I Hate the Great Firewall
Category: China
I am unable to access Twitter, Facebook, any Blogspot blog and often most of Google's services including Gmail.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 12 Comments •
Aardvarchaeology
Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.
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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.
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Recent Posts
- Blogging From An Aeroplane
- Sixth World Skeptics Conference
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- Pondering a Professional Plan B
- All My Readers are Descendants of Slaves
- Swedish Runic Corpus On-line
- 16th Century Campaign Archaeology
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Blogroll
May 30, 2011
May 28, 2011
Len Fisher, The Science of Everyday Life
Category: Books
Fisher calculates the time it would take a weightless astronaut to move from one end of a space station to the other exclusively on the reaction force of an ejaculation.
Posted by Martin R at 10:20 AM • 5 Comments •
May 27, 2011
Antique Collectors In China Don't Care About Provenance Either
Category: Archaeology
The Chinese have had an established tradition of their own for collecting fine art for millennia. As a rigorous discipline, archaeology is barely 200 years old.
Posted by Martin R at 12:01 PM • 12 Comments •
May 26, 2011
China's Named and Inscribed Places
Category: Archaeology
In China, nature appreciation is all about visiting named and inscribed sites whose beauty is vouchsafed by famous ancient poets.
Posted by Martin R at 11:56 AM • 11 Comments •
May 24, 2011
Tombs and Opium in Qingtian
Category: Archaeology
My mother-in-law grew up in the mountains near Fushan in the prefecture of Qingtian (pronounced CHING-tien), inland Zhejiang province. Though the prefecture's name means "Green Field", it's pretty poor and has been a major emigration area for decades. The...
Posted by Martin R at 11:47 AM • 7 Comments •
May 22, 2011
Airborne Chinese Marketplace
Category: China
On the flight from Amsterdam to Hangzhou Saturday, I observed some interesting behaviour on the part of my Chinese co-travellers. After the main meal, the stewardesses went around hawking tax-free goods. At this time, a bunch of people stood up...
Posted by Martin R at 8:03 PM • 6 Comments •
May 18, 2011
West African Marabout Con Man
Category: Skepticism
Marabouts are West African con men & fortune tellers who market their services in Europe with little flyers printed on coloured paper. In France, there's an ongoing collectors' craze for these notes. I found one under my windshield wiper...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 13 Comments •
May 17, 2011
Birds of Paradise Pecking the Carolingian Lion
Category: Archaeology
Both the birds and the gripping beasts enter Scandy art in the mid-8th century from Continental Christian sources, with missionaries as intermediaries.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 12 Comments •
May 16, 2011
Freshly Found Bronze Age Rock Art
Category: Archaeology
These years will be remembered as a time when the Swedish rock art map was redrawn in a dramatic fashion.
Posted by Martin R at 8:45 AM • 6 Comments •
May 13, 2011
What Makes High Elves High?
Category: Language
One of the stranger concepts in Tolkien's writings is that of "High Elves". Why are these elves high? It has nothing to do with drugs, though in the Tolkien Society we used to joke about them smoking lembas. And it...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 22 Comments •
May 12, 2011
Viking Period Drinking Bowl
Category: Archaeology
Post-conservation pics of a Viking Period wooden drinking bowl found last autumn. It's lathe-turned unless I'm very much mistaken.
Posted by Martin R at 1:50 PM • 20 Comments •
May 11, 2011
The Perfection of the Hideous
Category: Books
In the car yesterday I listened to two excellent narrations of Lovecraft short stories. And I marvelled upon re-encountering the opening paragraph of "The Picture in the House" from 1919.Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
May 10, 2011
Lead Seal and Engine Spec Plate, 20th Century
Category: Archaeology
The torques often come in twos and threes, so I was hoping to find another one today.
Posted by Martin R at 4:16 PM • 9 Comments •
May 9, 2011
My Check List for Metal Detecting
Category: Archaeology
Here's what I need to bring when going into the field.
Posted by Martin R at 4:19 PM • 11 Comments •
May 5, 2011
Treatment of Archaeological Human Remains in the UK
Category: Archaeology
The other day asked what UK practice regarding the treatment of archaeological human remains has been like in recent decades.
Posted by Martin R at 8:25 AM • 7 Comments •
May 3, 2011
The Silly Conventions of Funding a School Trip
Category: Children
Funding trips for classes of school children is a complicated business in Sweden. This is due to two commonly held conventional ideas. One is that it would be unfair to ask each family to simply pay for their kid, since...
Posted by Martin R at 1:59 PM • 10 Comments •
