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When last I left off posting about the trip, I had explained about the problems we encountered trying to leave town. I didn't mention that missing that flight made Keldor tired and discouraged, and ready to just skip the event and go home to bed. At the time I just said to Keldor that it would be ok, my conference presentation isn't till tomorrow, so taking a later flight will be fine. It was totally true, and he accepted the comment at face value. It was also totally unrelated to my true motivation for getting him to site, which was knowing that TRM planned to give him a writ at the event. Indeed, when we arrived in Gothenburg and Aleydis met us at the bus stop I commented that I had briefly considered not traveling, but then decided that of course we need to go to the event, and she smiled and winked at me, which he totally missed at the time (she is also a Laurel, so knew of the plans for the writ).
Thursday morning Keldor walked with me to the conference, and then left his backpack with mine in the back of the room for my session and went to check out museums in the area. I enjoyed the GeoArchaeology session, which included talks on:
After the session ended it was time for lunch, and I was hungry, so I failed my "networking" roll, and went to get free food (which was surprisingly tasty), instead of trying to talk with any of the people who had attended or presented at the session. Then I walked over the museum Keldor was at, and had fun there (for that story, and the rest of the trip south, see the next blog post)
Thursday morning Keldor walked with me to the conference, and then left his backpack with mine in the back of the room for my session and went to check out museums in the area. I enjoyed the GeoArchaeology session, which included talks on:
- Aspects of geoarchaeology
- This was the invited Keynote speech for the session. He shared information on three projects. The first was the analysis of carbonate deposits in the longest aqueduct of the ancient world, the second was a study of the carbonate deposits in a water mill, which record the timing of the invasion of the Gauls in the late 200's. The third was about a serious puzzle-project--people spent five years putting back together the broken marble decorative wall facing from a building in Turkey, did a geological analysis of the folds recorded in the rock, and even determined that two marble slabs from the sequence were missing, presumably broken before use, which resulted in a need to rearrange the order of the slabs, to still achieve the nearly mirror image patterns of the blocks on the wall.
- Digitally Reconstructing an Iron Production Landscape: The Spatiality and Chronology of Iron Production Sites within Northern Sweden
- This is a Masters student project. I enjoyed his graph showing the number and timing of each of the iron production sites--there was already a fair bit of iron produced in Sweden during the Bronze Age, though the graphs really shoot up once the Iron Age arrived
- Complex Crack Formation in Metavolcanic Rocks Accommodating Tool Making
- this one was looking at rhyolite outcrops in North Carolina, which had been used extensively in the Stone Age for tool making, and which also sometimes crack to sharp flakes in response to the weather. He didn't say it, but I expect that if they crack naturally to sharp flakes, that could have given people the first idea to do it on purpose.
- Modeling the social process behind the selection of rocks and the positioning of rock art figures in Aspeberget during the Bronze Age
- This one is part of a much larger rock art study--this portion focused on the different types of motifs that appear in the rock art, how many of each appear in each location, and what these clusters of patterns can tell us.
- Application of ultrasonic soundwave velocity for investigation and documentation of Bronze Age rock art in Tanum, Sweden
- this part of the same project as the one above, and it is a more geologic study of rock art--it turns out that the act of carving in the stone changes the rate at which sound waves travel through the stone. She also mentioned the ways in which the microcracks that happen in the rocks in response to the release of pressure when the glacier melted makes a huge difference in how easy or difficult the stone is to carve, which likely made a huge difference as to which stone outcrops got used for rock art in the first place. She thinks that an experienced carver may have been able to hear the difference by thumping on the rock, since the stones that would be harder to carve were not carved.
- Paint it red – Investigating the impact of painting rock art in Sweden through thermal imaging
- Sadly, this talk didn't happen. It would have been the third of the set, and I had been looking forward to it.
- Subfossil trees as proxies for long-term climate dynamics and ecosystem changes
- This one compares tree rings from lots of long-dead trees to learn about changes in the climate during the lifetime of the trees
- Stoneage site detected by high resolution seismic method
- This guy had been doing seismic studies of ocean floor, and noticed that while the water above the ocean floor normally looks calm and flat in such studies, in a couple of areas there were disturbances that show clearly in the water column just above the ocean floor. The investigated, by sending down divers, and determined that it was a concentration of flint scrap from stone age settlement sites that are now submerged that were causing the disturbances. Indeed, they have even tested this, by dropping such scrap to the ocean floor on purpose, and then doing the seismic reading, and they see the same sort of disturbances in the water column.
- Inventory and investigation of peatlands to reveal possible human settlements in south central Sweden
- This one is a study of bits of not quite fossilised trees from peat bogs. The speaker really likes peat bogs.
- Micro-scale clues to transport-scale questions: How LA-ICP-MS trace element composition maps can reveal steatite’s hidden secrets
- this was my talk. I think it went ok.
- Genesis of limonite ores in the “Röda Jorden” area from a hydrogeological perspective
- this one focused on what factors are responsible for making the red earth area in central Sweden so rich in oxidized iron that it could be easily transformed into metal using early bloomery processes.
After the session ended it was time for lunch, and I was hungry, so I failed my "networking" roll, and went to get free food (which was surprisingly tasty), instead of trying to talk with any of the people who had attended or presented at the session. Then I walked over the museum Keldor was at, and had fun there (for that story, and the rest of the trip south, see the next blog post)