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Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.

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Martin Rundkvist 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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Archaeology:

My Autumn's And Winter's Work

Category: Archaeology

I haven't actually said much about what I've been doing in my study these past months.

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Recent Archaeomags

Category: Archaeology

Lots of interesting feature stories lately.

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Rediscovering Ancient Landscape Rules

Category: Bronze Age

My current project on the siting of Bronze Age sacrificial sites aims to rediscover some of the the period's landscape rules.

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Talking About Heyerdahl On Norwegian Radio

Category: Archaeology

Here I go again, bad-mouthing Thor Heyerdahl to his countrymen.

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The Heating Is Increasingly Turned Off In Swedish Churches

Category: Archaeology

The reason that the heat is getting turned off in more and more churches isn't preservation concerns. It's the shrinking congregations and the price of electricity.

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The Dancing Beasts of Hvirring

Category: Archaeology

I've never seen a piece like this before: it must be a top mount for something - box, horse yoke, staff?

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Recent Archaeomags

Category: Archaeology

Mays suggests that if the child murders were spread out over three centuries, what sets Yewden apart is mainly the tenacity of the custom.

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Airport Runestone

Category: Archaeology

Placing the runestone in the airport terminal ensures its protection from the rain and freeze-thaw cycle, and also makes it maximally accessible to the public.

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Kon Tiki Airport Restaurant

Category: Archaeology

Last time I passed through Oslo airport I discovered this Kon Tiki-themed restaurant with a faux Ecuadorian stele.

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Kensington Runestone Faker's Signature Found

Category: Runes

One of the first things that stick out about the Kensington inscription is the unparallelled preponderance of numbers in it. The clincher is found in some simple cryptography.

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Iarlabanki Had This Stone Made While He Still Lived

Category: Runes

Iarlabanki Ingefastson is probably the most copiously documented Scandinavian of the Viking Period. But his name does not occur even once on vellum.

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Fornvännen's Spring Issue On-Line

Category: Archaeology

Two bronze masks from Avaldsnes in western Norway that look Celtic and may thus either be pre-Roman or Viking in date -- and more!

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Herbert Jankuhn Reads Selections From Mao

Category: Archaeology

Herbert Jankuhn (1905-90) is a contentious figure as he was a passionate Nazi soldier and SS archaeologist up until 1945, and then became one of Germany's most influential post-war archaeologists.

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Boat Carriers

Category: Archaeology

The yachting club's boat lift reminded me of a motif in Bronze Age rock art: the boat carrier.

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Halland Archaeology Journal

Category: Archaeology

Another fine read about a Swedish province with fine archaeology.

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Roman Mask Find Causes Legal Conundrum

Category: Archaeology

I hope there's a way to take the mask into public ownership without giving the man either reward or punishment.

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My Gothenburg Talk About Mead-Halls

Category: Archaeology

Here's my talk about Mead-halls book, from the Gothenburg Book Fair, 23 September.

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Swedish University Invites Imaginary Bosnian Pyramid Crank

Category: Archaeology

Cornelius Holtorf has now done something completely in line with his convictions, that is, something I consider extremely irresponsible and which causes me to palm my face and groan.

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Speaking Schedule Oct/Nov

Category: Archaeology

Wednesday 5 Oct. 17:00. About Fisksätra before the 1970s housing development. Fisksätra shopping centre, HAMN project office. Thursday 13 Oct. 10:00. About Bronze Age sacrificial sites. Uppsala, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3, Dept of Archaeology. Monday 17 Oct. 18:30. About pseudoarchaeology....

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The Winged Man of Uppåkra

Category: Archaeology

Norse mythology offers two immediate interpretations: either a god wearing Freya's magic falcon cloak, or Wayland the Smith wearing the feathered cloak he made to escape from his captivity with King Niðhad.

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Medal For Planting Spruce On Barrows

Category: Archaeology

You can't just leave a site to its own devices: pretty soon it will become so overgrown that it is unrecognisable and thus neither accessible nor likely to be understood as valuable.

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Ancient Swedish Fishers Put Human Heads On Stakes

Category: Archaeology

The skulls have been treated in a complex ceremony that involved the display of skulls on stakes and the deposition of skulls in water.

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Recent Archaeomags

Category: Archaeology

Here's a quick look at the most recent windfall of popular archaeomags that has reached my big black mailbox.

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Order My Mead-Halls Book On-line

Category: Archaeology

Those who want hard copy or are unwilling to wait six months for the free PDF can now order my Mead-halls book on-line for SEK 180 / U$D 27 / €20 / £17 plus postage....

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Me and My New Book

Category: Archaeology

This book aims at beginning to remedy the regional absence of mead-halls, being an investigation of the internal political geography of Östergötland during the period AD 375-1000.

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Ravlunda Cemetery Rebuttal

Category: Archaeology

The paper is a mess and shouldn't have been accepted. Tellingly, the topic is archaeology and quaternary geology, while none of the authors is an archaeologist and the journal is about geography.

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Sun Horses

Category: Archaeology

Scandinavian Bronze Age art features a number of motifs having to do with the movement of the sun through the heavens during the day and the underworld during the night.

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On My Mind, Sunday

Category: Archaeology

I'm a single dad now for two weeks while my wife's in China shooting interviews for a documentary series. Aard's been getting a lot of comment spam lately, and the filter isn't working properly, so I've turned on comment moderation....

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Three Days Digging in a Cave

Category: Archaeology

In the mid-20th century a fox hunter crawled into the cave and felt his way around. His questing hands encountered something on a ledge which he put in his coat pocket...

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A Lot On My Plate

Category: Archaeology

Feels like I've got a bit too much on my plate right now. Tonight's boardgame night, so I need to get everything packed up before dinner. "Pack up what?", I hear you say. Well, I'm spending the next couple of...

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Current Archaeology's August Issue

Category: Archaeology

I always enjoy reading Current Archaeology, both for the quality content and for the simple fact that it's about the UK.

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And On Bagpipes, Please Welcome André Leroi-Gourhan

Category: Archaeology

Charles Higham remembers his first digs in France, at age 16, in 1956.

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Student Labour Wasted at Ales Stenar

Category: Archaeology

The students have been lured onto a pointless dig devised by a crank that not one Scanian archaeologist is willing to collaborate with.

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Sacrificial Finds in the Late Bronze Age Local Landscape

Category: Archaeology

It really isn't good enough for archaeology to continue sitting around waiting for the public to locate Bronze Age sacrificial sites, then look at each one in isolation as an interesting anecdote.

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Swedish Pyramidologist

Category: Archaeology

To my mind, Almkvist's pyramidological studies are a classic case of geometrical pareidolia, apophenia or patternicity.

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Kalv's Runestone

Category: Archaeology

Did you know that a huge majority of the runic inscriptions date from after the Christianisation of Scandinavia?

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Boggy Test Pit

Category: Archaeology

A lake basin is usually deepest at the centre. And my pit was almost as near the centre of this basin as I could get without diving into the lake.

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Where Trolls Deloused Themselves of Old

Category: Archaeology

According to Ivar Hall, 80 years old, his grandfather told him that trolls used to scrub and delouse themselves against the boulder.

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No Sign of Cleopatra

Category: Archaeology

The most energetic of the people involved in the search is one Kathleen Martinez, a non-archaeologist from the Dominican Republic, who comes across as quite obsessive.

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Classification Presupposes Type Definitions

Category: Archaeology

In his 1962 dissertation, Jungneolithische Studien, Mats P. Malmer established that an object type's identity rests entirely upon a verbal definition.

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Gobi Desert Romans Are Unfounded Speculation

Category: Archaeology

Here's a Chinese village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Roman soldiers.

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Fornvännen's Autumn and Winter Issues On-line

Category: Archaeology

Read new research for free!

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Not the Big Chinese Power Dam

Category: Archaeology

The rivers run almost dry in Qingtian prefecture, Zhejiang province, China, because of recently built power dams.

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Recent Archaeomags

Category: Archaeology

One article is actually a long piece of special pleading to explain why the excavator did not find the desired remains on a site!

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The Cover of My Upcoming Book

Category: Archaeology

The title is Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats and the book will be published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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