High Medieval Farmstead

Iron wire brooch from Sommaränge, 14th century AD. Diam 27 mm.

The other day I received a copy of a new excavation report, produced by a number of close friends and dear colleagues at the SAU excavation unit in Uppsala. Three years ago, Emelie Schmidt Wikborg headed the excavation of a High Medieval farmstead at Sommaränge in Viksta parish, Uppland. I visited the dig once together with Emelie's hubby, my friend Jonas Wikborg, and I've followed the post-ex work, so it's great to see what came of it.

The building remains were pretty woolly due to the rural Medieval habit of erecting houses on wooden frames supported on easily removed stones instead of the age-old way with postholes. But there had been at least five houses including a smithy, and in addition there was a still-functioning well and the remains of a simple brick kiln. The site produced unusually many finds, including a surprising amount of metalwork with an aristocratic flavour: weaponry, spurs, dress ornaments, furniture mounts, combs and lots of horseshoes. This was at least partly thanks to the wise use of metal detectors before and after de-turfing. Check out the finds drawings by the great Stefan Kayat, who illustrated my doctoral thesis! The people who lived here were clearly a cut above the standard Medieval peasant.

The reasons that I like Sommaränge particularly are a) the number and quality of the small finds, which are always close to my heart, and b) the fact that the farmstead can pretty confidently be identified with a place mentioned from 1323 to 1482 in the written sources. It subsequently disappeared from the records: Giplinghe farm, or as it would be written in modern Swedish, Gipplinge. The excavation area was on the border of two villages that have historically fought over the land, probably because the marginal Gipplinge's demise did not take place in such a way that the rights to its land were entirely clear afterwards.

The dig also covered graves from the Bronze Age and Migration Period along with Late Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement remains, including a number of impressive burnt-stone mounds and rare Early Bronze Age metalwork. These prehistoric remains are treated in a separate report by Camilla Forsman and Helena Victor that hasn't appeared yet.

Emelie's a resourceful person. She keeps moving in and out of field archaeology and thus never seems to be unemployed: for a while she worked in the telecoms industry, then back to the trenches, and now she's with the state property management service. She's also an ex-punk chick and a rural culture geek who knows how to sing the cows home, milk them and make cheese. No wonder Jonas grabbed hold of her on her first dig and hasn't let go since.

The report isn't on-line here yet, but if you're into the real Middle Ages beyond the tournaments and castles and banquets, then you should get hold of a copy. Good stuff that you don't see every day.

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Schmidt Wikborg, Emelie. 2006. Från gård och grund uppå Sommaränge Skog. Medeltida bebyggelselämningar i Viksta socken, Uppland. SAU Skrifter 15. Uppsala. 224 pp. ISBN 91-975994-4-1.

[More blog entries about archaeology, medieval, Sweden; arkeologi, medeltiden.]

They're Digging In Sigtuna

This afternoon I drove up to Sigtuna to check out the excavations there. A treatment centre for MS sufferers are building an extension to their premises, which has given my colleagues an opportunity to dig a big whopping trench a stone's throw from the town museum. Anders Wikström heads the dig and he's got quite a team, including a number of archaeology PhDs waiting for the Boomers to retire from the universities. They've been digging since late May, and yesterday they were all absolutely drenched by rain.



The town of Sigtuna was founded in the late 10th century as a successor to Birka. Unlike Birka, it was a Christian centre and soon received a great number of stone churches, one of which was the first brick building in the Lake Mälaren area. But Sigtuna's heyday was brief and power moved on to Uppsala and Stockholm. Since about AD 1200, the town has been a quiet little place. American tourists always find it entertaining that its name sounds like "sick tuna".



The site under excavation has been farmland since the Late Middle Ages, so the team came down into 11th century urban layers really quickly. The stratigraphy is only one to two meters deep with a lot of subsoil contour. Part of the trench holds the edge of a Medieval churchyard with over 200 burials excavated so far. Interestingly, this is the first time in Sigtuna that a churchyard is found dug into earlier urban strata. This would indicate that the churchyard post-dates a re-planning event, possibly having to do with a processional street established to take celebrants around every church in town. This street has been clearly identified in the current dig. Before that, the area held unusually large and unusually orientated buildings, bringing to mind the high-status long houses on earthen platforms along the northern edge of the dense proto-urbanisation at Birka. So far, though, there are no strong indications of any wealthy inhabitants of the houses.

[More blog entries about vikings, vikingperiod, middleages, archaeology, Sweden; vikingatiden, medeltiden, arkeologi, Sigtuna.]