kareina

This week I did my 20 hours of LTU work Monday-Thursday, with only a tiny bit of Durham reading in the evenings. Therefore I opted to work from home on Thursday, during which I managed to do 8 hours of thesis work and 2.5 hours of snow shoveling. I also took three breaks for 30 to 60 minute long phone calls hanging out with David who had to work in Storuman (a four hour drive inland) today.

While I feel guilty that I haven't been working on the geochemistry questions that need addressing, I am having ever so much fun playing with Swedish Historical Museum's database . I have now made a good start on this section of my thesis introduction. First I introduced the database and mentioned that I would be summarizing the steatite finds from it, organized from North to South, and from West to East, grouped by Swedish Provinces, and below them by either the location number (if the exact location is known), or the name of the parish (if the exact location isn't known). So far I have finished the province of Norrbotten (from which there is only one steatite object), and am mostly done with Lappland (from which there were four locations with steatite finds). So far most of the objects that have been typed up are Bronze age cast moulds for axes or spear-points. However, two of them were medieval vessels. Now that I have the trick of searching by shape (föremål), and specifying "täljsten" for the Material, and the name of the province under "Landskap" it should go fairly quickly to work my way down the country.

It will go even faster for those locations with precisely known locations, since they come with a .klm file to export into GoogleEarth. Most of today's work was for finds that had been purchased in the 1950's and only had descriptions of the location plus the name of the parish, so a good chunk ot today's effort was carefully reading those descriptions and trying to decide where in GoogleEarth to put the star on the map for each location. For the ones in the Vilhelmina Parish I have also emailed a lady at the museum in that town asking if she can help find some of the locations (thanks to a suggestion made by a friend of a friend when I asked on FB).

However, now it is 03:15 and I really should do my yoga and get some sleep!