Horses: Culture, history, communication and adventure

When I started to study archaeology in 1990, I was not too optimistic concerning my own future within the discipline. I must admit, I had never been too interested in human behaviour actually. And humans are what archaeology is all about...

But - wherever we have walked on earth, we have been followed or led by animals. And animals had been my major love since I was a young girl, so I became an "animal archaeologist".

The horse was the animal I knew most about and understod best, and I was fascinated to realise that a thousand years old horse equipment looked almost identical to modern.  I therefore chose the horse in Ancient Sweden as a subject for my master paper and also for my doctoral thesis, which was finished in 2001. 

The front page of my doctoral thesis Hästarnas land. Aristokratisk hästhållning och ridkonst i Svelands yngre järnålder. (The Land of Horses. Aristocratic Horsemanship and Riding in Late Iron Age Svealand).

Clic here to read the summary!

To write my thesis, I had to learn more about horsemanship in different cultures and eras (which made me more interested in human behaviour). My knowledge and fascination for how the horse - human co-operation has worked and is working has led to me always looking for horse people when travelling.

The following articles will be published here shortly:

Jousting in Miskolc, Hungary with Celeres Nordica

Meeting pure arabians and riding in the desert by the pyramids of Giza, Egypt

In the footsteps and hoofprints of the Etruscans with a true Italian cowboy, butteri, in the Maremmano country, Italy

Among white lusitano horses, black bulls and breeder families who has bred from the same lines for over a century in Portugal