Chapter 12 The partial and the vague as a visual mode in Bronze Age rock art

Studies of rock art normally depart from a classification of type, style and what the motifs represents or depicts. South Scandinavian rock art, however, is often vague, incomplete and fragmentary. In this chapter, it is argued that certain rock art motifs, mainly boats and anthropomorphs, were deliberately made incomplete as a part of a vitalist technology with the aim of affecting the world. An important aspect of such visual vagueness, intentional or not, is that it can function as a punctum in Roland Barthes’s terminology and evoke affect among beholders. The incomplete motifs also stress the making of rock art as a continuous process in which details can be added over time to enhance certain aspects or radically alter the motif. The chapter is illustrated with examples of Bronze Age rock art of the Mälaren district in central-eastern Sweden

The materiality of the ancient dead. Post-burial practices and ontologies of death in southern sweden AD 800–1200.

The text discusses reuse and modifications of older graves in southern Sweden during the Late Iron Age and early medieval period (c. 9th to 12th centuries AD). Post-burial practices in the Late Iron Age have in general been interpreted as means to negotiate status, identity and rights to land, while in the later part of the period they are comprehended as expressions of religious insecurity and syncretism. In this text, the continuity of post-burial practices during the whole period is stressed and instead of general top-down interpretative models, the ontological status and material aspects of death, dead bodies and their graves is emphasized. It is argued that the post-burial actions generally constituted ways of relating to a specific type of materiality, the bones of the ancient dead, which transgress binary categorizations such as living–dead, past–present, heathen–Christian, and human–nonhuman. The argument builds on ve recently excavated sites in southern Sweden: Bogla, Broby Bro, Lilla Ullevi, Valsta and Vittene. Journal Name: Current Swedish Archaeology, Vol 24: 137-16

The changing roles of archaeology in Swedish Museums

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Characterization of the Viral Microbiome in Patients with Severe Lower Respiratory Tract Infections, Using Metagenomic Sequencing

The human respiratory tract is heavily exposed to microorganisms. Viral respiratory tract pathogens, like RSV, influenza and rhinoviruses cause major morbidity and mortality from respiratory tract disease. Furthermore, as viruses have limited means of transmission, viruses that cause pathogenicity in other tissues may be transmitted through the respiratory tract. It is therefore important to chart the human virome in this compartment. We have studied nasopharyngeal aspirate samples submitted to the Karolinska University Laboratory, Stockholm, Sweden from March 2004 to May 2005 for diagnosis of respiratory tract infections. We have used a metagenomic sequencing strategy to characterize viruses, as this provides the most unbiased view of the samples. Virus enrichment followed by 454 sequencing resulted in totally 703,790 reads and 110,931 of these were found to be of viral origin by using an automated classification pipeline. The snapshot of the respiratory tract virome of these 210 patients revealed 39 species and many more strains of viruses. Most of the viral sequences were classified into one of three major families; Paramyxoviridae, Picornaviridae or Orthomyxoviridae. The study also identified one novel type of Rhinovirus C, and identified a number of previously undescribed viral genetic fragments of unknown origin

Liv och död i det tredje rummet - hybriditet och materialitet under mellanneolitikum

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Döden i den bräckta Lagunen - bland hundar och barn i Skateholm

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