Now on ScienceBlogs: Weekend Recap: My Annular Eclipse Expedition!
Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
November 30, 2010
Category: Travel
In the preceding entry I gave a list of good stuff about a Gambian vacation. Here's the flip side. My first trip to Africa, a week in Agadir, Morocco in the mid-1990s, was marred (but not ruined) by the locals'...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 9 Comments •
November 29, 2010
Category: Travel
Gambia is Africa's smallest country, with 15 million people living on a flat stretch of river plain carved out of central Senegal. Besides peanut cultivation, tourism is an important source of revenue, and indeed coastal Gambia is one of the...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments •
November 28, 2010
Category: Skepticism
Excellent Swedish feature-journalism magazine Filter has a 17-page piece about the skeptical movement in its current issue (#17). Magnus Västerbro's take on the movement in general and the Swedish Skeptics Association in particular is supportive yet not uncritical. I've been...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
November 27, 2010
Category: NOIBN
I'm angry and confused. Death has never hit this close to home with me before. Anders was one of my best friends, a frequent guest at my table. I knew him for over 20 years. And now he's dead...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 15 Comments •
Category: Travel
Any Dear Readers in Birmingham? I'm going to be there from Monday to Wednesday for a Viking studies workshop. Email me your cell phone numbaz and maybe we can meet up!...
Posted by Martin R at 6:46 AM • 4 Comments •
November 26, 2010
Category: Humour
A Gambian moment. We're in an extremely dilapidated taxi that has stalled at the roadside, just a stone's throw from Tanji village's main taxi hub. Before getting into the car, my wife and I had to haggle for ten minutes...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 9 Comments •
November 24, 2010
Category: Archaeology
When the gear arrived from the Tuborg brewery, it turned out that the latter-day Vikings of the Danish film industry weren't quite up to the standards of their ancestors.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
November 22, 2010
Category: Archaeology
One of the Viking Period's more charming habits was silver hoarding. Let's not get into how they got the silver.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
November 19, 2010
Category: Archaeology
The boat burial dated from the 9th century AD and was sitting on the remains of a settlement from the 1st century BC. We weren't there to study that period, but we ended up with a shitload of burnt daub.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 15 Comments •
November 17, 2010
Category: NOIBN
Lately I have learned a few things about how to put an octagonal roof onto a two-story building.
Posted by Martin R at 1:52 PM • 11 Comments •
November 14, 2010
Category: Gaming
I spent most of the weekend at a gaming retreat organised by my buddy Oscar. It was like a small exclusive gaming convention. Oscar found a small B&B outfit in Gnesta, a small town an hour's drive from Stockholm,...
Posted by Martin R at 3:30 PM • 4 Comments •
November 9, 2010
Category: Archaeology
During an excavation for an extension of Berlin's subway in Rathausstraße, archaeologists have found a cache of bronze and ceramic sculptures from the Entartete Kunst exhibition.
Posted by Martin R at 10:34 AM • 19 Comments •
November 8, 2010
Category: Archaeology
Lots of news in archaeology and biology.
Posted by Martin R at 2:14 PM • 24 Comments •
November 6, 2010
Category: Tech
The movements of EU bureaucrats has created a market for short plane hops anchored in Brussels, and so the cheapest way for the rest of us to move about by air in Western Europe is often to join the briefcase carriers and change planes in Belgium.
Posted by Martin R at 10:35 AM • 5 Comments •
November 4, 2010
Category: Archaeology
Thor Heyerdahl could not accept the idea of independent inventions, of convergent cultural evolution. His thinking wasn't just diffusionistic on the small-to-middle scale. Every one of his boat trips was designed to show that hyperdiffusionism was possible.
Posted by Martin R at 10:41 AM • 48 Comments •
November 2, 2010
Category: Archaeology
I'll speak about four Scandy writers of pseudoarchaeological books at the Kritisk masse conference in Oslo: Bob G Lind, Lennart Möller, Erling Haagensen and Thor Heyerdahl.
Posted by Martin R at 5:04 AM • 11 Comments •
