Aardvarchaeology
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, board gamer, bookworm, and father of two.
aardvarchaeology | July 13, 2007That Myers character has snared me in his net again. Did I say Myers? Sorry, M e i e r. Sid Meier. The Civilization guy.
It's been years since I spent any significant amount of time on computer games. The other day, however, I picked up a copy of the 2005 hit Civilization IV cheaply on eBay, and now I've gotten sucked into it. I used to play the board game, I used to play it with house rules, I've even played it with house rules and a home-made alternative map, and I played the original PC game a lot too. I quit when I realised that the outcome of a game was largely determined by the size of…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2007As mentioned here before, Stockholm osteology professor Ebba During died in May. Her colleagues have now sent me an appreciation as a guest entry.
[More blog entries about archaeology, obit, obituary, Sweden, osteology, ebbaduring; arkeologi, dödsruna, osteologi, ebbaduring]
In Loving Memory of Professor Ebba During, 21.8 1937 - 15.05 2007
By Anna Kjellström and colleagues
Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory
University of Stockholm
Colleagues and friends at the department of Archaeology and Classical studies at the University of Stockholm are saddened by Ebba During's death on the 15th…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2007Alun at Clioaudio has done an excellent job of tracking down good archaeo & anthro material for the 18th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival.
The 19th 4SH will appear at Sherd Nerd on Wednesday 18 July. Submit good stuff (your own or somebody else's) to Amanda.
Bloggers with archaeo and anthro interests are invited to volunteer for Four Stone Hearth hosting duty. It's a good way to market your blog and make new blogging friends!
I'm hosting the Carnival of the Godless here on Sunday 22 July. Submit here.
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2007Here's something for my fellow burial aficionados to ponder. The news item's headline is overstated ("Woman Grieved for Seven Years at Empty Grave"), but the actual occurrence is kind of interesting.
A Gothenburg woman grieved for seven years at her mother's grave, but the urn with the mother's remains had never left the crematory.
"This shouldn't be allowed to happen. That's why you turn to an undertaker's, otherwise I could have done the work myself", says the woman to Swedish Radio Gothenburg.
An urn should by rights be buried within the year. At crematories, urns occasionally remain for…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2007Last Saturday morning an armed robbery was attempted at the Nacka Forum mall not far from where I live. Two masked robbers went in just as staff were arriving to work, dragged a woman into her workplace, gaffer-taped her to a chair and demanded that she turn off the alarm and tell them when her co-workers would arrive. After receiving confusing replies, the two men left, running, and minutes later the woman worked herself loose of the tape and called the police. She is physically unhurt.
The robbers had gone into a cashless realtor's office, Svensk Fastighetsförmedling, instead of the post-…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Belgium, Merovingian, burial; arkeologi, Belgien, folkvandringstiden, vendeltiden, gravar.]
Belgian Dear Reader Bruno is one of the astronomy buffs behind Blog Wega (in Dutch). A piece about Bruno's nearest archaeological site wouldn't fit that blog, but I'm happy to have it as a guest entry. Rich 1st Millennium graves, what more can you ask for? This is the sixth entry I receive for the Your Nearest Site carnival. Gimme three more NOW, people, and I'll put it on-line!
Merovingian Motorway at Grez-Doiceau
By Bruno Van de Casteele
Yes, this is my…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2007
I've embarked on three weeks of summertime solo fatherhood as my wife works for a cookery mag in town. Today I sent the kids and their friends out to the overcast playground for an hour, listened to the Pixies and re-boxed my computer odds-and-ends, discovering innumerable useful cables and connectors, three old Sportster modems and five or six mouses, most of which have no scroll wheel.
Parenting tip: to get kids to eat veggies, hand them out while they play video games. Zombie-like and unfazed, they will chomp carrots and cucumber as they stare at the screen. Anything that isn't directly…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2007Dave over at The World's Fair is asking a few questions about interdisciplinary envy. Do biologists wish they were physicists? Or do physicists dream of biology? And what about archaeologists?
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
I'm an archaeologist specialising in Scandinavian Prehistory, mainly the 1st Millennium AD.
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course?
Nope, I've concentrated on this subject since day one at the University of Stockholm back in 1990 when I was 18. I chose between archaeology and astronomy, but went for the field where I could dive straight…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2007
Lately I have come to think of books as computer devices, combining the functions of screen and backup medium. All texts these days are written and type-set on computers, so the paper thingy has long been a secondary manifestation of the text. People like publisher Jason Epstein and book blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman have predicted that we will soon have our books made on demand at any store that may today have a machine for making photographic prints. The texts will reside on the net, on our USB memory sticks or on our handheld computers/cell phones. The paper output/backup-storage device…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2007Antony Moore's novel The Swap is set in southern England in 2006 and revolves around a school reunion of people born in 1970. It's a murder mystery and a love story, a humorous tale about being startled out of complacency and boredom by unexpected events, about letting go of your past and moving on. It's quite engrossing but should carry a prominent warning sticker: This Book Has an Infuriatingly Open Ending.
Moore, Antony. 2007. The Swap. London: Harvill Secker. 278 pp. ISBN 978-1-8465-5070-6.
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2007[More blog entries about hiking, Sweden, Norway, mountains; fjällvandra, Sverige, Norge, Dalarna.]
Spent Monday through Wednesday on a trip to Lake Grövelsjön in the mountainous northwesternmost corner of Dalecarlia province. The lake is sausage-shaped with one end in Sweden and the other in Norway. On Tuesday my wife and I hiked around it, a walk of 25-30 km involving the ascent and descent of 250 m heights -- twice, as we touched down to the valley floor at the far end of the lake. Most of the time we were above the treeline at about 980 m over sea level.
The area is right in the middle…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2007[More blog entries about science, medicine, biology, carnival, tangledbank; vetenskap, biologi, medicin.]
Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 83rd Tangled Bank blog carnival! This is the blog where all of science -- natural, social and historical -- is just seen as one big bunch of adjunct disciplines to the study of societies of the past. "What about medicine?", I hear you ask. It is very good for prolonging the working lives of archaeologists. "Physics?" We do need dating methods, you know. "Zoology?" Help us classify faunal remains and reconstruct ancient economy. "Astronomy?" It'll get…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2007Gone mountain hiking with this babe I met at a party eight years ago. The Tangled Bank blog carnival will be one day late.
aardvarchaeology | July 3, 2007[More blog entries about architecture, history, Sweden, Victorian; arkitektur, historia, oscariansk, Wallenberg, Saltsjöbaden.]
The area where I grew up once belonged to the village of Neglinge, a group of small holdings on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago. The nearby inlet was briefly used as a harbour by a foreign fleet in the High Middle ages, but apart from that, Neglinge didn't really make the news until the 1890s. A Stockholm banker, Knut Agaton Wallenberg (whose family still rules the Swedish economy), bought the area in 1891 and turned it into a summer resort for his…
aardvarchaeology | July 2, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Mesolithic, forestfire; arkeologi, mesolitikum, Tyresta, skogsbrand.]
Spent Friday working for my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell, digging on one of their Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve south of Stockholm. It's an incredible place. Imagine:
An archipelago with lots of little rocky islands, located far from the coast of the mainland and teeming with seals. Mesolithic people go there in kayaks to hunt at certain times of the year, bringing chunks of rock for toolmaking. At their camps, they knap it into arrowheads,…
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2007Time to get those ace blog entries written!
On Wednesday we have a Four Stone Hearth at Clioaudio (submit archaeology and anthropology entries here). 4SH also has open hosting slots from September onward.
On Thursday there's a Tangled Bank here at Aard (submit life-sciences entries here).
ASAP there will be a one-off carnival here at Aard about Your Nearest Archaeological Site (more info here).
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2007Last week a mentally ill man shot one policeman to death and hurt three other people when they came to apprehend him in his home in the Swedish town of Nyköping. This is a very rare and shocking occurrence in Sweden, where gun control is such that most people have never seen a handgun. Wednesday, an opinion piece about the case appeared in the main Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. It was written by two senior psychiatrists, Henrik Belfrage and Göran Fransson, both of whom have examined the killer in the past. What they had to say is quite remarkable, and so I decided to translate a few bits…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2007Aardvarchaeology's been on-line for half a year today! Before I came here, I'd been blogging at Salto sobrius for over a year, so by now this blogging thing is a big part of my lifestyle and self-image. I love it -- I write about whatever's occupying my mind, a pleasurable pastime in itself, and then hundreds of people show up to read it every day! Being here on ScienceBlogs helps a lot to attract readers, and so do Stumbleupon and Reddit. (Digg, not so much.) As I've been boasting for a while in the sidebar, Aard is now the world's number one archaeology blog measured by the number of other…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2007
There's a newsbit doing the rounds of international summer-starved media about a funny cranium found at St. Nicholas' church in Sarpsborg, Norway during excavations headed by Mona Beate Buckholm of Østfoldmuseet. The cranium belonged to a batch of bones surfacing when some rose bushes were moved. Radiocarbon dates them to most likely the 11th century AD. The find is touted as having "the same genetic marks as the Inca people of Latin America". This is an oversimplification.
Here's what it's all about, and I translate from the Norwegian:
"One of the men had a cranium with a split neck bone, a…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2007In the current issue of Antiquity is a review of G.G. Fagan's edited volume Archaeological Fantasies (available on-line behind a paywall). I reviewed this book favourably back in September: it's pretty much a skeptical attack on pseudo-scientific archaeology.
Antiquity's reviewer, however, doesn't like the book at all, and for an interesting reason. Wiktor Stoczkowski is a sociologist of science working in Paris, and he isn't very interested in the interpretation of the archaeological record. His main concern is with the dynamics of current society.
"The editor of the volume insists that its…