Finds of the Week #2

Work has been slow at Landsjö this week; we lost an entire day to hard rain and thunder storms and several of the students have been ill. However, we have still had a couple of extraordinary finds.

A  type of medieval ard found while searching for the bridge that connected Landsjö Castle to the shore.

While trenching to find the bridge that would have connected Landsjö to the shore, I recommended that one of the students metal detect the dirt we temporarily removed. This was no small task given that the pile contained around 200 cubic meters of mud. Just before finishing, Ola uncovered the head from a medieval ard, something used for ploughing, similar to maul or hoe. The tool has been made with several design decisions such as the angle and type of socket used to haft it, and it will therefore be easy to date typologically. Although at first we thought it was from the Bronze Age, we are now fairly certain it is high medieval. 

The other side.

However, the most specular find from the week, in my opinion, is a small piece of ceramic we found in Trench H. Team H has been looking for evidence of a drawbridge or other structure in the vicinity of the dry moat that divides the island in half near the southern edge of the perimeter wall. Although no evidence of this type has been or will be found, we are fairly certain the trench shows evidence for the excavation of the moat. The piece of ceramic, which is quite thick and made from a paste with large quartzite fragments and decorated with a stamp, is almost certainty from the Swedish Battle Axe Culture, a subset of the Corded Ware culture that existed throughout Europe in the late Neolithic. This would make the ceramic at least 4,000 years old—more than 3,200 years older than anything else we have found on the excavation thus far. It is likely that while digging the ditch, the medieval workers displaced the remains of a Neolithic settlement on the island. A few centimeters below the Neolithic ceramic, a piece of medieval ceramic was also recovered, illustrating the feasibility of this explanation.

A piece of  Swedish Battle Axe Culture ceramic uncovered in Trench H at Landsjö. 

After finding the ceramic, we have screened with extra vigilance, looking for prehistoric artifacts that can be easily overlooked when searching for medieval remains. Other than flint and whetstones, most rocks are considered geological and not worth a second glance in a medieval setting—not so when dealing with stone age culture. Since then, we have found fire-cracked stones and many pieces of quartz debritage—the remains of stone tool manufacturing or knapping. These finds show that Landsjö has been inhabited far longer than anyone previously realized. 

This week, as we finish digging inside both the northwest and southwest towers of the castle, we hope to make many more finds.