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 | June 28, 2007Been tagged with the same chain letter by the guys at Why Don't You Blog? and Tim at Walking the Berkshires. So, in the interest of full disclosure, here are eight random facts about me.
I've played seven matches of Jeopardy.
I'm a Lord of the Forodrim.
I once caught chlamydia from a registered midwife.
Along with a hoard of other forodrimites, I once ran around a golf course on a Midsummer Night in the nude, showering in the sprinkler system.
I'm myopic on the right-hand eye only, giving me poor stereoscopic vision.
The hardest mind-altering drug I've ever taken in a dose large enough to…
aardvarchaeology | June 27, 2007
My friend Lars at Arkland always comes through with ace photographs when I ask for them. Here's a pic he took in 1995 when a landowner at Vittene in Västergötland had come forth with an Early Iron Age gold torque he had kept in a closet for many years. In this picture, our late colleague Ulf Viking is wearing a makeshift rain coat made of a black plastic garbage bag, ready to search for more parts of the hoard. Read more here!
Dear Reader, feel free to follow Lars example and send me archaeopix! Just tell me a few words about what's in the pic to aid my dull understanding.
aardvarchaeology | June 26, 2007Here's some geology for a change.
At Slättemossa in the province of Småland, southern Sweden, are found ice-polished outcrops of orbicular diorite ("Napoleonite"). This rock consists of granite balls covered with hornblende and other minerals and then encased in a granite matrix. When the inland ice ground the rock down, a smooth grey surface covered in darker circles resulted. Pretty striking, as seen in the photographs by Anders Möller! Anders and Inger are badass geocachers, having found nearly 1400 caches and hidden more than 200.
Visit the site at N57° 22.930 E15° 36.100. It's not far…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007I've checked the literature and found out what really happened in the Goldhahn vs. Berntsson fight about barrow-building. Of course, whatever the result, it would have left the Lund Archaeological Review editors looking bad.
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007The fine British journal Antiquity is soliciting material for the Open Access section of its web site. Specifically, Martin Carver and his crew want a) the abstracts of recent doctoral theses with relevance for archaeology, b) obituaries of recently deceased archaeologists. Submit thesis abstracts here, obits here. In either case, you should of course also erect a commemorative rune stone near a ford or assembly site and bury a large silver hoard.
Oh, and they also want really good archaeopix dor the editorial section of the paper edition! E-mail yours with some contextual info and photo-tech…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007Panos Karnezis's new novel The Birthday Party is a re-imagination of the life of Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate. The book is structured around the events of a single day and night towards the end of the tycoon's life, though the bulk of the text is made up of deftly interleaved backstory. The storytelling method is straight-forward on the verge of simplistic, with an omniscient narrator. Being used to far more murky and intricate approaches, I found myself wondering if some passages were in fact intended as naïvistic parody. The only metafictional twist I've detected is that one of…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2007Daryl Gregory's short fiction is quite remarkable. For the two past years, he's managed to top both the Hartwell & Kramer and the Dozois Year's Best anthologies with "Second Person, Present Tense" and "Damascus". I don't want to spoil anyone's fun by saying too much about the stories: just that they are science fiction stories about neuropsychology. One about the neurological basis of selfhood, the other about the neurological basis of religious epiphany. Gregory is a materialist and a skeptic, my kind of guy, and he's also a fine stylist with great psychological insight.
Check out the…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2007
Longtime Dear Readers may remember me blogging about the excavations in my friend Jan Peder's garden last summer. Beside his house is a ruin mound full of heavily burnt and vitrified Medieval-style bricks, and he's gotten funds together to do some excavations there. The original idea was that the feature might be the remains of a defensive tower or other aristocratic building. Last year's work established that it was in fact the remains of a brick kiln, which is also evidence of somebody powerful in the vicinity. 16th century pottery found inside the kiln gives the latest possible date for…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2007Here's an idea for bloggers with an archaeological bent. I'm thinking of putting together a one-off carnival about people's nearest archaeological sites. You go to the nearest site you're aware of, snap a picture of it and explain (in as many or few words you like) the site's significance and life-history in a blog entry. Then you send me the link, and when I've got a fair number, I put them together in a link-fest, plug it on Reddit & Co, everybody votes for it and we all get a traffic spike. You don't need any formal qualifications to contribute.
Sound like fun? Please leave a comment…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2007It's been a while since I ran any reader-submitted archaeopix. C'mon everybody, I'm sure you have some good snaps sitting on your disk! Please e-mail them to me with a bit of contextual info.
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2007The other day I suddenly understood the etymology of the word "helicopter". Many would probably try to take the word apart as heli-copter, which makes no sense. I mean, what does it mean to copt helis? "I am a copter and I sure love coptin' them old helis."
What you need to do is look at words like Pteranodon (meaning "tooth on wing"), Diptera (meaning "two-wings") and "helix". Helico-pter! Helix-wing! Suddenly there's a new nerdy option for the hyphenation of that word.
I once read a newspaper article about record producer Phil Spector, where he was poetically described as "helicopter…
aardvarchaeology | June 21, 2007
Yesterday I met a Slovakian colleague, the amiable Matej Ruttkay of the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. We had an animated conversation in broken German about 1st Millennium graves and he showed me loads of find pix. Matej's own excavations are absolutely ace, with some really weird Style II metalwork, not actually very far from the Scandinavian prototypes yet clearly of local make. But what blew my mind was the pix and news of the Poprad-Matejovce chamber grave, excavated by Matej's colleagues last summer and not yet widely publicised. It's an extremely well-…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2007The seventeenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. I love that blog's name. Check it out! Archaeology anna anthropology anna boom shakalaka.
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2007You listen to a podcast that you like for months and years and you start feeling like you know the people on the show a little. Their voices are certainly familiar and you know a bit about their personalities. And so you start to wonder what they look like. At least I did. So by various means I've located pix of the people behind my favourite podcasts. Check them out! These guys rule my mp3 player and they should be on yours as well.
The R.U. Sirius show: R.U. Sirius, Jeff Diehl, Diana Brown, Steve Robles.
Escape Pod: Steve Eley, Jonathon Sullivan.
Skepticality: Swoopy, Derek.
Digital…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2007Me and my Internet Service Provider go way back. I got my account with algonet.se in early 1995 and put up my still current web site there after a few months. I've been using my e-mail address there as my main one ever since, publishing it indiscriminately all over the web and UseNet, and still I don't get too much spam.
Algonet is a legacy domain. There is no longer an ISP by that name: the domain and its user accounts have passed from ISP to ISP and are currently handled by an outfit called Glocalnet. Since new Algonet accounts haven't been issued for years, I guess us users are a dwindling…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007Wednesday 20 June will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Hominin Dental Anthropology. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Jason ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line):
"Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2007Here's a translation of one of my first brushes with absurdism, Swedish rocker Eddie Meduza's 70s song "Va den grön så får du en ny" (original lyrics here with ugly popups).
If It Was Green, Then I'll Replace It
By Eddie Meduza
I'd bought myself a vacuum flask
In a store down in Målilla
It was real pretty until I poured coffee into it
But then it broke into pieces
So I called Mr. Chin
He's the man with the store
(You see, he's got a really big chin)
And I told him, my flask is busted
Do they come with a guarantee?
Yeah, said Mr. Chin, gravelly and really slowly
He was speaking really slowly…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2007[More blog entries about psychedelic, fairground, carousel, zoo, Sweden; psykedelia, Eskilstuna, parkenzoo, karusell, zoo.]
Invited by my wife's employers we spent the day at Parken Zoo, a highly original amusement park outside Eskilstuna, an hour and a half by car from my country seat. Originally a Folkets Park (People's Park) established by the victorious early 20th century Labour movement, it has a great big stage, two dance halls, much greenery and loads of bronze sculpture, including a bust of Hjalmar Branting right at the entrance. Since that time, it has also acquired a full…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2007
Most rock carvings have very little archaeological context: people who search for them tend to remove hastily any layers on top of them, and they quit digging when they reach the edge of the carved panel. But in recent decades, there has been a trend among Bronze Age scholars to dig beside the panels and try to find ones that are still covered by culture layers. Such digs tend to turn up carving tools of stone, pottery, enigmatic clay marbles and above all lots of evidence of burning. Cultic fires illuminating the carvings as drunk fertility cultists cavorted and copulated in Mycenaean…