17th Century Pastoral Novel
Category: Books
"Stratonice" is a pastoral romance set in the age of Alexander the Great.
Posted by Martin R at 8:19 AM • 19 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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History:
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.
Posted by Martin R at 3:52 AM • 6 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 5:05 PM • 1 Comments •
Jane Austen LARP
Category: Books
I grew sideburns, brushed up on some country dances, learned to play whist, borrowed a Regency outfit and selected some Wordsworth and Coleridge poetry to perform.
Posted by Martin R at 4:01 PM • 18 Comments •
Kalv's Runestone
Category: Archaeology
Did you know that a huge majority of the runic inscriptions date from after the Christianisation of Scandinavia?
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 10 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 11 Comments •
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.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 33 Comments •
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 •
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 •
Kenyan Villagers Deny Chinese Allegations of Being Related
Category: China
Not even the locals, who supposedly tell "legends" about their Chinese ancestry, believe any of it or indeed know of any such legends prior to the recent foreign involvement.
Posted by Martin R at 10:02 PM • 3 Comments •
Sankt Joachimsthal: the Buck Starts Here
Category: Archaeology
Jáchymov currently has only a bit more than three thousand inhabitants, and yet its name is used daily by billions of people worldwide.
Posted by Martin R at 4:33 PM • 5 Comments •
Five Mountain Names
Category: History
Where do all these weird mountain names come from and what do they mean?
Posted by Martin R at 8:27 AM • 21 Comments •
Union Depot, Duluth
Category: History
I particularly like this image of the 1892 Union Depot, as the architecture is similar to that of the station houses along the Saltsjöbanan commuter railway that I've been riding for most of my life.
Posted by Martin R at 4:36 AM • 6 Comments •
Post-Modernist Historiography
Category: China
A relativist present-day writer will not allow for a Victorian writer to have found out any objective knowledge about the High Middle Ages. But he will himself unproblematically claim objective knowledge about the Victorian writer's views and surrounding world.
Posted by Martin R at 3:32 PM • 13 Comments •
Swedish Historical Bibliography Mysteriously Threatened
Category: History
How is the Royal Library celebrating this milestone in Swedish historiography? Well... By terminating the Swedish Historical Bibliography project!
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Monday Miscellany
Category: Archaeology
Lots of news in archaeology and biology.
Posted by Martin R at 2:14 PM • 24 Comments •
Saint Paul Never Read the Bible
Category: History
Did you know that Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, was written just about the time of Paul's execution in AD 64/65?
Posted by Martin R at 6:18 AM • 37 Comments •
Two Queenly Careers
Category: History
One thing that really gets me about these people is how briefly they lived, how little education they had and how young they were when they did the deeds that wrote them into history.
Posted by Martin R at 1:46 PM • 18 Comments •
Gordon Ramsay's Predecessor Sacks Jerusalem
Category: History
And here's star philologist and religion scholar Ola Wikander with a guest lesson in Akkadian.The word of the day is nuḫatimmu. It means "a cook" in Akkadian (or sometimes "a baker"). Maybe something to interest Gordon Ramsay? And wouldn't...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Continued Afro-Chinese History Manipulation
Category: Archaeology
I hope the project does find a 15th century Chinese shipwreck. But if they do, then this will in no way validate the suddenly remembered folklore. It's a ridiculous product of current Afro-Chinese economic relations.
Posted by Martin R at 4:41 PM • 13 Comments •
A Deadly Find
Category: Archaeology
What's the most dangerous find an archaeologist can make? Some fear anthrax spores in sealed burial caskets. Others the asbestos used to temper certain types of North Scandinavian pottery. But German construction workers are on a whole other level than...
Posted by Martin R at 8:58 AM • 16 Comments •
Platoon
Category: Archaeology
The local cub scouts had asked me to accompany them on a forest walk to give them some culture and history.
Posted by Martin R at 4:55 PM • 7 Comments •
Not the Real Face of Jesus
Category: History
The shroud of Turin has been radiocarbon-dated to AD 1260-1390. This date coincides with the first written mention of the cloth from AD 1357.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 387 Comments •
Ancient Kings On the Edge of Historicity
Category: History
Protohistorical information is strictly speaking not factual knowledge. Not because we know that it's wrong, but because it is impossible to corroborate.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 14 Comments •
Dendro Dissidents
Category: Archaeology
When the amateurs challenge the professionals' opinion, all the latter can reply is "We know we're right but we can't show you how we know".
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 17 Comments •
Mistitled Book on Graveyard Folklore
Category: Archaeology
Vampire Forensics is mainly a collection of weakly interconnected but titillating tales of death and burial. Under this rubric the author zig-zags all over the place.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Futile Land Reclamation
Category: Archaeology
It's tragicomical reading, really. Because regardless of whether people were trying to drain and cultivate bogs, or if they were digging for peat and trying to process and sell it, there was a huge disconnect between their high hopes and the actual outcome.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
Fear of Time Travel
Category: History
Imagine that you're dropped into the city you live in with only the clothes you wear. No wallet, no hand bag, no money, no cell phone, no identification. And it's 500 years ago.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 49 Comments •
News From Old Uppsala
Category: Archaeology
Magnus Alkarp's book concentrates on the two craziest periods in Old Uppsala's history of scholarship, the 17th century and then the 19th-20th centuries, leaving the comparatively rationalistic 18th century out.
Posted by Martin R at 11:17 AM • 12 Comments •
Medieval Genius Sculptor Vaporised
Category: History
There are few named Medieval artists. And they have acted as magnets for attribution of anonymous masterpieces.
Posted by Martin R at 10:10 AM • 6 Comments •
Information Longevity Talk in Gothenburg
Category: Tech
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Årtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt långa perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent...
Posted by Martin R at 8:00 AM • 4 Comments •
New Book on the Early History of the Stockholm Archipelago
Category: Archaeology
In addition to the archive reports on my two seasons of fieldwork at the Late Medieval and Early Modern harbour of Djurhamn, I have now published a paper that discusses and interprets the results.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
Bus Ride up the Meuse
Category: Archaeology
Sculpture fragment from the Cathedral of St. Lambert in Liège. Today's bus excursion took us up the river Maas/Meuse into Wallonia, Belgium's Francophone part, where our first stop was Liège. The city looks pretty crummy, I'm afraid, with a...
Posted by Martin R at 1:48 PM • 1 Comments •
Copulation Music
Category: Music
Some of the most intensely loved musical styles have names that mean "copulation music".
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Runic Aerobics Disliked by Nazis
Category: Skepticism
The Nazis were no strangers to occultism. But Friedrich Marby was too much even for Himmler: he invented runic aerobics.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 13 Comments •
150 Years of Continual Discoveries
Category: Biology
Sean B. Carroll's latest book, Remarkable Creatures, is a collection of mini-biographies of people who have made important discoveries in evolutionary biology.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
Norwegian Ghost Mine
Category: Archaeology
It's a copper mine that was worked from 1723 until shortly after 1945. This is one of the coldest parts of Norway, which means that the wooden structures don't decay much through microbial action -- they mainly just erode.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Swedish History Reenactors in Canada
Category: Archaeology
We're seeing two periods of Scandy history being celebrated here. Tina & hubby represent the Viking Period in the 9th & 10th centuries. The other people, the ones erecting a may pole, are into the rural culture of the 19th century,
Posted by Martin R at 1:38 PM • 11 Comments •
Medieval Stockholm
Category: Archaeology
Time and time again, the town on the island and the heavily fortified castle at its northern end were in the hands of opposing political factions. Little wars were repeatedly fought between Stockholm town and castle!
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments •
The Knowledge of the Ancients
Category: Books
Ancient texts were preserved and copied largely because they were believed to contain valuable timeless knowledge about the world.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Weekend Fun
Category: Tech
Saturday me and the kids went on an unusual package tour. First we took the 1903 steam ship Mariefred from Stockholm to Mariefred, and got to visit the engine room while the machine was working. Mariefred is a small...
Posted by Martin R at 2:51 PM • 14 Comments •
Beowulf Saves the Royal Pub
Category: Archaeology
The conflict that drives the first two thirds of the long poem is centred upon certain problems King Hrothgar of the Danes has with his mead-hall "The Hart".
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
Open Source Dendrochronology
Category: Archaeology
Dendrochronology has a serious organisational problem that impedes its development as a scientific discipline and tends to compromise its results. This is the problem of proprietary data.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 9 Comments •
17th Century Coin Forgery
Category: Archaeology
It appears to be a forged gold coin, consisting of a soft grey metal (tin?) with a thin coating of a yellow metal.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 14 Comments •
Centenarian Open Access Archaeology Journal
Category: Archaeology
Fornvännen appears on-line for free with a six-month delay (due to concerns that the on-line version might otherwise undermine the print version).
Posted by Martin R at 9:03 AM • 1 Comments •
Baroque Lion Mask from the Peerless Palace
Category: History
North European Baroque is such a weird and lovely style. The wreck of the Vasa is a prime example, and there's a lot of it on the facades of houses in the Old Town too.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Silence is the Enemy: But What is Wrong With Those Men!?
Category: Children
In the long run, Darwinian selection acts upon cultures. But us in the world at large can't wait for that to make the current cultures of Liberia and Congo go extinct.
Posted by Martin R at 1:40 PM • 51 Comments •
Inga Clendinnen: Dancing with Strangers
Category: Books
Dancing with Strangers is an account of one of world history's most absurd situations.
Posted by Martin R at 5:24 PM • 5 Comments •
North Shore Battlefield
Category: Archaeology
I'm particularly interested in the pre-battle finds that are starting to accumulate.
Posted by Martin R at 11:37 AM • 2 Comments •
Gothic Confusion
Category: History
We're dealing both with historical reality and with historical fiction written a long time ago.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 20 Comments •
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