The scent of sandstone – exploring a TRB material

The aim of this article is to briefly explore how quartz-rich sandstone might have been perceived by TRB societies. Using the senses as a point of departure, it discusses how sandstone was selected for grinding stones and for dry walling in megaliths, emphasizing the significance of the visual as well as the mechanical properties of the material. The article also acknowledges the complexity of the way in which the material was perceived. The significance of sandstone was shaped by context, implying that a changing context altered its significance. Ultimately, this study is a call for taking materials seriously by exploring them in a more nuanced way. Analogies, for example, can be very useful – not as proof, but as a way of raising questions and scenting the diversity of the Neolithic

Neolithic Diversities : Perspectives from a conference in Lund, Sweden

Papers from a conference in Lund, Sweden. The title of the conference was "What's new in the Neolithic". The book brings together the latest research on the Neolithic of northern Europe. In the study of the distant human past, certain events and periods have come to represent decisive passages from one human state to another. From a global perspective, the characteristic feature of the last ten thousand years is that people in different parts of the world, and at different points in time, started to grow plants and domesticate animals. The rise and dissemination of agriculture were crucial factors for the continued existence of humankind on earth. The incipient agriculture is often regarded as the very beginning of human culture, as it has traditionally been perceived in western historiography, that is, as control over nature and the “cultivation” of intellectual abilities. As a result of the increasing national and international interest in the northern European Neolithic (4000–2000 BC), combined with large-scale archaeological excavations which helped to nuance and modify the picture of the period, senior researchers and research students formed a Neolithic group in 2010. The Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University served as the base, but the group also included collaborators from Linnaeus University and Södertörn University, and from the Southern Contract Archaeology Division of the National Heritage Board in Lund and Sydsvensk Arkeologi in Malmö and Kristianstad. Meetings and excursions in the following two years resulted in the holding of an international conference in Lund in May 2013 entitled “What’s New in the Neolithic”. Invitations to this conference were sent to two dozen prominent Neolithic scholars from northern and central Europe. This publication gives aspects of innovative research on the European Neolithic

Fragments of life and death : the biography of grinding and polishing stones found in long barrows at the Almhov burial site

The burial and gathering site Almhov was discovered as a result of large-scale archaeological excavations in southern Sweden revealing the remains of five long barrows, two dolmens and a large number of pits, rich in finds. Given the multitude of activities performed at the site including, for example, monument-building, pit-digging, burying, feasting and axe-manufacturing, the site can serve as an example ofthe complexity of large Early Neolithic gathering places. The activities, as well as the physical monuments and pits, can be interpreted as an expression of how Early Neolithic man made sense of the changing world brought about by the Neolithization. Different perspectives as well as archaeological remains of various kinds offer different narratives of this on-going process. Artefacts interpreted as polishing and grinding stones were by far the most common type of ground stone artefacts found at Almhov, and the interesting contexts in which they were discovered,as well as their sheer number, poses a variety of questions about their presence at Almhov. How can we, for example, make these artefacts tell us something about the people in the area and the Neolithic way of life? This article focuses on the grinding and polishing stones found in two of the long barrows on Almhov, and uses them as the basis of a case study of how a biographical approach can be utilized as a method of categorizing and interpreting ground stone artefacts. Why, for example, were pieces of grinding stones placed in connection with the façade of one of the long barrows? Why were grinding stones, broken in half, put into graves? This paper suggests that the tools represented the novelty of making monuments and that putting them together with the dead could have been a way of mediating new practices with reference to the past

‘My Rainbow Family’—Discomfort and the Heteronormative Logics

Author's accepted version (post-print).AcceptedVersio

Self-reported memory strategies and their relationship to immediate and delayed text recall and working memory capacity

The aim of this study was to examine the performance of fifth-grade children in the reproduction of the content of a new text - directly, after they had read it (immediate recall), and one week later (delayed recall) - and to investigate the relationship between performance, self-reported memory strategies, and working memory capacity (WMC). The results revealed that more complex strategies are associated with better performances, and that children with high WMC outperformed children with lower WMC in immediate and delayed text recall tasks. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that memory strategy and WMC are the strongest predictors for both immediate and delayed recall tasks. It is argued that self-reported memory strategies are possible to use as estimates of strategy proficiency. The awareness of the importance of memory strategies and children’s WMC in education are further discussed