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Recent paleoclimatic research has revealed that volcanic events around 536–540 AD caused severe, short-term global cooling. For this same period, archeological research from various regions evidences significant cultural transformation. However, there is still a lack of understanding of how human societies responded and adapted to extreme climate variability and new circumstances. This study focuses on the effects of the 536/540 AD volcanic event in four Scandinavian regions by exploring the shift in demographic and land use intensity before, during, and after this abrupt climate cooling. To achieve this, we performed climate simulations with and without volcanic eruptions using a dynamically downscaled climate model (iLOVECLIM) at a high resolution (0.25° or ~25 km). We integrated the findings with a comprehensive collection of radiocarbon dates from excavated archeological sites across various Scandinavian regions. Our Earth System Model simulates pronounced cooling (maximum ensemble mean −1.1°C), an abrupt reduction in precipitation, and a particularly acute drop in growing degree days (GDD0) after the volcanic event, which can be used to infer likely impacts on agricultural productivity. When compared to the archeological record, we see considerable regional diversity in the societal response to this sudden environmental event. As a result, this study provides a more comprehensive insight into the demographic chronology of Scandinavia and a deeper understanding of the land-use practices its societies depended on during the 536/540 AD event. Our results suggest that this abrupt climate anomaly amplified a social change already in progress.

Background: This paper presents a new software tool, Inglämnlagare, developed to be open-source, that restructures information about ancient remains in Sweden for analysis. The background is a new version of the ancient sites database, the Historic Environment Record, curated by the Swedish National Heritage Board, that was launched in 2018 with a new database model that structures the information differently compared to previous versions.

Methods: The program, written in Python programming language, has multicore support in order to improve performance for large files and uses regular expressions to extract information about individual features of composite sites. Such features, together with their summed amount, are written as new individual fields to a comma-separated value file. The program is delivered as a source script file that can be executed in any Python environment.

Use cases: As an example of use, a case study of exploring graves of rectangular shape found within Sweden is provided. The use case also describes the different steps involved in preparing the data in QGIS to run the program, as well as some methods to efficiently analyse and visualize the output.

Conclusions: Inglämnlagare will make more information from the Swedish record of ancient sites accessible for research and can be used to explore different content of the record more efficiently than previously possible. While the tool is written specifically for this dataset it also provides an example of how open-source tools can be used for data wrangling making information designed for a specific purpose, such as online dissemination, appropriate for analysis. Keywords

Although data reusers request information about how research data was created and curated, this information is often non-existent or only briefly covered in data descriptions. The need for such contextual information is particularly critical in fields like archaeology, where old legacy data created during different time periods and through varying methodological framings and fieldwork documentation practices retains its value as an important information source. This article explores the presence of contextual information in archaeological data with a specific focus on data provenance and processing information, i.e., paradata. The purpose of the article is to identify and explicate types of paradata in field observation documentation. The method used is an explorative close reading of field data from an archaeological excavation enriched with geographical metadata. The analysis covers technical and epistemological challenges and opportunities in paradata identification, and discusses the possibility of using identified paradata in data descriptions and for data reliability assessments. Results show that it is possible to identify both knowledge organisation paradata (KOP) relating to data structuring and knowledge-making paradata (KMP) relating to fieldwork methods and interpretative processes. However, while the data contains many traces of the research process, there is an uneven and, in some categories, low level of structure and systematicity that complicates automated metadata and paradata identification and extraction. The results show a need to broaden the understanding of how structure and systematicity are used and how they impact research data in archaeology and in comparable field sciences. The insights into how a dataset’s KOP and KMP can be read is also a methodological contribution to data literacy research and practice development. On a repository level, the results underline the need to include paradata about dataset creation, purpose, terminology, dataset internal and external relations, and eventual data colloquialisms that require explanation to reusers.

Heritage management in Sweden has undergone a substantial transformation in recent decades. The process of monitoring and managing heritage information has become increasingly digital, relying on interconnected systems to monitor registered archaeological remains to manage investigations and contract archaeology excavations. This also has to work together with the digital systems of the County Administrative Boards that administer all permissions for excavations. Current developments deal with archiving and dissemination of reports, and documentation from fieldwork. Documentation of archaeological excavations has predominantly been digital for the past 20 years, which brings both possibilities and challenges in making sure the information will adhere to the FAIR Principles. This article outlines some of these developments and exemplifies the possibilities of reusing legacy data through the Urdar project.

The development of technical tools for digital documentation of excavations has equipped archaeologists with increasingly powerful ways to generate high-quality data. With the use of digital documentation, GIS, photogrammetry and a wide range of scientific analyses, each excavation can produce large quantities of interrelated data. These new practices provide great opportunities for knowledge production, but also huge challenges. Aggregating the vast quantities of data produced by contract archaeology is still a monumental and time-consuming task due to diverse terminologies, use of proprietary software and poor digital archival practices. With the ongoing development of national and international infrastructures that can make

Embracing digitality is to a large degree a question of competence of critically understanding a branch of technologies, their use, usefulness and direct and indirect cultural repercussions. It is fair to claim that both quantitatively and qualitatively, there is more archaeological and archaeologically relevant information than before and new copious possibilities to use and reuse, analyse and reanalyse this information. A vital aspect in the process is to maintain a critical sensitivity to the limits of both large and narrow categories and an understanding of their consequences to archaeological information work and the conduct of archaeology. This is a task of all archaeological information workers from field archaeologists to geographic information system specialists, curators and information managers, and obviously, especially those who are engaged in educating and training future generations of professionals.