Daniel Löwenborg

In Scandinavia, numerous regions with high densities of rock art exist. One notable area is Mälardalen in central Sweden, where rock art, primarily dating from the Bronze Age and featuring various characters and symbolic meanings, is located along the prehistoric Lake Mälaren coastline. This article examines the landscape locations of these carvings in order to identify their distribution patterns. The methods employed include spatial analysis with geographic information system combined with Maxent, a machine learning technique. Geospatial data on the environment, particularly the bedrock, along with information about archaeological sites and the number of carvings, were analyzed. The primary findings reveal a significant correlation between rock art and quartz arenite. Despite covering only 1.6% of the land area in Mälardalen, this bedrock type hosts half of the known rock art. In this study, rock art is defined as images depicting various figures, such as ships, while cup marks are analyzed separately. The study argues that there has been a significant preference for specific rock types in the creation or preservation of rock art. The rock must be sufficiently soft to allow for carvings, yet hard and stable enough to withstand weathering.

Background: This paper presents a new software tool, Inglämnlagare, developed to be open-source, that restructures information about ancient remains in Sweden for analysis. The background is a new version of the ancient sites database, the Historic Environment Record, curated by the Swedish National Heritage Board, that was launched in 2018 with a new database model that structures the information differently compared to previous versions. Methods: The program, written in Python programming language, has multicore support in order to improve performance for large files and uses regular expressions to extract information about individual features of composite sites. Such features, together with their summed amount, are written as new individual fields to a comma-separated value file. The program is delivered as a source script file that can be executed in any Python environment. Use cases: As an example of use, a case study of exploring graves of rectangular shape found within Sweden is provided. The use case also describes the different steps involved in preparing the data in QGIS to run the program, as well as some methods to efficiently analyse and visualize the output. Conclusions: Inglämnlagare will make more information from the Swedish record of ancient sites accessible for research and can be used to explore different content of the record more efficiently than previously possible. While the tool is written specifically for this dataset it also provides an example of how open-source tools can be used for data wrangling making information designed for a specific purpose, such as online dissemination, appropriate for analysis.

Background: This paper presents a new software tool, Inglämnlagare, developed to be open-source, that restructures information about ancient remains in Sweden for analysis. The background is a new version of the ancient sites database, the Historic Environment Record, curated by the Swedish National Heritage Board, that was launched in 2018 with a new database model that structures the information differently compared to previous versions. Methods: The program, written in Python programming language, has multicore support in order to improve performance for large files and uses regular expressions to extract information about individual features of composite sites. Such features, together with their summed amount, are written as new individual fields to a comma-separated value file. The program is delivered as a source script file that can be executed in any Python environment. Use cases: As an example of use, a case study of exploring graves of rectangular shape found within Sweden is provided. The use case also describes the different steps involved in preparing the data in QGIS to run the program, as well as some methods to efficiently analyse and visualize the output. Conclusions: Inglämnlagare will make more information from the Swedish record of ancient sites accessible for research and can be used to explore different content of the record more efficiently than previously possible. While the tool is written specifically for this dataset it also provides an example of how open-source tools can be used for data wrangling making information designed for a specific purpose, such as online dissemination, appropriate for analysis.

Although data reusers request information about how research data was created and curated, this information is often non-existent or only briefly covered in data descriptions. The need for such contextual information is particularly critical in fields like archaeology, where old legacy data created during different time periods and through varying methodological framings and fieldwork documentation practices retains its value as an important information source. This article explores the presence of contextual information in archaeological data with a specific focus on data provenance and processing information, i.e., paradata. The purpose of the article is to identify and explicate types of paradata in field observation documentation. The method used is an explorative close reading of field data from an archaeological excavation enriched with geographical metadata. The analysis covers technical and epistemological challenges and opportunities in paradata identification, and discusses the possibility of using identified paradata in data descriptions and for data reliability assessments. Results show that it is possible to identify both knowledge organisation paradata (KOP) relating to data structuring and knowledge-making paradata (KMP) relating to fieldwork methods and interpretative processes. However, while the data contains many traces of the research process, there is an uneven and, in some categories, low level of structure and systematicity that complicates automated metadata and paradata identification and extraction. The results show a need to broaden the understanding of how structure and systematicity are used and how they impact research data in archaeology and in comparable field sciences. The insights into how a dataset’s KOP and KMP can be read is also a methodological contribution to data literacy research and practice development. On a repository level, the results underline the need to include paradata about dataset creation, purpose, terminology, dataset internal and external relations, and eventual data colloquialisms that require explanation to reusers.

Volcanism is one of the main natural climate forcings at annual to multi-decadal timescales. Therefore, this forcing is important to study Holocene climate variability. Our main objective is to examine the impact of volcanism on the climate in the 6th century AD within the iLOVECLIM model and analyze the results with archeological data. We hypothesize that large volcanic eruptions around 536 AD and 540 AD contributed to cooling of the climate, resulted to the adversities of Late ancient societies throughout Europe, and caused a major environmental event in Iron Age Scandinavia.In this work, we have made three groups of simulations with the iLOVECLIM model, representing the climate of 536 AD and 540 AD. Two scenarios include high and low volcanic activity forcing, while in the third scenario, volcanic forcing is absent. We applied a model version with dynamical downscaling to reach a spatial resolution that allows for a meaningful comparison with archeological data. We compared our model results with C14-dated archaeological records from Scandinavia to analyze the spatial intensity of land use during these time periods. An evaluation of the difference between these simulations will highlight the impact of the volcanic activity on early to mid-6th century Scandinavia.This study demonstrates the link between climate and volcanism during these periods and shows the advantage of combining the archaeological records with climate data to understand human-environment interactions. Future research that considers both climatological and archaeological data can benefit our understandings of the impact extreme natural events had on the environment, the climate and people.

Heritage management in Sweden has undergone a substantial transformation in recent decades. The process of monitoring and managing heritage information has become increasingly digital, relying on interconnected systems to monitor registered archaeological remains to manage investigations and contract archaeology excavations. This also has to work together with the digital systems of the County Administrative Boards that administer all permissions for excavations. Current developments deal with archiving and dissemination of reports, and documentation from fieldwork. Documentation of archaeological excavations has predominantly been digital for the past 20 years, which brings both possibilities and challenges in making sure the information will adhere to the FAIR Principles. This article outlines some of these developments and exemplifies the possibilities of reusing legacy data through the Urdar project.