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.
Category: Archaeology
At the Late Roman cemetery of Lankhills at Winchester, stable isotope analyses are advancing an old question of where in the Empire certain of its inhabitants came from.
Posted by Martin R at 1:58 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Suddenly I felt the itch to get out and check out some sites before the leaves and grass sprout in earnest and ruin visibility.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 18 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Century after century, these people were sacrificing expensive objects in the same stretch of river where they fished every day.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The theme of the conference is Bronze Age mortuary cult in the local cultural landscape.
Posted by Martin R at 12:16 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Lots of interesting feature stories lately.
Posted by Martin R at 4:52 AM • 5 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 21 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The yachting club's boat lift reminded me of a motif in Bronze Age rock art: the boat carrier.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Another fine read about a Swedish province with fine archaeology.
Posted by Martin R at 8:31 AM • 4 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments •
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...
Posted by Martin R at 4:11 PM • 6 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
In his 1962 dissertation, Jungneolithische Studien, Mats P. Malmer established that an object type's identity rests entirely upon a verbal definition.
Posted by Martin R at 3:34 PM • 7 Comments •
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 •
Category: Archaeology
Success and failure in archaeological fieldwork is a graded scale.
Posted by Martin R at 3:52 PM • 22 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
A fine little volume in Swedish can be read on-line for free or mail-ordered from the Stockholm County Museum.
Posted by Martin R at 10:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Roman sites in the UK and 19th century sites with imported Classical sculpture have local living micropopulations of Mediterranean land snails!
Posted by Martin R at 3:50 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The National Geological Survey of Sweden has put an interactive deglaciation and shoreline displacement model for the country on-line for free.
Posted by Martin R at 11:22 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The purported site of Phaëton's chariot crash is most likely illusory, as the Chiemgau Impact Hypothesis is not accepted by geological consensus.
Posted by Martin R at 2:02 PM • 12 Comments •
Category: Bronze Age
I'm giving a talk at the Stockholm County Museum in Sickla, Saturday at two o'clock, as part of a day seminar. The subject will be my on-going research into Bronze Age sacrificial sites, where I collaborate with the museum on...
Posted by Martin R at 9:16 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Bronze Age
I had two pages in the May issue of Sweden's equivalent av Scientific American about recent books on the Scandinavian Bronze Age. I was happy to publish there, but not very happy with the rushed chop job the contribution went through.
Posted by Martin R at 12:39 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Bronze Age
Reiner Knizia is one of the board-gaming world's greatest celebrities, famous for a long string of hit games. According to the members of Boardgamegeek.com, the best of Knizia's games is Tigris & Euphrates (1997), which is #11 on the...
Posted by Martin R at 12:06 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The project's goals are twofold: a) to understand the landscape rules behind the siting of deposits, and thereby b) to develop a tool-kit that allows scholars to find undisturbed Bronze Age deposits without the aid of farmers, dredgers or ditch diggers.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
I'm writing a paper for the conference volume of the Helsinki meeting I attended back in October. Here's an excerpt from the manuscript.
Posted by Martin R at 5:27 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
"Of course, some thought he was a little crazy, crawling around like that with a blanket over his head."
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Joakim Goldhahn is investigating a burial cairn sitting on top of a rock-art panel full of child-size footprints.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 33 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
When the Hyndevad dams were built, the river bed was temporarily laid dry. A major prehistoric sacrificial site was discovered.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Bronze Age Scandinavians believed that the sun was pulled across the sky in a chariot by a horse. They built models depicting this out of cast bronze.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
I've walked around, looked at sites, gotten to know the lay of the land, searched in the plough soil ("fieldwalking") and taken a lot of photographs.
Posted by Martin R at 2:57 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Bronze Age
It is impossible to be more rational than what your level of knowledge about the world allows.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Maori archaeologists are in a situation relative to the prehistoric period they study that is comparable to if I had begun my research into the Bronze Age some time in the 5th century BC.
Posted by Martin R at 4:28 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Although I am still just getting acquainted with the research background of my Bronze Age project, I wrote the first couple of paragraphs for my next book today.
Posted by Martin R at 8:13 AM • 15 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
We saw a preserved little bit of an excavated cemetery to which had been added a memorial stone in the 1930s. On the plaque the site is dated to about AD 100 and proclaimed as burial place of the first Finns!
Posted by Martin R at 11:26 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Lise Harvig knows where every piece of bone and bronze is in the burial urns before she even cuts open the plaster they've been encased in since being lifted out of the ground.
Posted by Martin R at 12:03 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
I'm at the 11th Nordic Bronze Age symposium, which for the first time includes a bunch of Baltic colleagues as wall. Everybody's very friendly and the atmosphere is informal.
Posted by Martin R at 4:31 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The fact that the place is still an island means that it was way, way out 2600 years ago.
Posted by Martin R at 4:39 PM • 6 Comments •
ERV 11.26.2011
Orac 05.18.2012
Tim Lambert 05.17.2012
PZ Myers 04.30.2012
Tim Lambert 05.01.2012
