Comment by phinnaeus

2 months ago

The local archaeologist? Incredible

Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.

There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.

Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.

To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...

  • it seems like you moved to property on "a road called 'Solsteinen' " .. did it occur to anyone that many special local things might be built close to the stable sun stone? I would even guess that no one built a home or horse barn there because they were not allowed to by the community.. this is modern development.. using up the ancient old area for a new sale. That is the appearance from the description above.

    • The (immediate) area has been farmed for hundreds of years, so I would guess most old burial mounds etc has been recycled centuries ago. The houses there now are mostly built in the seventies, at which point (luckily!) the local council would NOT let you build upon any ancient structures.

      Where I live now - same island, but farther from the natural port and, hence, less attractive land in the old days - we still have a few which noone bothered to remove (to till the land underneath or to use the stones for building walls or foundations).

      My kids used to love going playing around those mounds, made for excellent inspiration for pretending games, that!

  • As someone from a place that is less than a century old this sounds incredible!

    • It is until you try to build something!

      (Nothing quite like watching an archeologist go 'Oooh, that's interesting!' during a dig to establish whether you can go ahead building on your chosen spot...)

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I suspect most local councils in the UK have an archaeology team and failing that there are a lot of professional consulting archaeologists - a lot (all?) large scale building works often include the need for archaeological surveys and/or remediation.

e.g. Work for what is now the Queensferry Crossing bridge uncovered a 10,000 year old home:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-2...