in old methods of doing stuff - but that does not mean they aren't using modern tools and modern methods. Futuristic-seeming methods, even.

So I was not surprised to read this BBC article about a laser scanning technology that allows to look through vegetation in use for archaeology. Even though this method is of course even more important in the far-off djungles than in tame Middle Europe, maybe we'll have similar laser-generated 3D maps here in the future?

Since a lot of you readers are involved in Living History or Archaeology in some way, this might be interesting for you: Roeland Paardekooper is looking for a discussion about food. Here's his request for submissions:
 

For a BBC program in 1954, Sir Mortimer Wheeler tasted a reconstruction of the Tollund Man’s last supper, which turned out to be a tasteless mush. This led him to announce: "I believe that the poor chap of Tollund committed suicide because he could stand his wife's cooking no longer!"

While archaeology inspired cookery is an important and attractive way of involving the public, it also has some drawbacks. How authentic can we be? What about health and safety? Should we only cook what the public will like? Please discuss the questions and issues with ancient cookery that often arise, either when cooking as demonstration or experiment. Send your reply, between 100 and 400 words to: Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein..

And if you like, post your reply in the comments to this post as well - then we can have a second discussion here as well!

Yesterday, I received a mail informing me that a colleague had stumbled across a .pdf version of a Festschrift for Frans Verhaeghe, online and downloadable free of charge. Since I am a curious person, I took a look at the link she had posted. And since I'm a very curious person, I then took a look at the site that hosted the file.

As anyone who was at a typical archaeological dig knows, work safety is not always easy to achive. To be really safe, for example, it would be necessary to bank the sides of any trench after about 1.5 m of depth. Now this is unfortunately not possible if you want to document and analyse an archaeological profile... and there are many other conflicts between archaeology and perfect work safety like this.

Most archaeologists know about the risks. But since it's often a choice between take the risk or do not dig and document at all... the risks usually get taken, and most of the time luck is with them who wield the trowel and the showel. That said... situations like the one that you can see here (provided the link works - their server seems to be a little iffy) make me gulp.

So should you consider studying archaeology, or should you be one of the many folks who think they would love to be an archaeologist... it's not only hard and dirty work with not so much pay, standing in the exhaust fumes of big excavator machines sometimes, know that it often also means that you take quite a lot of risks - since you don't know what is behind a wall, or a trench wall, and you still go there and you still do the work.

If you are reading this blog, there is a rather high chance that the name "Oseberg" will mean something to you. Just in case it does not: The Oseberg ship was a Viking age burial ship and a spectacular archaeological find. It has beautiful carvings, and, as usual for a burial ship, was equipped with the burial (of course), other wooden items (such as a wagon), non-wooden items, and some equally spectacular textiles (the pictures aren't of spectacular quality in this link, but it will give you an overview of the finds).

The ship was found in 1903 and excavated in 1904. And now, it seems, the wooden items are in really, really dire need of reconservation - as this article (in Norwegian) describes.

For those of you who do not read Norwegian: The conservation method used for several of the wooden finds (not the ship) was employing alum as a stabilising agent. This has made the wood very brittle, and now it has been found that the finds are slowly rotting away from the inside, so that  they are only still kept together by the slightly more stable surface. The main items afflicted with this are the wagon and the sled. The museum has asked for money from the Norwegian government to save the finds, but this was denied. Because, the government says, the museum and/or university should be paying for something like this out of their own budget.  (They asked for approximately 5 million Euro to save the finds. And everybody knows that any museum or university can easily afford a sum like that, just so, at the drop of any hat.)
According to the article, the finds could fall apart any moment. (Thanks to Natascha Mehler and Rainer Schreg for translating all that to German, so I could translate on.)


I don't know what to say. I really, really don't. Norway is not that poor a country, and the finds really are outstanding and a piece of their cultural heritage.

Now the museum's last hope is for private sponsors. 


I still can't believe this.