Farewell to Landsjö

On Friday, we finished the 2015 excavation season by filling our trenches at Landsjö. With everyone working hard in the mild, morning weather, we finished before lunch time. We ate one last meal together in the ballroom at Landsjö, and then everyone scattered throughout Sweden to finish the summer. I'm back at Cambridge now, putting the finishing touches on my master's degree, and I'll head back to California for a month of rest at the beginning of September.

Finds of the Week #3

Today is our last day digging for the 2015 Stensö/Landsjö Excavation Season. We will mostly be filling the trenches that remain open, returning tools to the local museum, and cleaning the house. However, this week we made several awesome finds.

In Trench I, inside the southwestern tower room, identified as a cellar of some sort, we finally cleared all the rubble after five days of digging. Once the layer under the rubble was excavated, a huge quantity of items were uncovered, including the huge key shown below. Keys are a fairly common find on medieval sites, some even larger than this one. This one was found in-situ with a hinge (also visible in the photo) and a large amount of bone, suggesting it is part of a rubbish heap left behind when scavengers ripped out a flagged floor, pieces of which they left, inside the tower.

A key found in Trench I, Landsjö.

We also found this copper-alloy dress ornament in the shape of a rose. This probably would have been sewn onto a man's tunic or onto a woman's dress. We found several other personal items as well (not pictured) including part of a comb and a knight's spur.

A copper-alloy rose.

Even though the dig is over, I still have some posts to put up about it in the future.

Allemansrätten

Chanterelle mushrooms picked in the forest near Landsjö. 

In Sweden, one has the right to roam on private lands without permission. Called the Right of Public Access (Allrmansrätten), it includes the ability to forage on private lands, except for the private area immediately surrounding a dwelling.  That means mushrooms! This weekend, we went into the forest nearby and gathered wild chanterelles. They grow abundantly in the summer and autumn in Sweden, particularly after bouts of rain  like we've just had. There are no similar looking species of mushrooms, except for another, less tasty type of chanterelle, and it's perfectly safe to gather the bright, yellow mushrooms. You can never have too many chanterelles. 

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. 

Bridges and Dendrochronology Dates

Excavating for a bridge at Landsjö, on an industrial scale (photograph by Simon Terbrant Säfström).

Because Landsjö Castle was built of incredibly heavy materials (the mortar alone would have required tons of sand and limestone) on an island, we always assumed that it was accessed from the shore via a long causeway or bridge. Although we know the castle was deconstructed over successive winters by dragging the large stone blocks across the ice sometime in the 1500s and 1600s, such a methodology would have been impractical for building the castle during short, winter days. 

Our initial idea was confirmed last year when we found used horseshoe nails intermixed with debris from the construction of the castle in Trench D. Although horses can swim and although they may have arrived on a barge, it seemed likely they came across a bridge. 

Two of the students, Henrik and Daniel,  enjoying the muddy work.

This year, we applied to dig a 1.5m x 150m trench in cooperation with the landowner Micke whose house we stay in during the dig. His foreman drove the digger out today, and we began the enormous trench. At our current numbers and pace, it would take us seven months to dig as much as he accomplished in a few hours. 

Posts retrieved from the trench. Note the tapered ends on the right two stakes. All three are probably large enough for dendro dates (photograph by Simon Terbrant Säfström).

The results were spectacular. By searching in the trench for the posts broken off as the trench was excavated, we were able to retrieve 15 or so, three of which can probably be dated using dendrochronology to the nearest-decade—if not the exact year—the tree was cut. Dendrochronology is ostensibly the science of quantifying tree rings based on large, known assemblages of preserved wood. In the waterlogged, oxygen-poor mud near the lake, organic materials do not degrade quickly, and there is a chance the posts may be even older than the medieval period.

The smaller pieces that cannot be dated using dendrochronology can still have their intrinsic ages determined using radio-carbon dating. Thus, the assemblage of posts we recovered, slices of which are now resting in the large freezer downstairs until they can be moved to a lab, is invaluable in determining the construction sequence of the castle. There was another spectacular find made along with the posts, but you’ll have to check back tomorrow for more on that.

Part of the full assemblage of posts recovered.

Abandon Ship!

Although we've been very lucky with the weather so far—rain tends to be less frequent in Sweden during late June and all of July—today we had a really wet day. With thunderstorms forecast about half an hour after the video below was shot (and indeed they did come) we decided to make a hasty retreat back across the lake. Later, after lunch, with the sun shining we set out to return, but only made it to the boats before the sky turned dark and the thunder started again. Better luck tomorrow...