Database

Most of the archaeological assemblage from the excavations 1909-1930 has been registered in the museum database. It has been recorded by many different archaeologists over a long period of time. Much was done by the various archaeologists employed at the Swedish History Museum, especially by Hans Browall. Within the Alvastra pile dwelling project 2015-2019 efforts have been made to register the remainder of the material, work carried out by interns from the Department of archaeology and classical studies at the University of Stockholm (see here).

 

It is now only the following categories that remain to be fully registered: unworked stone and organic material (i.e. wood samples, hazelnuts, macrofossils, apples, charcoal and other samples).  These categories comprise an estimated 18% of the total assemblage. Thus around 82% of Frödin’s assemblage is available in digitized form, comprising around 10 200 records (April 2019). Regarding the osteological assemblage from the earlier excavations, see the chapter on osteology below.

 The 2015-2019 project registered the whole assemblage from Mats P. Malmer’s excavations in the museum database, address see below. It consists of 12481 records (April 2019).

This database is available at the following address: http://mis.historiska.se/mis/sok/sok.asp. https://historiska.se/upptack-historien-start/sok-i-samlingarna/

Unfortunately, this public version of the museum database has not been updated since August 2018. This is due to the fact that the Swedish History Museum acquired a new database in August 2018. The public version of the database remains in the old database and it will take some time before it can be exported to the new version.  It is estimated that a new public updated database will be available by the end of 2020.  Some material, especially bone/antler/tooth/tusk artefacts and osteological bones from Frödin’s excavations, has been registered since then and many corrections have been made to existing records. These are not visible in the public database. Efforts have been made to include on this site extracts from the internal database in the chapters on different archaeological materials below, but these extracts are in the form of static lists.

Objects on exhibition

Some 160 records (one record can be more than one object) from Otto Frödin’s excavations can be seen in the exhibition Prehistories at the Swedish History Museum. They belong to room 5 entitled” How large is your world?” and they are contained in two showcases.  This link takes you to a list of the exhibited objects:

http://mis.historiska.se/mis/sok/exhib.asp?id=43885&uid=309543&sm=11_0.  Alvastra, together with three piles (see piles), also features in the audiovisual display which can be viewed in the same room.