Finds of the Past Week

This week, in addition to several kilos of animal bone—ubiquitous on medieval sites, and useful for understanding past subsistence—we made some special finds.

An iron crossbow bolt and arrowhead uncovered in Trench F inside the tower, testaments to the martial nature of castles like Stensö.

In Trench F, inside the tower, we found two weapons, both projectiles. The first, above on the left, is the bolt from a crossbow. Skulls with wounds from bolts such as this have been found in the mass grave on the site of the great battle between Valdemar Atterdag’s Danish armies and the people of Gotland. Crossbows were a truly horrific weapon.

The smaller find beside the crossbow bolt is a normal arrow head, still quite deadly.

An annular brooch uncovered in Trench D.

In Trench D, one of the students uncovered a silver or copper alloy brooch (we wont be certain until it is restored). An exact correlate in type to this brooch was recovered from a hoard that was dated very precisely using coins in the hoard, giving us a very exact idea of when brooches such as this would have been extant in circulation. Much like the brooch we found last year at Stensö, it’s a great find. When we find possessions like these, I always wonder how they came to be lost. Was it swept out with the rushes by mistake? Did it fall from someone’s cloak while riding? In any case, brooches are great for establishing dates.

The wealth of ceramic sherds we have recovered this week, although not as photogenic as some of the special finds, are also very useful for dating the layers in which they occur. Ceramic from this period provides a 100 to 200 year window for dating, and this can be refined even further if larger, diagnostic sherds are excavated. These finds, such as the rims of a particular pot or vessel, can narrow dating to as little as 25 years—exceptional.

Thus far, we have still not found any coins, the ultimate diagnostic for dating. However, with the living floor identified inside the tower, we should rectify this soon if we are lucky. Finds such as these—although they can be deposited or lost long after they have gone out of circulation—are even better than getting a radio-carbon date. Cross your fingers for us…

A runic inscription in the mortar of the castle, situated behind, but probably not related to, a pile of bricks someone scavenged after the abandonment of the castle.

However, above is the most special find of the week. It is a runic inscription, once written in the still-wet mortar of the castle, which phonetically reads “HELK(I),” a man’s name. Individuals are rarely visible in the archaeological record—though they commonly occur in the historical record. But in this case, we can see and identify a reference to a person who once lived. We can surmise, though not definitely, that Helgi worked on the castle during a repair phase and wrote his name into his work. It is unusual that he chose to use runes which had largely passed out of fashion except in churches by the time the castle was in use. If he had skill as a building craftsman, it is not out of the question that he also worked on other buildings in the area, including churches. 

Start of 2015 Excavations

The map of the 2014 and 2015 excavation trenches at Stensö, Östergotland.

This week we started our excavations at Stensö by opening three trenches inside the site of the former castle and several, smaller exploratory units farther afield. Much like last year, the aims of the project are to retrieve small finds to help better understand how the people of Stensö lived and to uncover architectural features of the castle in order to learn how the castle was built and what form it might have taken while it was in use.

The three main trenches we opened (as you can see on the map) are D, E, and F, with the small group of test trenches labeled G (off the map, farther down the hill near the “harbor” to the east).

Trench D aims to uncover evidence of a well or water catchment area identified in previous surveys by Christian Lovén, the Swedish castellologist, located near the perimeter wall. This site has already yielded an enormous quantity of bone and other waste including iron and ceramic.

Trench E aims to uncover the base of the southern tower wall where it touches the bedrock in order to learn how the castle was built.

Trench F, inside the southern tower, has both architectural aims and aims associated with understanding the lives of the people who lived at Stensö.

Test trenches G (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) will hopefully show traffic between the castle and the bay, potentially showing how construction materials and other commodities were transported either during the tenure of the castle or during its dismantlement.

I am supervising Trench F, inside the tower. Interestingly, the castle has attracted an enormous amount of attention after it was inhabited and abandoned, and the first layer of Trench F (the turf overlaying the rubble from the collapse), shows clear evidence of camping and other outdoor recreation at the site in the 20th and 21st centuries (a fire ring, melted bottles, bottle tops, clay pigeons, and such). We even found a coin from 1987. Also, thus far, we have uncovered more than 30 1940s era magnesium batteries, showing that the tower was potentially used as a lookout during World War II when Sweden—although neutral in the war—was wary of activity in the region from both Russia and Germany.

Last year, we also found evidence of post-abandonment refuse, potentially dating to when the site was inhabited by tenant farmers living in a small hut or house on the site of Trench C. Thus, although the primary aim of the project is to learn about life in the medieval era, we are also gaining insight into how the site has been used throughout all the eras since. 

The collapse layer at Stensö, showing the bedrock just under the photo scale and the living floor, a thin, dark layer visible just to the right of the complete bricks.

After opening a test trench within Trench F to understand how deeply the rubble covers the cultural layers we are most keen to excavate, we found the “living,” earthen floor of the castle tower immediately overlying the bedrock hill upon which the tower was constructed. As we clear the tower of debris, we will come closer to our aim. Excavating in rubble is often a messy business, much less orderly than working with clear strata one might see in an archaeological textbook. However, since last year we have learned an enormous amount about how the castle collapsed after its use, and seeing a modern collapse at Stegeborg Castle to the south has helped as well. We are moving much more quickly than last year with the help of Martin’s excellent students!

Stensö and Landsjö

The remains of Landsjö Castle. The south-western corner of the outer perimeter wall, ensconced in the roots of a pine tree.

Stënso and Landsjö, although disparate sites and although constructed differently from one another, are remarkably similar in several important ways. 

Firstly, when they were constructed—Stensö slightly earlier than Landsjö—they were both owned by the same family. From the sparse historical records available at the time, we know that Holmger Torkelsson of the Boat family, and his wife Sigrid Karlsdotter of the Stubbe family, lived at Landsjö sometime around 1369 CE. Stensö had been owned by Lord Holmger's great-grandmother, Lady Kristina, sometime around 1280 CE. 

Lord Holmger and Lady Kristina's family probably had good relations with the Swedish crown at the time the two castles were built. In order to build private fortifications, one needed royal permission—specifically a "license to crennelate." Whether the issuing (or forbearance of issuing)  licenses indicated an interest in controlling the spread of military assets or were a way to control the socially ambitious who wished to demonstrate their status through castle building is not entirely agreed upon by archaeologists and castellologists—it needn't necessarily be clear cut. Although licenses to crennelate were rarely refused in England—indicating the crown probably had very little control over whether castles were built or not—the situation in Sweden may not be a direct correlate. The structures of the monarchies in England and in Sweden were different, for instance.

Secondly, continuing with the similarities, both Stensö and Lansjö were originally located on islands. Landsjö currently stands on an island in Lake Lansjön, and Stensö would have been on an island in a marsh in the Bråviken, a Baltic bay to the south of Stockholm. However, today Stensö is firmly landlocked on account of rising land, an effect still felt long since the glaciers receded after the last glacial maximum. Both castles were very difficult to get at if the owners did not want visitors.

Yet however strongly fortified their positions, both castles share a further similarly of meeting what we assume to have been somewhat grisly ends. Both Stensö and Landsjö were abandoned sometime in the 1400s or earlier, and today very little of the stone once contained in their massive walls can still be found on the sites themselves. At Stensö, only the foundation of a round tower and part of a perimeter wall exist above ground, and at Landsjö even less remains—only the western stretch of its perimeter wall, never at a height more than a meter or so, and its northern and southern corners. 
Most of it has been carted away and used to build other, newer structures that dot the local landscape. Stensö in particular shows strong evidence that it once suffered a powerful fire. Our excavations in 2014 uncovered evidence of brick that had gotten so hot it had vitrified, or turned to glass and partially melted under extreme heat. Both also seem to have been abandoned or given over to tenant farmers around the time the plague was spreading throughout Sweden, and this could have played a role in their demise as well.

Both castles are also prime examples of private fortifications—owned neither by the crown, nor by the church. As such, they are somewhat rare, and until our first season of excavations last summer, neither had ever been excavated before. 

I'll attempt to write more about the excavation of these two structures in the coming weeks, but unfortunately we have no internet at our dig house at Stensö, so it won't be as frequent as I would like!

Welcome!

The remaining tower at the Stensö castle ruin, June 2014.

I'm Ethan, and I am PhD student in archaeology at the University of Cambridge. I started this blog to share the excavation I'll be co-directing this year with my Swedish colleague Martin Rundkvist. We start our second season digging with Martin's students from Umeå University at Stensö on Monday, June 22 and at Landsjö on July 6. In the mean time, the excavation reports from our first season can be found on my Academia profile, and please be sure to check out my homepage as well.