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kareina When last I posted, I had described my first day working as an archaeologist, which was Tuesday. Here follows my memories of the rest of my week.
Wednesday morning we started the day with "Avtorvning", or removal of the layer of "torv", the various plants growing on the surface. We did thus by hand, in two meter-wide stripes, one for each of the two hearths in the first area
The area: https://pub.raa.se/visa/aktivitet/arkeologisktuppdrag/72eddf26-c513-4a6b-b020-76bb824c7d64
Hearth 3571:
Hearth 3572:
All three hearth areas we are investigating are located near highway E10, in the zone that will be impacted by the highway expansion; they are making it wider, and adding a separate bike path, which is why we are investigating them--it isn't yet known how old these hearths are. Certainly neither has been used this year, nor probably for the last several considering the amount of plant growth that had covered even the central portion of the hearths.
Hearth number 3572 is the larger, and easier to spot of these hearths, with a number of stones in the ring still very visible through the plant growth (mostly mosses and small berry bushes, directlyon the heartes I think it was lingon and crowberry, but there are also blueberries growing in the study area). Hearth number 3571 is smaller, less round, and not as elevated above the rest of the ground surface as hearth 3572 is. Fewer stones from 3572 were visible above the plant growth, and we wondered if some of its stones had been reused for 3571.
I asked if the two hearths might ever have been used at the same time, but they replied that they thought it unlikely, as normally such a hearth would have a small "koja" (temporary hut or shelter) overv them, and they were too close together to fit well into normal sized koja, and the wall/ground interaction of one koja would fall right onto the rocks of the other hearth.
We chose to investigate only half of each hearth, leaving the other side untouched. The dividing lines run through each hearth, and extending a couple of meters in one direction, and only a meter or less in the other. (These sizes are a guess made as we drive. I wasn't involved in the measurements, and while there was a measuring tape unrolled next to the lines, I never felt the need to read the numbers displayed.)
The Avtorvning was done as a group, first using a shovel to cut through the layers along the edges of the guide wires. Then we rolled up the vegetation along the strip, one of kneeling on the unrolled part, rolling it towards themselves, the rest of us surrounding the roll at the roll edge, using small gardening tools to cut any roots that were preventing progress. Each exposed area is called a schack in Swedish, the same word that is used for the game chess, so I assume that both words have to do with the columnar pattern of the chess board pieces or the cleared rectangle on the ground.
After we had rolled up the turf in strips along one side of each hearth my boss and I left the other two to keep working, and we went to the next area
Area 3575:
Hearth 3575:
This hearth is just far enough from the road improvement area that it won't be impacted, but the hearth adjacent area is in the impact area, so for this area it is only the adjacent area we are investigating.
My first task, while my boss wrote up a detailed description of the area, was to use the above linked area map and the "show my current location" button to mark the boundaries of the study area by tying blue and yellow paper ribbon saying "Fornlämning" around those trees which grow along the boundaries of the area.
Can I just say how much I love being a researcher in this part of the Information Age? That we have such resources as that wep page, which lets one look and see what culturally significant things are where in Sweden, including which are located where you are right this second, and to see that information on either a map, an aerial photo, or a lider image makes me happy.
Standing in the field for area 3575 one sees trees and underlying plant shrubs. Using the app to see the lidar images reveals that the nearby river has meandered back and forth across the width of its river valley, and that the slight rise that the hearth is on is actually an old river depositional area. The active river channel is to the north of this location now, but it has clearly also been to the south of this area as well.
After lunch in Wednesday I used the metal detector in the third study area, 3566:
With hearth 3566:
The modern metal things we found here have a very different character to those we'd found the day before on the hill near hearths 3571 and 3572. There we had found things showing that the recent history of the area has been primarily recreational (bottle caps, crumpled aluminium foil (probably used to cook something), flattened cans, and, near/in the hearth, nails). This area, on the other hand, seems be used more for work. I found a steel cable, about 1 or 2 cm thick, coiled into a ring about 60 or 70 cm diameter. There were a pair metal wires, perhaps 7 mm thick, folded in half, and their ends threaded through holes in a metal bar (one bar and folded wire per pair), that were interlinked. There were a couple of chrome covered strips that look like they used to decorate the side of a car, a couple of other bits of wire, one bear can pull top, of the sort used in the 1970's, and two bottle caps, one folded flat and too rusty to read the label, the other in aluminium, the pink and white paint faded, but still showing (the beverage had been passionfruit flavour), and one used gun bullet cartridge.
After finishing the metal detection we fastened a log to a pair of trees with some adjustable strap webbing. Later we will hang the screen bottom tray from that log for sifting away dirt from the excavation to see if there are any objects hidden in it.
We also cleaned away branches that fell to the ground during tree cutting, and we trimmed the spikes of trunks from small trees and bushes level with the ground so as not to be a tripping hazard.
Then we walked a bit further into the forest to look at another hearth that won't be investigated before returning to the first area to see how things had gone there in the meantime.
In addition to the manual Avtorvning near the hearth itself, we also hired an excavator to clear a few larger rectangles of vegetation in the area. It turns out that we didn't get the machine we had ordered, which is able to rotate its scoop for better control, but the driver nonetheless managed to get a couple of rectangles cleared. In those areas the most common exposed items after clearing away the vegetation was bits of glass. However, they did also find a 1 kr coin from 1949.
Then the work day was done and we went back to the apartment.
Thursday morning my boss and I started at area 3566 (where I had used the metal detector the day before), and we staked out a couple of white crossses to the ground to serve as gps reference points later. Then we decided that there was too much sunshine just then to take good overview photos of the area before excavation, so we went back to area 3575 and I did the metal detection there while she marked the boundaries of the study area and wrote up the description. This time we found a number of used gun cartridges (enough so that I suspect target practice rather than hunting), an old rusty, empty surströmming can (the lable was long gone, but that size and shape can is only used for surströmming), a glass bottle, crushed, with its lid (we suspect it had been intact before the forestry crew came in with heavy equipment to cut the trees in the study area), a flatened aluminium container of a sort that neither of us recognised, another metal container full of broken glass bits, another bottle cap, and a rotting log from which a number of bent nails were falling out of. Some of the nails looked very old and hand made, others looked modern. Most of the modern artefacts we found we just removed from the vegetation layer, photographed, and will probably simply discard them later. That log with nails we left in place and will look at closer later.
Then we cleaned away some branches and trimmed spiky small tree stumps flush with the ground until lunch time.
After lunch we returned to the main area (hearths 3571 and 3572), where I did the Avtorvning of the strip of vegetation between what had been done by the new, correct, excavator machine, and the hand-cleared areas by one of the hearths, while my boss did the other, and the orher two continued to work with documenting the extent of the newly machine excavated area. This time, at my bosses suggestion, taking it up in squares small enough to carry away, rather than rolling it.
That brought me to the end of the work day, and we returned to the apartment.
Friday we worked only a half day, as it is a four hour drive to Luleå from there, and everyone is looking forward to the weekend.
This time my boss and one of the others went to one (or both) of the orher hearths, while I and the other colleague worked at area 3571 and 3572. She worked on the machine excavated area, while I went over the area we had hand-cleared by the hearths on Tuesday and removed the final thin layer of vegetation (pretty much all roots), and carefully scraping to expose the really thin underlying black layer above the sand.
I managed to finish both rectangles by the hearths just as the others returned and it was time to leave.
I have taken most of the drive to type this on my phone. Soon we will be in Luleå, where I will spend the weekend at David and Caroline's picking black currants.