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 | September 16, 201323 years ago I started my undergraduate studies, and my hugely inspiring main teacher was Göran Burenhult, who had written our main textbook. Now I'm teaching a very similar freshman archaeology course for the first time, and the main textbook is again one written by Göran Burenhult. This two-volume work is titled Arkeologi i Norden and appeared in 1999. At Göran's invitation I contributed an article for the second volume about aristocratic culture in the 5th through the 8th centuries.
I haven't re-read my article in a long time. But very timely, my friend Kristina – who is writing a book…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2013This bug in OpenOffice / LibreOffice has been with me for years and years. You open a file, you delete it while open, you close LibreOffice -- and then LibreOffice will henceforth tell you eeeevery time you start the program that it tried and failed to recover that file. But I found a bug fix. Thank you "user177723"!
1. Open LibreOffice and create a new file with the same name as the lost one in the same directory. (Which directory this may have been, you have to remember/guess.)
2. Save it.
3. Close LibreOffice completely. (Yes, this is an essential step.)
4. Open the newly created file.…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2013Though I really enjoyed my late 70s childhood visits to Disneyland and Disneyworld, I am no friend of disnification, and I've always seen the Paris Disneyland as a bit of a joke. But my mom wanted to treat my kids to a visit last week, and so I came along too.
The Paris Disneyland has five sections. The US small-town nostalgia section full of Disney memorabilia shops, the faux-16th century fairytale section, the adventure movie section and the wild west section didn't do very much for me – though the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is admittedly hugely atmospheric, and the Small World ride…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2013I'm not saying that my mind is particularly august.
First Aid Kit rule. And are godless: "There's one life and it's this life and it's beautiful"
After listening to Ken & Robin's latest podcast episode I did some reading on Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. The mind boggles at the idea of a Medieval army lead by two violently delusional psychotics.
Reading a book that shows its author, an American teacher of creative writing, to have a tenuous grasp on English. He writes shown for shone, immure for inure and lumpen for lumpy. Boo to his editor!
For the first time in 30 years I've seen a…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2013Recently I blogged about historians of science who chronicle scientific debates of the past neutrally and leave it to the reader to find out who (if anyone) turned out to be right in the end. This approach pisses me off because I'm a scientist and I believe that the main point of such debates – past and current – is to advance science. I don't enjoy the implication of neutralist history of science, that it's all just historically contingent talk and the process isn't taking us anywhere.
Historian of science Darin Hayton of Haverford College in Pennsylvania didn't like my viewpoint and wrote…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2013I'm weeks late to the party here. If you pay attention to atheist issues you've probably heard that a recent major meta-study* concludes that at the population level, atheists are a bit smarter than religious folks (mainly Protestant Americans and English in this case). Not dramatically so, but in a statistically significant way. The difference persists even if you control for gender and education level. This means that if you look only at poorly educated people, the unbelievers are a bit smarter, and likewise if you look only at highly educated people, or women, or men. Here are some…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2013I like reading about the history of science, including my own discipline. But there is one kind of history of science that annoys me hugely, and that's the knowledge relativist kind. A knowledge relativist historian of science will chronicle a scientific debate of the past but make no comment on who – if any – of the participants turned out to be right. (If you feel the need, you're welcome to substitute “gain the eventual support of today's scientific consensus” for “be right”.)
Such history writing makes scientific debate look ridiculous and pointless. Just a lot of agitated people dreaming…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2013After a languid summer of reading, swimming and some work I'm gearing up for an intense time with a lot of fun stuff during September and October.
Accompany Junior's class to Sevenoaks and London for music camp.
For the second time, review grant applications for the main science funding body of a country in southern Europe, possibly with travel involved.
Go to the Lake Vänern Museum in Lidköping to look at the finds from the Sunnerby barrow that I've been contracted to write about.
The 15th European Skeptics Congress of which I am a co-organiser.
Teach Scandy Archaeology 101 in Umeå one day…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2013The people who owned my mom's summer house in the 60s and 70s threw household waste into the sea from the main dock. And they methodically filled their empty wine bottles with water and sank them there. (If you toss an empty bottle into the sea it floats away.) The water's only about 2.5 m deep at the dock, so when we took over in '82 we could see the junk covering the sea floor clearly. Hundreds of bottles. For a few years in the mid-80s me, my brother and our friends did a lot of diving and took most of the stuff ashore. But a few empties have still been visible in favourable lighting,…
aardvarchaeology | August 3, 2013I have a problem with the term Viking Age. And it's not likely that I will ever get satisfaction. Because I am a Scandy archaeologist, and the term is owned by UK historians and the general English-speaking public.
The three-ages system was established by C.J. Thomsen in his 1821 book Ledetraad. It divides Scandinavian Prehistory into three ages, characterised by the material used in cutting tools: first stone, then bronze, then iron. In Swedish, this taxonomical level is the ålder – stenåldern, bronsåldern, järnåldern – using the close cognate of what Snorri back in the 13th century called…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2013
Sad case in my municipality of date rape made worse by fathering fail. 20-y-o guy coerces 15-y-o girl to blow him by threatening to tell her dad they're together. Good dads are who you run to when somebody tries to blackmail you.
A publicist offers me to review the latest in a popular series of detective novels (that I've never heard of) on my blog. I accept and receive an epub file. Then I realise that this is just an ebook reissue of a book from 1997. Not reviewing it.
Michael Jackson didn't die. He just completed his transformation into a Deep One. Just look at the song lyric, "The girl…
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2013Come September I'm scheduled to fulfil a major life goal of mine after over 15 years of impatient waiting. I'm going to teach Scandy Archaeology 101 for the first time, at the University of Umeå!*
The fall semester is divided into four modules of which I am head teacher for three: 1) Introduction, 2) Stone Age & Early Bronze Age, 4) Landscape & paleoecological methods. I'm going to use this blog entry as my draft notes for the introductory module, and I'd like to ask you, Dear Reader to help me improve them with comments, suggestions and questions. Let's make a list of the most…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2013My Wulfheodenas homie David Huggins asked me a good question. ”Shield maidens! True or False? Okay, that was a bit general, but female 'warrior' graves, symbolic or otherwise?”. I take this to mean “Were there female warriors in Northern Europe AD 500-1000?”
Let's start by examining why everyone accepts that there were male warriors. Indeed, to my knowledge most scholars believe that at least, say, 99.9% of all warriors were men, and conversely that a considerable percentage of free-born men received some degree of weapons training. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, the written…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2013I feel like blogging but there's not much going on over the summer and I don't know what to write about. Toss me a bone, Dear Reader! Suggest a topic, ask me a question, gimme a link!
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2013Smørenge is one of the sites on Bornholm that keeps yielding mid-1st-millennium gold mini-figurines. But in addition to the 2D representations on embossed gold foil known as guldgubber, an artisan employed by the magnate family at Smørenge also made nude 3D figurines. The fifth of these was found by one of the island's famously skilful metal detectorists in May, and she's quite a revelation. Because representations of women are far less common than of men in Iron Age art, and nude women are almost unknown.
The Smørenge woman is wearing only a hatched belt. She has the prominent "seer's thumbs…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2013Here's a fun case of me not anticipating an imminent technological development, not thinking that last centimetre of far enough. In July of 2007, six years ago, I wrote:
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…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2013The Stone of Sälna is a runestone (U 323) erected about AD 1000 at Sälna hamlet where a major road crossed Hargsån stream in Skånela parish, Uppland. (This is not far from where Arlanda airport now sprawls.) None of this is unusual. But the stone's great height, its inscription and its later fate are. Here's what can be made out of the runes as they survive today and as documented by a 17th century antiquarian.
Østeinn and Jorundr and Bjorn, the brothers, erected [this] stone [after] ...steinn drums, their father. God help his spirit and soul, forgive him his crimes and sins. Forever shall…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2013
Wait a minute. Did I just win my first competition for an advertised teaching job? In ten years of applying for them? I kind of feel the bedrock under my feet slipping.
A chapter of my life ended on 12 June. 13½ years ago I began taking my son to daycare. Ever since, I have taken my kids to daycare or school half of my mornings or, since Jrette showed up, more. In August she starts taking the commuter train to school.
The Norwegian Archaeologists' Annual Meeting has two quotations at the top of this year's web site: one from Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley about how important…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2013Contract archaeology is the current term for what used to be called rescue archaeology: documenting archaeological sites slated for destruction through land development. (Swedes sometimes fall for a false friend and translate an old word of ours, exploateringsarkeologi, into “exploitation archaeology”, suggesting fieldwork undertaken by people in pimp/ho outfits to the soundtrack from Shaft.)
Swedish contract archaeology has seen steady growth measured decade by decade since the end of WW2, both in terms of the number of active field archaeologists and of the number of units. I seem to…