The truth about cats and dogs?

I grew up with cats, so I understand it when people tell me that they prefer cats to dogs because cats behave more independently than dogs. Conversely, they say that cats don’t demand much of one’s time and attention. They say that you “can just let cats be” while dogs constantly seek direction from their humans. After reading a few books about dog training and about dogs and their umwelt – i.e. how they, through their senses, perceive and interact with the world as they know it – I now wonder if we humans haven’t understood it the other way around.

Modern humans put extraordinary pressure on dogs to conform their way of being to suit human society. In comparison we have a disproportionally laissez-faire approach to the upbringing of cats. Both cats and dogs are domesticated predators and scavengers. But while my colleague doesn’t mind carrying her cat off the table ten times during dinner for example (as she herself recalls), many people somehow expect dogs to “know” what’s appropriate in the human world and put a moral value on the dog’s behavior (“bad”/untrained dog) when they act in a way that we judge inappropriate.

I would bet that with structured positive reinforcement – as one does in dog training – the table-jumping cat would have decreased motivation to jump on the table for attention if she were offered something she considered valuable (such as a treat a.k.a. “reinforcer”) whenever she went off the table with a coupled command (operant conditioning). Yet we seldom think about cats this way. In fact, we humans seldom consider the double standard we put on cats and dogs. For instance, in my neighborhood there are a few people who let their cats roam at night. People don’t react negatively when they see a well-groomed cat without an owner on the street, as a leashed cat is a rarity rather than a norm. Neither would you see a “no cat allowed” sign in garden pavements, since roaming cats just basically walk themselves.

Hmm, Lea and I did see this sign in Japan. I don’t know what it says, but maybe there they assume that cats are either leashed, or can read.

In the book “In Defense of Dogs” by John Bradshaw, the author recalls a dog from his childhood who took himself for walks. His grandpa’s dog roamed the neighborhood all afternoon, by himself, like a village dog in other countries still do today. But now, in our place and time, dogs have less freedom and we humans are expected to control every aspect of their work, play and social life. I mentioned the double standard between pets to the colleague with the table-jumping cat. She attributed it to the notion that dogs are pack creatures (= needs a model and a leader) while cats are lone hunters (= with a will of their own). In my reading of books about dogs, ethologists critically discuss the pack theory, which I don’t intend on discussing just now. But even if the notion of dogs’ hierarchical structures were true, it still remains a fact that while society is more willing to accept that cats have their own minds, society is somewhat less willing to let dogs have theirs.

This relates to another thing I’ve been reading about, which is activity versus enrichment. Activity is what we aim for when we take dogs for long walks, engage them in cooperative play and train them in mind and body (e.g. nosework, agility and obedience training). It gives the dog something constructive to do so he doesn’t get busy with other mischief (such as eating your shoe due to boredom) and teaches him skills that we appreciate in the human world (such as playing dead for our entertainment – a quite useless skill for a dog in the natural world, come to think of it).   

Enrichment, on the other hand, is a concept taken from zookeeping animals in captivity. The concept seems to be broad, but basically it refers to offering animals opportunities to practice species-specific behavior that they would naturally display such as digging, climbing, seeking shade, gnawing on trees, working for food and so on. For pet dogs, this would mean offering opportunities for dog-specific behaviors, such as digging, barking, sniffing, pee marking or running free. Some of these may border in the territory of “unwanted” behaviors for humans, for example barking (which is a natural form of communication for dogs, and part of the concept of social enrichment). I have also seen videos of people offering dogs food-related enrichment by placing kibble in cardboard boxes, thus encouraging the dogs to work for their food by inevitably destroying the boxes with paws and teeth to access the food. Because I knew nothing about enrichment at that time, I thought it looked like uncontrolled destruction. Now I understand that, from the dogs’ perspective, they were problem-solving and using body parts (teeth and claws) that they would normally use to forage. The principle of enrichment posits that by giving animals an outlet for behaviors natural to them, animals exhibit less stereotypic (repetitive) behaviors such as stress-licking or tail-chasing (or whatever destructive stereotypic behavior other animals might have). For both activity and enrichment, the bottom line is that if the dog is happy, the human companions will be happier for it. In contrast to activity though, enrichment offers activities at the animals’ own premises, based on what is natural for its species.

Diesel does indeed look like a hunter while busy demolishing this twig.

Learning about enrichment really made me think about the difference between our approaches to cats (who, I believe, are more allowed by humans to display natural behavior) and dogs. Diesel is in a phase now since before Christmas, as he learned that he could bark. Though an enrichment paradigm, he is doing what is natural for him (territorial enrichment = the desire for animals to protect their home, like cats do when they roam their territory) but I also admit that, in the human perspective, some canine behaviors if left to develop may become problematic. I think it would be unnatural to expect a dog never to bark. But I am also trying strategies so he can exercise that behavior within some limits. 

From the cartoon series "They can talk"

Okay. I know I simplified a bit about cats’ freedom. My next-door neighbor has two hairless Sphynx cats who are indoors all day. As I was writing the last paragraph, I heard him in the hall cooing his cats back into his apartment. Apparently, his cats ran out the door, as they often do when he comes home. Diesel was curious behind my own closed apartment door, sniffing at the jamb and listening closely. Between my dog’s leashed walks and the indoor life of these hairless cats, one could wonder if one of them is better off than the other.  

People-watching

It's true what they say: With a dog, you are forced to take walks. Every day, I take two long walks with the dog: once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. I also take him out for shorter walks around the block during lunch, and then again before bedtime. All in all, we spend a good two hours every day walking. I now tend to enjoy and look forward to these walks as my daily exercise, so in the end, I don't actually know if I'm the dog's personal trainer, or if he is mine.

On these walks – where I am not purposely going from A to B but rather meandering wherever my own fancy or my dog's nose take us – I get to see the city from a casual observer's eye. Naturally, our walks occur at certain times before and after work. And after a time, it struck me how not only my dog and I keep to a schedule, but how everybody in the city does.

At the first floor of a corner apartment building, a man watches TV every day at 6 AM, but he always does so standing up beside his dining table. I smile to myself every time I see his head: "There he is again watching TV standing up right there!". In the next neighborhood, a woman always turns at the same street every morning on the way to her bus stop. Despite grid streets, I know where she will be turning. At around 6:30, it's time for a man with a cement company van to go work. I can always tell it's his vehicle approaching since I hear the loud rock music from inside his car, before I even see the van! People say that dogs are creatures of habit, but maybe that just reveals that we are unknowing of most of our own routines as humans.

Even though we often never say a word to each other, I also feel an affinity with the other people walking their dogs; they too, are bound by office hour constraints and use their free time to exercise their dog and/or make them go to the toilet. Owning a dog has made me realize how many dogs actually live around this neighborhood, which I never really had a reason to care about before. It is at the last walk of the evening, about 9-10 PM, that I feel most kinship with the Dogfolk. All half-tired, we all wish for a peaceful evening and weave our way around the park trying to avoid each other, lest our dogs become agitated and excitable around other dogs.

I tend to see the same persons walking their dogs during my walks, that I begin to recognize them and their mannerisms. Surely, they look at me and think (like many do, even when I didn't have a dog): "There goes that girl again, who walks without swinging her arms!".

I have begun to give the dog-walkers secret nicknames. There is "Pulse watch girl". She walks like she is in a big hurry, you can't tell at first that she is actually walking her dog. The dog is trailing behind on a long retractable line, trying to keep up with her. Pulse watch girl is, indeed, very set on power walking. When her dog stops to sniff (which she occasionally, reluctantly, lets him do), she jogs in place – thus my theory that she has a pulse watch.

There is also "Flashlight man". He is long and has a young German shepherd. Like me, he intersperses play into dog walks. In these dark winter mornings, he is armed with both a head lamp and a flashlight. Their play consists of making the German shepherd chase the flashlight light on the ground, as a cat owner would play with a cat using a laser pointer. Secretly, I study Flashlight man and his dog to see who is more successful between us at training our dog not to pull on the leash. Secretly, I think I am winning.

A mystery among the Dogfolk is "Coughing woman". She seems to have a well-mannered dog and they are dressed in the same blue-and-yellow colors. She takes mostly the same route around the park – only paved walks, never on grass to explore the bushes – and she looks very purposeful. I call her "Coughing woman" because strangely, she seems to communicate with her dog (or to other dog walkers?) using deep-sounding coughs. They are never a series of coughs, but just one loud expectorating cough, which sounds like a heavy book being suddenly closed. If she is behind me and about to overtake, she coughs. When we are approaching and I think she wants to signal that she wants distance from her dog, she coughs. But even when her dog is sniffing at something and she wants to move forward, she coughs. Who knows if I will ever get the secret meaning of these coughs.

Finally, I also get to observe other kinds of people in my walk, that I would probably never have bothered to look at if I were walking with a goal to get somewhere. Every morning, there is a woman who walks a park street towards town. She is well-wrapped in clothes (as if cold), and is always armed with a big full bag and rolling a trolley behind her. I wonder if she is homeless, where she walked from and where she is walking to. One morning, I thought of passing nearby and just tell her I see her every morning and ask her about herself. But I changed my mind, as I wondered what I would do with the eventual information she was going to share. Today, I also saw a man walking a path. Strangely, when he thought nobody was looking, he made a U-turn into some trees and hid himself behind a pile of gravel. In the dark morning, I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for the small reflector on his jacket. Discreetly, I tried to walk the dog nearer the dense trees. I don't know why I did. I guess one gets a sense of confidence walking around in the dark with a big dog. I was also curious. But as I got nearer, and the figure (or rather his reflector) had not moved, I retreated back to the path. Who knows what I would find out. Maybe it wasn't worth my curiosity. Or maybe he was just peeing in a discrete place. Same same - sometimes it is better to people watch from a distance.

Four years into the future

Last week, I got a blast from the past. An old univeristy schoolmate got in touch to ask me about this old blog of mine. My friend had just recovered from a particularly bad period of illness, and now that life is around the corner again, he thought of taking up blogging. He said he remembered reading my blog and feeling inspired about how one can write about both the big stuff in life and the little things. He said it was like a model for "how to live inside and outside one's head". After some thought, I figured that yeah, maybe that was exactly what this blog was (is) for me. 

My latest entry here was in December 2018. That was four whole years ago. Since then, of course , a lot have happened. I started commuting for work in 2015. I got my associate professorship in 2022. Years rolled by as program director, teacher, researcher -- Who had the time for a blog? With commuting life, there were times when I thought I would convert this blog into a journal for lunchbox-friendly recipes (Indeed, I would cook large batches of food on weekends to to take to work over the week and my freezer was full of square-shaped IKEA food boxes). I also thought of just saving the entries in a big Word file and closing the blog altogether. After years of not reading or writing in my blog, I even wondered if the address still existed. I'm glad I didn't turn my blog into a recipe book nor deleted it. And I am also glad the address still exists, because, well, I'm back.

The comeback also coincides with another comeback in my life: From this autumn, I stopped commuting, and I now live and work in the same city again. Again, I am discovering my city as a place to live and spend liesure; not just as a pitstop from a to-and-fro work routine to wash clothes and cook lunchboxes. I am reading books in my free time again. I am hosting and entertaining. Although the years commuting to another university did give me a lot of freedom, experience and responsibility,  being back in one place and at my alma matter now allows me other freedoms: space, time, and perspective. I also feel that now, I can write in my blog again.

* * *

In September, when I stopped commuting, I adopted a dog. His name is Diesel, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever that I got from his breeder when he was 11 months old. He lived the first part of his life there with his mother, grandmother and two sisters, but since he was an unsold and intact male dog, his impending sexual maturity would have been problematic in the pack. As I had dogsitted for Diesel's brother Guinness and liked the breed's temperament so much, I decided that I might as well have a look at Diesel. Everybody who has adopted an animal knows that when you have taken the big step to look at the animal, one has more or less already made a decision. That's how it was for me, and after a trial period to see if we work well together, Diesel is now family.

Diesel with his doe eyes. November 2022

He also gives me something to write about, which makes this comeback to the blog have the same purpose as when I started it: to show family and friends how everyday life is like discovering things with a companion in life. I have only had Diesel for three months now but it seems like we have always been together. Through reading dog books and living in close proximity with Diesel everyday, I am discovering a lot of things about canine behaviour and canine-human interaction that I never knew before. I am discovering new neighborhoods through our walks. I am also finding purpose and fun challenges in dog training and just learning to understand the world from the eyes (or nose) of my new friend.

I have a lot of funny stories about dog guardianship, but let me just end with a couple for now: Last night, I dreamt I tried dog biscuits by mistake and actually liked them. In my dream, I actually remember having a sense of taste and texture! After a few nibbles, I looked at what I was eating with surprise, and put the cracker quickly back in my pocket 😂. The other funny story is that when I simulateneously chat with my sister Lea and my friend Kristian (who both have dogs as their profile picture, that appear as two circles in my phone screen), I get a strange feeling that I am chatting with dogs!

Welcome back to my blog.

Leftovers soup

When I was growing up, we had a set of Compton's Precyclopedia where each entry for a word (e.g. Cooking in the C-volume or Fire in the F-volume) contained not only facts but fables, poems and stories about those words. Because my siblings once accused me of not reading, I bugged them by memorizing and reciting parts of the Precyclopedia -- or at least the first lines of entires. For example, the first lines of the Precyclopedia entry for Cooking is this now quite outmoded statement:

Who cooks dinner?

Mother does, but sometimes, Father might.

Another entry, maybe on Cooking or on Stones was a story about "Stone soup". 

As the story goes, there was once a poor traveller that came to a village and had nowhere to sleep, so he knocked at a door to ask for lodging for the night. A poor woman opened the door, but upon finding out that the man didn't have any money, she was about to turn him away. "Wait," the traveller said, fumbling for something in his stuffsack. "In my travels I came upon this very special stone, that makes a very delectible soup. If you'd allow me to cook you a dinner with it, it is yours as a payment for your kindness." The woman looked skeptically at the stone, which seemed like any other smooth pebble, but she decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. "Alright," she said, "but the soup has to be good; otherwise it's out on the street with you!"

The traveller rubbed his hands together and asked for a cauldron of water to be put on a boil at the fireplace. The stone was dropped in the cauldron to cook, and every now and then, the man would sip a small teaspoon of the liquid, to taste. "Let me taste it too," the woman insisted. "No not yet," the traveller said, "it needs a little bit of salt." So the woman got him some salt, which went into the soup. "Hmm, it is starting to taste better. But if you happen to have some scraps of meat, I think the soup would be a little better still," said the man. "Alright, I'll see what I've got. But that soup has to be good!", the woman answered. An old meat bone with some scraps went into the cauldron. 

The man continued to taste the soup and later on he asked, "You don't happen to have any potatoes, do you? Just a little bit will do to heighten the taste of the soup. The stone is really rendering its flavors now!". "Oh my! Is it really?" the woman asked. "Yes I think I may have an old potato and a carrot...". Diced, the vegetables went in the cauldron as well.

And so it went -- I think the travleller may have asked for a little bit more to spice up his Stone soup -- and after a long evening of anticpation, the traveller finally declared the soup ready.

"Oh, it's delicious!", the host exclaimed. "To think it was made out of a stone!"

---

I thought of that story as I cooked this evening's soup, grabbing stuff I had in the refrigerator to turn "something out of nothing"! Voila! Leftovers soup!

Ingredients and method:

Mince and sauté an old onion in butter. Grate a leftover sad-looking carrot and sauté with the onion. Add water, not too much, and half a bouillon cube (chicken or vegetable). Look inside the freezer, where there are leftover bacon strips that you fried earlier in the week (I freeze everything!). Cut and dump into the soup, don't even bother defrosting them. Scrounge around in the cupboards, and grab that old bottle of dried mung beans you don't have the heart to throw away but are years old. Rinse and throw some into the soup. Let boil and simmer until mung beans are soft (Watch TV in the meantime, but add some water halfway to prevent drying out). Scrounge around the refrigerator where you see a glass of milk that you saved for tea, half a lemon, and some leftover cheese. You decide that since this whole thing is an experiment, these can go in too (just a dash of lemon though!). Take the chance and press a garlic clove in the soup too, and season it with freshly ground pepper. 

Serve the Leftovers soup with homemade croutons made of leftover bread that you froze (Again, I freeze everything), and -- need I say this? -- whatever other leftovers you can find. In my case, my last two last ham slices made a good sandwich on the side.

Enjoy, and think of how nice it is to have your own (and may I say, delicious) recipe for "Stone soup", without the stone!

Dear blog

Dear blog,

It’s been a long time, my friend.

390 posts since 2006, and yet no posts for the last year? It’s been all too long.

Sometimes I think of you and wonder why I never have the time to write a few lines. You’re like an old friend that moved away: one that I wrote often to for a start, then more sporadically – a Christmas card or so – before neglecting to write altogether. Meanwhile, years and life fly by. All those birthdays, Christmases, summers, times good and bad – without me even taking the time to write a word.

Yet I’ve thought of you. I thought of writing to you those times I felt that I needed a friend, when I felt alone. But I was too embarrassed to admit I was feeling that way, so I didn’t write. I also thought of writing to you when I felt happy, when I’ve accomplished things or did things that made me swell with pride. But after a while, these things felt strangely trivial and I didn’t write about them either. And in between, there were those days that were just the everyday grind. And what’s there to write about that? Or so I thought. That’s how relationships cool off I guess.  People talk about growing apart. It starts when they share too little of themselves because things seem too ordinary, that soon enough the person standing there becomes a stranger. I never wish to turn so blasé though.

I’ve had the privilege of keeping long-distance friends through the years even though I seldom write to them nowadays. So, maybe you could see this post as a way for me to keep in touch again? For me, you’ve been there at the back of my head all of the time. And why not? You followed me through so much of my early years in Sweden – through all of those things that were so new to me and yet so “everyday”, like frost and snow, and boats and mountains. You followed me through grief and back to “normal life”, through projects that I planned for myself, through my travels, and through the workaday world. “Home and away”. No wonder I write to you like you were a friend. You’re a lot of my life and thoughts in a nutshell. And also, we go waaaay back before Facebook! Twelve years and – as with this post – still running!

Time flies. There are many things I haven’t had a chance to write about. But let’s catch up. I know I’ve said that before – but this time around I’ll try to think that no thought is too little as to be too uninteresting. After all, I really am mostly writing to myself and for a few crazies out there (hi friends and family who are reading this!) who probably would gladly read what I write anyway. Since I started this blog, there had been so much technological advances on the smartphone that has allowed me to keep in touch with friends and family on a regular basis. But to be honest, I missed you. You had the stories one could read over and over again, and I re-live those moments each time I read an old post. Write to you again soon! For now I have to get some shut-eye for tomorrow's commute. See ya,

Yours truly, Joy

Pilipinas kong mahal

Pilipinas kong minumutyá,

pugad ng luhá ko’t dalita,

aking adhika:

makita kang sakdál laya!

(Philippines, which I treasure,

Nest of my tears and poverty;

My aspiration:

to see you absolutely free!)

- the last verse of "Bayan ko" (My Country)

Even when I still lived in the Philippines, I of course already had the awareness that extreme poverty existed side by side with the everyday life that I knew of. But it was only after living a few years in Sweden -- seeing my country and my upbringing from a distance -- that I truly appreciated how the middle class life my family and my friends' families enjoyed was a true gifted privilege, in a ctiy where many hundred thousands of people only know and would only ever know a slum life.

I understand now that what I have seen were mere glimpses of that other, darker and desperate side of Metro Manila life. I remember grade school, being picked up by Mom and sitting in the passenger seat of our air conditioned car. Begging children about my age knocked at the windows, hoping that drivers could give them a few coins while the cars were stuck in a red light. I remember college, commuting in a jeepney on the way home from university. The beggar children would go through the open rear door of the jeepney caught in traffic. They would symbolically "polish" the passengers' shoes with a really dirty rag (to the annoyance of some passengers), and stretch out their hands as we passengers looked away and muttered an apology. But even as a university student, it never really occurred to me to ask why all these kids weren't in school, and why their families remained poor. The beggars and the homeless were just a part of the cityscape, much like unpleasant diesel fumes were part of the city air. And poverty, I suppose I thought, always have and always will be there, as inevitable as the city humidity that sticks to your skin but you could never really do anything about. As a journalist for the university paper, I also once went to Payatas, the big mountain of trash at the outskirts of Quezon city, where all the city's trash get sorted by people. It's an enormous place, wet, mushy, stinking and steaming. I can't even begin to imagine how it looks like in the rainy season. At that time, a trash slide caused the loss of lives but people continued to live there to eke a living. It's not a secret that many people make a living out of the trash in Payatas. But neither does it seem to raise any questions anymore. Questions like "how could these peoples' lives look differently"?

There have always been attempts by politicians to hide the slum life from view: by relocating the squatters to the outskirts of the city where there are no jobs; by erecting colorfully painted walls along the slum area so the makeshift houses would be out of sight for cars; and by building false facades along squatter communities, attempting to make them look like narrow Dutch houses from a distance! But attempts at "beautifying" the city only just amounts to putting plaster at a really gangrenous boil. The billion-peso question is, why can't we create a society that systematically goes to the root of this inequality; to raise the standard of living for all instead of just targeting the symptoms of extreme poverty? In grade school I thought I could make a change if I gave each sad-looking kid beggar a 500-peso bill. I don't believe that any more but I honestly think many Filipinos still do think that. Of course, that would solve some of the acute problems of poor individuals and undoubtedly also help them in the short term. But it never really gets to the root, does it? Despite our well-meant charity, poverty persists.

When Filipinos think about urban poor as a problem, I believe they most think about the risk of crime, drug use, the ugliness and the garbage. The rest of us build higher walls around our houses, trap ourselves in our cars, and avoid looking like we have money when we happen to be in certain places in the city at night. All that is just part of the reality of middle class life in the city. Some even feel proud of making it to semi-notorious places in Metro Manila without incident. But where did we even get to this point, that we have such urban poor that we have to "protect ourselves from"? We got there at one point. How do we solve the problem?

The new thing in theme of plaster-on-a-gangrenous-boil is the president's notorious "war", that has according to own police statistics, already killed thousands of urban poor in just one year. Even if you're not Filipino, it is unlikely that you have missed this in the news. The police are implicated and no one has been charged. In this war, the wretched poor are (as they always really have been) to blame for the city's demise and lack of security. And the solution has been (as it really always have been) to eradicate the symptoms, while the roots remain untouched.

Why am I writing about this in the first place?

Yesterday, I watched a documentary (Korrespondenterna) where Swedish television was in the Philippines. They followed a photojournalist covering the killings. It is a disturbing piece. They didn't exaggerate or anything. In fact, many things in the documentary resonated with what I already knew to be true in the Philippines: the class differences, abuse of power, desperation. But the piece also opened my eyes to the wretchedness, apathy and a face of ugliness in my dear, dear home country. I wished I never saw the piece, even if I don't regret seeing it.

Maybe part of makes the piece so disturbing is that it is so graphic. At first I was angry. I thought, besides family reasons, why should I even want to visit a society so dysfunctional? I should boycott the Philippines to show my disgust. Then I felt scared. What kind of city am I really going to come to when I go there? When I thought back on some of the scenes of the documentary last night, I was too scared I couldn't sleep well. As I lay there in bed, I thought that the TV team crossed the line of gruesomeness for me. The gruesomeness was something I really could have done without. It makes me sick. But sadly, it is also the truth.

Oh my poor home country! What are we going to do about you?

Here -- for anyone interested -- is the link to the documentary in SVT Play. It can be seen until May 2018: https://www.svtplay.se/video/15862571/korrespondenterna/korrespondenterna-sasong-19-knarkkriget?start=auto&tab=2017

A medieval bridge that disappeared

About a month ago, the local newspaper had an announcement for a guided archeological tour in Linköping. Stångebro, a medieval bridge that had been named in manuscripts since the 1000s but whose true location had been unknown, has been discovered while surveyors were digging an area for a planned fish ladder. The fish ladder construction came to a halt — at least temporarily — as national archeologists scanned the site for two weeks. Not one to pass these kinds of interesting things up, I went for the tour.

The tour of the archeological dig attracted more people than the archeologists expected!

It has always fascinated me how layers of earth could contain layers of history. As a child, I could kill time watching Egyptology shows. Dinosaur shows were OK too, but only more interesting if they were about the discovery of new bones. The curious thing is that the deeper one gets into the earth, the further you also get back in time (like looking into a better telescope and looking earlier back in time the father into space you look). I have always wondered where those extra meters of dirt might have come from! I remember, in a trip to Barcelona many years ago, I was at awe at  the completely preserved Roman city ruin that lay under the museum itself, accessible by elevator. According to a guide book, the local cathedral there likewise lay on the ruins of a Roman temple, which in turn lay on the ruins of not less than seven (!) older temples. The older the city, the more likely it has rebuilt its structures over older ones, so I had always until now mostly thought of city ruins as being under Roman cities, or in medieval trade towns like Visby. To think that it could be as near to home as Linköping!


According to the guides — themselves archeologists that did the digging — the site of the original Stångebro bridge used to be known to the medieval locals as the site where one could cross the river Stångån safely by foot. The bridge on that site must have been constructed at around year 1000, after the death of a particularly rich woman attempting to cross the river. Records from the time report that on her way home from a religious retreat from a cloister at Vadstena, her horse and carriage vaulted with the force of the river. The construction of the bridge allowed for safer passage, and it was for a long time the only land connection between the east and west Östergötland county. To the west lay, among other things, the important cloisters at that time. To the east were roads connecting Östergötland to Stockholm in the northeast. Swedish kings have been reported to cross Stångebron on their tours of the kingdom. The battle of Stångebro also took place there in 1598, that ultimately ended the union between Sweden and Poland.

 One of the archeologists telling us about the history of the site

Curiously, for being such a historic bridge, nobody really could guess where the original site of where the bridge was. The bridge presumably burned down, and a new bridge was built some kilometers upstream. It wasn't until last autumn — when the construction of the fish ladder at Nykvarn became an inevitable fact — that surveyors noticed the ruins of what must have been the foundation of an old bridge. Archeologists were called in, and more research over the last winter revealed that, in fact, there were medieval city sketches of the historic bridge, which had only come to light again from the depths of their archives because of this accidental find! Among other things, the location of the original Stångebro bridge was sketched in a property map of a wealthy man who had farms to the west and a watermill-powered metalworks hammer on the east. From what they could tell from the records, the man also lobbied for Stångebro bridge to be built where it was. So, for all the mystery of the bridge's unknown location, the truth was just really waiting to be read in some archive somewhere, had it interested somebody much earlier. But that's how historical research is most of the time, I guess.

The most fascinating thing about the dig was not the finding of the actual bridge foundations — they found two kinds, an older one of wood and a newer one (later middle ages) of stone — but what lay around the bridge foundation. The dig revealed that the bridge continued to a medieval paved road — the road to Linköping! — about five meters wide, with gutters on each side and remains of houses to one side. These were all previously unobserved before the dig, as the site was thick with trees.

 The medieval road to Linköping (coins were found dating to the 1800s), that extending from where the bridge used to stand. There were, already then, city standards for how wide roads should be: five meters. On both side of the road, there were gutters.

 The cellars in one of the houses. It had a gutter and a drain, suggesting that occasionally, the river filled the houses' basements with water.

The houses' purpose was only the archeologists' guess. A miller's house was recorded in the site, but the proportions didn't match a humble miller's dwelling. When they digged deeper, the archeologists also found that the houses' cellars contained a number of broken bottles with corks intact — wine bottles, although their contents are unknown, as they could have been refilled. This leads to a theory that at least one of the houses could have been a pub, but this theory also falls short as there is a record of a pub just a kilometer downstream, that would have existed at the same time.

 Some of the many bottles found in the houses. 

They are wine bottles, but perhaps refilled and re-corked with other contents?

The nature of the houses is still somewhat of a mystery to be figured out by archeologists with their carbon dating techniques, and laboratory techniques to identify traces of what were in the bottles. In the meantime, the dig also recovered other artifacts, some more interesting than others. For "road filling," the medieval constructors used old roof tiles, bricks and other objects. The archeologists found many of these strewn around, but perhaps, they concluded, they had no other purpose than as mere construction fill. More interesting finds were made along the road itself and inside the houses. On the road lay were some coins from the 1800s. Possibly some loose change that fell off some poor fellow's pocket? Inside the houses were fragments of stoneware — both local brown stoneware and faux china — and glass fragments, some patterned by pressing. In one of the houses, they found the remains of what must have been a tiled stove. And near it: the oldest coin they have found in the dig so far, from 1636!

At another station of the tour, an archeologist shoes us some of the artifacts found at the site.

 

 The box of artifacts, including weights for fishing nets, fragments of everyday objects such as plates and glasses, fish hooks, coins, oyster shells, the remains of a simple pipe, etc.

On the other side of the road, opposite the houses, were the remains of an old brick factory — a shed, and a kiln — but these were of more relatively recent dating, ca. 1800s, presumably after the bridge no longer was in use because of the construction of a newer bridge. This could be guessed because the shed was constructed partly over the road, which suggests that it was no longer in full use. Then, for some reason or another, they moved the brickworks too, and the once historical site fell into anonymity.

Overview of the dig site. Road to the left, houses with cellars to the right (where a coin from as early as 1636 was found). The block on the road is what remains of the brick shed, ca 1800s. To the man's left are what remains of the brick kiln. At the time of the brickworks, the road was probably no longer in use.

The archeologists expected that, with a week left until their dig was done, they would find older artifacts the deeper they dig. They document their work through photo-scanning of the area, to preserve knowledge about how the site looked like. Unfortunately, those photo-scans will probably be the only thing left of this only recently discovered ruin. At least for the moment, the local politicians — with the exception of the city archeologist — are still firm on continuing the construction of the fish ladder, that will effectively bulldozer away the traces of this piece of local history. A shame. After all, the river is wide. I  suspect that  the fish ladder being built so close to the banks is not only for the fishes' sake but for human eyes to behold the fish. And in that case, the interest of preserving a historical site for future generations may just lose to other interests, such as the aesthetic one. With all due understanding that the fish may want some help upstream, ultimately the building of the fish ladder over what people now know to be a piece of their city history just deals with a political decision to replace an older man-made structure with a newer, modern one. As in Rome, Visby or Barcelona in times past: we build over the structures built before us.

On a lighter note, I couldn't help feeling — when I noticed the logo of Arkeologerna (The National Arheologists) on the guide's vests — that its designer must have been a person with a pretty good sense of humor :-)