🏵️ ❗ 🧠 🖌️ 📝
'Cognitive affordances of South Scandinavian Mesolithic portable art as inferred from complexity and entropy measures' ➡️ doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...
I have invested sooo much energy on this paper, so I hope you will give it a skim
Our findings expertly summarised here by co-author Riccardo:
Elsie Hultén, seated behind the snow, second from the left. Source: https://nol21.livejournal.com/819507.html
Elsie Hultén also seems to have been a general explorer-type botanist/chemist/ethnographer/badass, participating along with her husband in the Swedish Kamchatka Expedition of 1920-1923. Here you see her, second from the left, seated behind the snow. Her husband, Eric, is petting an adopted bear cub
Hultén 1939: 'Magiska Ornament i Mesoliticum?', fig.4
She believed, like Sophus Müller, that patterns in everyday handicrafts inspired the geometric engravings. These patterns, she argued, were continually applied to magically maintain an object's durability. The 1939 article iconically features her own embroidered version of the motif typology ✨
Hultén, seated, teaching in Kamchatka. Source: https://nol21.livejournal.com/819507.html
My shout-out on #InternationalWomensDay goes to Elsie Hultén, one of the earliest proponents of Mesolithic art having magical functions. To this day, her 1939 article 'Magiska Ornament i Mesoliticum?' remains one of the most persuasive and empirically founded interpretations of this material.
Today I ventured into the Maglemose heartlands and visited Holmegård Værk, where a true masterpiece of the #Mesolithic has been hiding in plain sight for sixty years. Stay tuned for the object biography 🖼️
I'll take two!
Just finished a well-executed #DIALPAST course on 'AI in Archaeology' in lovely Paris 🌟
GenAI & LLM ethics, AI in archaeological prospection, data mining legacy data - i understand this stuff better now.
Thanks to my #phd colleagues who participated, and thanks to
@uio.no for hosting DIALPAST
"[The] rich ornamentation", he continues, "[...] was probably produced at different times, when the owner felt like further adorning his tool in his spare time. The main motifs in this ornamentation are purely geometric figures, carelessly placed and quite casually thrown together."
Artefact drawing of the Skalstrup Mose axe. From Plonka 2003 'The Portable art of Mesolithic Europe', fig.124
Here you see the entire surface decoration. Lots of stuff going on - note also the snake(s)?! Broholm (1924) writes: "Perhaps one dares to see a fumbling attempt to portray a snake or worm".
Photograph of one side of the Skalstrup Mose axe (Photo: Anne Vad Christiansen, Nationalmuseet, CC-BY-SA), with close-up and redrawn detail of the fish-and-net-like engravings
The Mesolithic people evidently depicted fish exactly as any of us would today. But what is the fish swimming towards? Could it be a net? We don't know of course, but if you were to argue for Mesolithic art as a storytelling practice, this axe from Skalstrup Mose would be relevant to bring up
Big tubular bone. Don't think there is a species ID, but perhaps red deer?
"All the bands are very superficially and inaccurately engraved, as is the case with the engravings on other older Stone Age artefacts. It is probably correct to say that these engravings are more likely to be the result of idle hands than to be regarded as a specific ornamentation."
Old photograph of fragmented comb, Ertebølle culture. From Madsen 'Affaldsdynger fra Stenalderen i Danmark, undersøgte for Nationalmuseet' (1900), Plate VII
It's not an aggressive hand gesture sent from the distant past, but rather a comb with broken-off teeth from the eponymous Ertebølle shell midden.
Neergaard (1900) found the object itself to be 'probably the most charming of all the [Ertebølle] combs', but he is super underwhelmed by its decoration
If you enjoy furry mustelids, throwbacks to famous archaeological sites and theoretical discussions on Mesolithic human-animal ontologies, you might enjoy this fresh article, with christmas greetings from @sofiefh.bsky.social and I
❤️🐾
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Close-up image of a sand coloured stone, with a diagonal crack. The sand rock has a textured surface, and small spots of blue can be seen towards the centre of the stone. The background is grey.
Microscopic photo of the blue spots, that are irregular in shape and size and positioned diagonally across the image. The rest of the photo shows the rough sand coloured texture of the stone.
Time to update your Palaeolithic palettes... 🔵
Very proud to share our new research on the OLDEST use of blue pigment! We identified traces of azurite - a vibrant blue mineral - on a stone object around 14-13,000 years old. Why is this so exciting? 👇🏺
doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
Back 🏡 again from #MESO2025 in Ferrara, Italy, where I finally got to meet the faces of the field.
A Mesolithic-specific week like this only comes along every 5yrs, so I appreciated every minute of it. Now it's back to the Paternity bubble 🫧🌷
This aurochs radius mattock-head was found 100years ago 🎉
Brøndsted 1934: "... the three long lines with the transverse zigzag is an unusually precise and well-executed motif for Mesolithic ornamentation, demonstrating that the art of this period was capable of deliberately stylised geometrisation"
Drawn by A.Andersson, from Schmitt 1995: The West Swedish Hensbacka: a maritime adaptation and a seasonal expression of the North-Central European Ahrensburgian
"Transgressional phases, between 10.000-7.000 BP, may have caused a certain amount of inconvenience!"
Oi, I won an Early Career Researcher award for this neat paper doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...
(go read it plz❤️)
Thanks a lot to SAS & JAS!
lnkd.in/ee37g7-r
So long and tschüss to Grabow, the iconic Late Palaeolithic amber workshop. Great campaign on all parameters, run by top-notch @au.dk @auarcher.bsky.social students 🚀
Off to the field with @ll-herskind.bsky.social and a group of awesome students - four weeks teaching excavation and my @erc.europa.eu project CLIOARCH’s very last field season. And we’re going to excavate the world’s oldest amber art workshop from the Late Pleistocene 🤩
Nerve-racking day of sampling from these precious artefacts, but the results will be equally invaluable.
Let's get those radiocarbon dates!
⏳🦴🏺
Photo: Nationalmuseet Site: Øgårde, Zealand, DK
Take a moment to appreciate this stunning photo of a fragmented, perforated, neatly decorated artefact made from an aurochs radius ✨🏺
But how old is it, you ask? Time will tell!
#archaeology
I know full well that ResearchGate achievements are just a gamification gimmick that annoyingly fills our inboxes, but sometimes I have to admit it works. The 1000 "reads" of my 2023 MA thesis at least suggests that it lives its own life on the www.
Wonder how many actually read the thing though
Velkommen til vores første alumnedag på Moesgård - med bl.a. den helt store fredagsbar. Vi glæder os. Sign up here lnkd.in/dswV5fSw
Lige mine ord!
From Brinch Petersen 2016: Afterlife in the Danish Mesolithic – the creation, use and discarding of »Loose Human Bones«, fig.11a-b
This heavily used #Maglemose amber pendant depicts a group of people. Brinch Petersen gives a spooky interpretation:
"...four geometrical and standing persons with upright arms with a fifth floating above while a severed head is being presented by the last standing figure to the right."
#prehistory
From Larsson 1988: Ett fångstsamhälle för 7000 år sedan : boplatser och gravar i Skateholm, p.93
First pummeled by a wild boar, later killed and dismembered. The #Ertebølle man from Grave 13 at Skateholm had a rough life.
Perhaps it would have been a comfort for him to know that, ~7000 years later, archaeologists would make a comically morbid cartoon out of it 🏺
More on this here ➡️www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2023.12
Contemporary judgements of #prehistoric #art influence how we research and disseminate it.
Mesolithic art has, in implicit comparison to more famous traditions, often been described as “sparse and poor, without much care… As a whole, a hasty, random frippery without independent worth or bearing”