Peder Winstrup (1605-1679) was a gentleman we have been working on for some time now. He lived in a turbulent time. He became bishop of Lund in 1638, then still a part of Denmark, and through various wars he saw first one part of his diocese turning Swedish in 1645, and the rest in 1658….
The ring-fortress in Löt
Öland is full of ring fortresses. They are similar to some extent, they are ring-shaped and often have some kind of origin in the migration period. But they are also unique. One was still used in the wars in the 17th century, another is full of dead people, and a third has nine entrances and…
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and human evolution
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA) has published a new brief text on human prehistory, genetics, and archaeology (only in Swedish though). I was lucky to be among the authors who worked with the text, coordinated by Mattias Jakobsson. With some frequency KVA tries to summarize what we know as the research frontier move…
Ancient DNA gone forensic, or the other way around.
After a few decades in the field I can list a number of conferences, meetings, and attempted projects where we have claimed ambitions (that were never realised) to collaborate with the forensic side. We keep cheering ourselves with producing techniques that are useful for catching the bad guys, but do we really? That is why…
Of trains and archaeogenetics in the Middle East
Examining a thesis defense requires a few things. A thesis, someone who defends the thesis, an examiner, and a place where it is presented. In this case we had “Population Genomics, adaptation, and ancient diseases in the Near East from Chalcolithic until the end of the Iron Age”, Motahare Feizabadi Farahani defended it and yours…
The collections in Tumba
We have several excellent museums in Stockholm, it is for example possible to check out the Historical Museum, and the Mediterranean Museum. And many of these museums keep much material magazined south of Stockholm, in Tumba. They have to, there would simply not be enough space for it in the city buildings. And although this…
Neomatrix, not yet at the final sprint
Neomatrix will soon enter into its last year. We still have much to do throughout these last 13 months. Much fun remains. Neomatrix is a twinning project, funded by EU, and including academic organisations from Stockholm, Paris, Heraklion, and Ankara (who coordinates it). If someone in the field asks what it really is I usually…
”Scotland is my dreaming head”
“An Alliance once existed between the Anatomical museum in Edinburgh and Stockholm University. Long ago we published together. We come to honor that allegiance.” Is one way of putting it. Another would be: “You and I have unfinished business”. Linus Girdland Flink, now in Aberdeen, has done some interesting work with my group over the…
Archaeogenetics in Athens
Locking people up and forcing them to work is usually bad, and often illegal and defined as slavery. But sometimes it is not bad, if it happens in Athens. We had several projects we needed to move forward, people who could work on them, and the Swedish Institute in Athens could spare us their localities…
The Good Friday battle, what will the DNA tell us?
Since we are getting involved in a number of projects relating to battles, we organized the metaproject WarStories in which we try to collect all of them. The latest addition is The Good Friday battle. It happened in Uppsala the 6th of April 1520, and was between a Swedish and a Danish army. The Swedish…
A popular presentation in Kalmar on aDNA
A few weeks ago I was asked to present our work on the 17th century warship Kronan and also on a migration period ring fortress on the Baltic island Öland. The presentation was much about demography, from where did the people come etc. All in Swedish I’m afraid, no English summary or anything. Still kind…
aMeta, the tool I needed
A few years ago, I got curious on what archaeogenetics could do for the understanding of diseases. By then the archaeogenetics exploring human mobility had turned into a standard toolkit applied to various dataset while genetic palaeopathology seemed to be the next frontier. And as you would expect from a coming frontier, there were promising…
Ancient DNA Research 