Papers by Daniel Löwenborg
Current Swedish archaeology, Dec 23, 2022
Review by Daniel Löwenborg Technological developments and the implementation of digital methods o... more Review by Daniel Löwenborg Technological developments and the implementation of digital methods over the past few decades have changed how archaeological excavations in Sweden are documented. This ongoing process has profound implications for contract archaeology and the possibilities for generating relevant knowledge. This is the topic of Fredrik Gunnarsson's thesis 'Det digitala uppdraget: Om uppdragsarkeologins möjligheter att skapa relevant kunskap i ett digitalt samhälle'. The thesis was preceded by a licentiate thesis that touches on similar topics, including how digital tools can aid the reflexive process in archaeological interpretation. Emphasis was also placed on public outreach and engagement, and new opportunities involving digital dissemination. Gunnarsson discusses different aspects of this, from quick and easy online access to information, to digital reconstructions and virtual reality. The PhD thesis goes more in-depth regarding the production of new knowledge as part of contract archaeology, and the role of digital approaches, or what they could have, in this. Gunnarsson's thesis has nine chapters, and starts with a thorough overview of the technological development of Swedish archaeology and the organisational framework that has created the current situation. He also de
Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia, Uppsala Universitet, 2018
The Iron Age Shock Doctrine : What were the mechanisms behind the social changes in Scandinavia a... more The Iron Age Shock Doctrine : What were the mechanisms behind the social changes in Scandinavia at the middle of the first millennium AD?
Cultural landscapes are closely linked to human well-being, but they are undergoing rapid and fun... more Cultural landscapes are closely linked to human well-being, but they are undergoing rapid and fundamental change, often leading to the loss of landscape values. Understanding the societal transformation underlying these landscape changes, as well as the ecological and societal outcomes of cultural landscape transformations across scales are prime challenges for landscape research. Nevertheless, so far, a common understanding of cultural landscapes is missing, which has inhibited the design of effective policies to safeguard cultural landscape values. Based on the foci of the Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), we propose a framework to manage and integrate the different understandings of cultural landscapes. Six major dimensions of landscapes emerged from recent progress in landscape research that we propose to consider when studying landscape change in relation to societal transformations: (1) social-ecological linkages in landscapes, (2) landscape structure and land us...
Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History, 2012
event trigger large-scale social changes in the Mälaren valley area?
The Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History
In this article, a dataset of burial grounds is considered in relation to the question of a proba... more In this article, a dataset of burial grounds is considered in relation to the question of a probable demographic crisis in the 6th century AD, as a consequence of the cosmic event in AD 536-7. Although indications of an extensive crisis can be seen in a wide range of sources, it is difficult to make any estimate of the extent of the crisis. Some hypothetical social consequences are, however, discussed and compared to the Black Death in the 14th century AD. For the 6th century crisis, a widespread upheaval and renegotiation of property rights for land that has been abandoned is suggested, together with a possible redefinition of the nature of property rights. After the crisis there seem to be increased possibilities for private ownership of land, which enables the acquisition of large landholdings among a limited number of people. This is related to an increasingly stratified social structure in the Late Iron Age, where an elite is thought to have been able to take advantage of the ...
F1000Research
Background: This paper presents a new software tool, Inglämnlagare, developed to be open-source, ... more 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...
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society
KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies
Although data reusers request information about how research data was created and curated, this i... more 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 discusse...
<p>Volcanism is one of the main natural climate forcings at annual to multi... more <p>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 6<sup>th</sup> 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.</p><p>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-6<sup>th</sup> century Scandinavia.</p><p>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.</p>
Acta Archaeologica, Apr 19, 2010
This paper will discuss a pedagogical approach to integrating the humanities and the natural scie... more This paper will discuss a pedagogical approach to integrating the humanities and the natural sciences. Our approach calls for extended collaboration between the two fields and a capacity to integrate the experimental and deductive lines of reasoning within the natural sciences with the holistic and critical perspectives of the humanities. This paper will describe and discuss how this notion is applied to the construction of a pedagogical framework or a learning environment constituted from landscape theory, GIS, and pedagogical principles derived from EBL and PL. The paper highlights how a landscape approach in combination with the interactive and dynamic properties of GIS can be used as an active learning environment crossing the interfaces of the disciplines.
This special volume is dedicated to the proceedings of the session <em&amp... more This special volume is dedicated to the proceedings of the session <em>Bridging the Gap – Integrated Approaches in Landscape Archaeology</em> held at the 3rd International Landscape Archaeology Conference (LAC) 2014 in Rome, Italy.
Work Package 2.3 of the HERCULES project brings together a protocol for studying the long-term ch... more Work Package 2.3 of the HERCULES project brings together a protocol for studying the long-term changes in cultural landscapes and spatial dynamic modelling frameworks and tools. Additionally it pre ...
In this paper a method for reconstructing territories through the calculation of watersheds from ... more In this paper a method for reconstructing territories through the calculation of watersheds from the topography is put forward. Watershed could, in some cases, work as a natural uniting factor for a region, e.g., connecting a region through a system of rivers used for communications, as a unit for land management, or as an otherwise uniting element. This method provides an opportunity to analyze territories and regions that, although often difficult to distinguish in the archaeological material, are crucially important for the understanding of past societies. This article illustrates the use of watershed analyses in relation to territorial units through examples from the province of Västmanland in central Sweden, and Hawaii, but the method could be applied to any geographical area.
Recuperating GIS data from excavations : On the use, or lack of use, of digital archaeological in... more Recuperating GIS data from excavations : On the use, or lack of use, of digital archaeological information
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Papers by Daniel Löwenborg