Insects and worms

Otto Frödin’s excavations

Browall only mentions one find of a possible insect from the older excavations (2011:337). This is a question of one insect shell, accession number 15703. It has, however, not been studied by any specialist and Browall thinks it could be a carbonised seed pod.

In the soil produced from the excavation of a peat block Jonas Bergman discovered the eggs of intestinal parasites. He published his results on the Alvastra blog and in the Journal of archaeological science (Bergman 2018).

Mats P. Malmer’s excavations

Fig. 1 Insects from Malmer’s excavations (file will be downloaded shortly).

The insects registered in the database include one fly and seven fragments of beetle. One comes from the fixed series of botanical samples in the Eastern trench (BP3; for explanation of this see here). This would seem to be from Göransson’s square N in the Eastern trench (i.e. EN; Göransson 1995: fig 5) as it is registered in Malmer’s list of samples as coming from x220/y425. The others seem to have been recovered directly by archaeologists during excavation. They do not bear any macrofossil sample number. It may be the sample registered as BP3 that contained remains of a beetle, Trechus secalis, a species of ground beetle (Lemdahl 1995:99). None of the other insects are identified as to species.

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The following reference cited on this page has no web link:

Bergman, J., 2018. Stone Age disease in the north – human intestinal parasites from a Mesolithic burial site in Motala, Sweden. Journal of Archaeological Science, vol.96, pp.26-32.

Browall, H., 2011. Alvastra pålbyggnad, 1909-1930 års utgrävningar. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien. Handlingar. Antikvariska serien 48. Stockholm.