Inte en Fornlämning

[kareina]

 The work yesterday and the day before confirmed what we had already been suspecting, the hearths have been used only in modern times, and don't count as "Fornlämning" (just now artefacts and sites in Sweden have to have been in use before 1850 to get that designation).

 

I think my colleagues are more disappointed than I am about this. They had all of the work planing the project and gathering the tools and supplies needed. I on the other hand, got my first glimpse on how one approaches such a site, marking the boundaries, taking the gps readings, recording information and taking photographs before doing anything, and then carefully excavating through the layers and sifting each to be certain that all artefacts have been found.

 

In the hearth I excavated they burned a lot of wood with nails in it. I don't have a scale here, but the bag of just nails found in that hearth is absoutly more than 1 km. Those nails, and the broken glass, continue to be present all the way to the bottom of the hearth, with many pieces of the clear glass occurring right under the bottom layer of charcoal, and over the white sand. (This location is in a deposition area of a river valley, where the river has clearly flowed on other side of this location, once upon a time.

 

Once I had excavated and sifted to the bottom of the hearth, I dug a deeper trench next to it, to expose the full profile, which has been measuered and photographed (the charcol layer 7-17 cm thick, white/grey powdery sand 5-9 cm thick, and the underlying orange/brown sand is more than 14 cm thick, as I only dug the trench that deep).

 

So we spent yesterday afternoon filling in thectrenches we'd dug and gathering and packing up the tools and supplies.

 

Today two of them will work with the excavator, which will put back the vegetation layers it removed, while the fourth and I will go check out reports of an old housecfoundation that isn't in the national record, and look to see if we can find any other tools in an area that a local says they found a quartz scraper.

 

 

Comments

[redbird]

This is interesting, thank you for posting it. We get the occasional newspaper articles about rescue archeology, the times when they do find something ancient and/or interesting under a parking lot or a planned construction site. That implies more times when the city of Rome, for example, had an archeologist there in case the construction crew found something worth recording, but they didn't, but the process of taking a look and concluding that those potsherds are neither unusual nor ancient doesn't get a newspaper article.

[annofowlshire]

I love that you're getting so much out of this, even if it's not the hearths that were originally hypothesized!