The ceramic material found at the pile dwelling is fragmented. Most of the time I am working with and trying to understand small fragments that weigh around 5-10g. It is common to work with smaller sherds when studying the Pitted Ware pottery due to...
Alvastra pile dwelling
Finds
Two unique scrapers from the middle Neolithic?
Hafted scrapers are typically unifacial (flaked on one side),made from flakes or blades of flint, that were then fixed or ”hafted” to a handle and used to scrape excess fat and flesh from animal hides as a part of the tanning process. I came across...
Fishing at Alvastra
Accession number 34984:x221y425, F6 (Fid 1188532) Fishing hook of boar tusk Photo: Gabriel Hildebrand, SHMM The picture shows an exquisitely preserved and previously unpublished object from the 1976-1980 excavations at the Alvastra pile dwelling. It...
A Miniature Vessel Found in the Storeroom
As we are progressing with our work with registering the material from the recent excavations at Alvastra pile dwelling we also have to study earlier research concerning the materials found during the excavations in 1909-1930. When we recently...
Flint axes were used as lithic cores at Alvastra pile dwelling?
The pile dwelling is a site that has left evidence of many interesting cultural activities. One such activity that has become very evident whilst cataloguing the flint material is the destruction and/or re-use of apparently fully functional tools,...
Impressive Impressions
I would like to draw attention to an interesting décor that I recently found on a sherd. It is something that I have never seen on Neolithic pottery before. The specific sherd is presented above. It is a flat rimmed sherd. The colour is light...
Projectile points in the Pile dwelling
There are two dominant types of projectile points that have been found in and around the pile dwelling at Alvastra. These are commonly referred to as tanged arrowheads and traverse arrowheads. Tanged arrowhead with fire damage from Alvastra pile...
Interim translations
If you search our database under accession number 34984 you will be greeted by a cascade of Swedish. This is not how we would like it to be but at the moment we are restricted by the confines of our database. Eventually it will be possible to...
Et voilà! A vessel is made
In my recent post I described the differences within the ceramic material found at Alvastra pile dwelling where the so called pile dwelling pottery (PBK) is singled out from the rest of the material partly through choices made during production. In...
Lithic material in the pile dwelling
There are literally thousands of pieces of flint in the material collected in the 1976-1980 investigations. These range in size from whole cores or pieces of cores and raw material to the smallest micro flakes, and debitage less than 1mm across. So...