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 27, 2013On 10 June I blogged about some grisly finds from Cliffs End in Kent which to my mind indicate eight centuries of human sacrifice during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. I invited colleagues at Wessex Archaeology who did the dig to comment, and Chief Osteoarcheologist Jacqueline McKinley kindly sent me some detailed views.
The first thing to note is that though the full monograph hasn't appeared yet and my blog entry was based on a pop-sci feature in British Archaeology, a scholarly paper on the site has in fact been published:
McKinley, Schuster, & Millard 2013. Dead-sea connections: a…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2013This is priceless. There's a line of scented candles and other spa treatment paraphernalia called Voluspa. Volu-spa, get it? Now, the firm shows no awareness of what their chosen name means. Völuspá is a long Old Norse poem in the Poetic Edda, dealing with the creation and eventual destruction (and re-creation) of the world. It's title means "Prophecy of the Seeress", and it's known as one of the most majestic pieces of writing in its language. With this name, the candlemakers are either just oblivious, or they're judging that their target market doesn't know much about the Viking Period.
I…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2013Bronze Age rock art along Sweden's south-east coast is rich but not as varied as that of the famous west-coast region. One motif that we have been missing is the four-wheel wagon. It isn't common anywhere except on one site, Frännarp in inland Scania (below right), but we have had none whatsoever where I am.
Wagons at Frännarp in Scania
The other day we got our first wagon: at the rich classical site of Himmelstalund on the outskirts of Norrköping in Östergötland province. According to period convention, it is depicted in a flattened perspective with the wheels seen from the sides and the…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2013Despite loud (and in my opinion, well argued) opposition to the Swedish restrictions on metal detector use by honest amateurs, our authorities are sadly not coming round to anything resembling the Danish legislation that works so well.
My friend and fieldwork collaborator Tobias Bondeson is a skilled amateur detectorist who regularly publishes scholarly papers on his finds. He pointed me to the latest developments in Swedish officialdom on the topic, a 26 March proposition from the Ministry for Culture to Parliament: Kulturmiljöns mångfald, ”The Diversity of the Historic Environment”. Tobias…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2013British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It's about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we're dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants.
Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.…
aardvarchaeology | June 3, 2013Historiska media is a publishing house in Lund. In recent years they have been putting out pop-sci guide books about Medieval Sweden, province by province. I've reviewed the volumes about Södermanland and Uppland provinces here. And now my friend and Fornvännen co-editor Elisabet Regner has written the first volume in the series that deals with a town, not a province: about Stockholm, in whose suburbs I've lived for almost all my life. Together with the Uppland and Södermanland volumes, Det medeltida Stockholm gives us Stockholmers a pretty good grip on our Medieval surroundings.
I shouldn't…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2013
Reading Kerstin Ekman I'm struck by how complicated a relationship her characters have to social class. And by how oblivious I have largely been to it through my life. I've always known that there are people with less money and power than my circle. And that there are those with more money and power. But me, I'm just comfortable in my middle-class geekiness, where what matters is neither money nor power, but being smart and well read. I don't care what your pay check looks like, I will still only really respect you if you have a vocabulary and can spell.
I want a big fucking switch in Gmail…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2013For months I subscribed to too many podcasts, and so wasn't listening to a lot of music. But lately I've made an effort to rectify that. Here's what I've been bopping to.
Apples In Stereo – Travellers In Space And Time (2010). Lots of vocoder!
David Bowie – Pin Ups (1973). Glam covers of 60s British pop tunes.
Brimstone Solar Radiation Band – Solstice (2005). Norway's finest psychedelia!
Jet – Shaka Rock (2009). Stonesy, amazingly derivative and amazingly good.
Midlake – Courage of Others (2010). Mournful, close two-part harmony, guitars, flute, always on the brink of over-earnestness.
Norm…
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2013Last winter I was amazed by the poor upkeep afforded to buildings in central Marrakech. I spent part of last week in fascinating Istanbul, and there it was again: plentiful ruins of recent buildings in the middle of busy shopping and hotel districts. Istanbul is in even worse shape than Marrakech. Many older houses are only maintained on the ground floor. There may be eight ruinous floors on top, eroding steadily and falling piecemeal into the street.
Many property owners in Istanbul fit their buildings with horizontal metal-grille shelves sticking out from the facade above the first floor.…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2013Role-playing games of the Dungeons & Dragons variety come in the form of books that are functionally analogous to computer software. You get your operating system (core rule book) and then you can buy update packages (rule expansions), programming libraries (campaign settings) and application programs (adventure modules) for it. In this analogy, the computer that runs the software is you and your gaming buddies.
A difference between RPGs and computer software is that once you have a secure installed base for your operating system -- that is, with RPGs, once you've sold enough core rule…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2013Junior and I went for two days to LinCon, the annual gaming convention in Linköping (est. 1984). There was a fine crowd of geeks, all ages and with a good gender balance, many in steampunk finery. I said to Junior, "Look at them closely, son. These are your people."
Here's what I played. All good games!
El Grande (1995). Power struggle in 15th century Spain. This is the only 1990s game currently on Boardgame Geek's top-20, and so I wasn't surprised to find that it was the best game I played. Highly recommended!
Hacienda (2005). There was a room dedicated to the games of Wolfgang Kramer, so…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2013The other day somebody hid a geocache a short bike ride from my house at a spot where, I now know, an orienteering-themed fraternal order was founded in 1930. Today I rode out and became the second person to log the cache. And coming home I realised it was my 800th find since I started 8 years ago!
My geocaching stats reveal a hobby that starts as an obsession and mellows out into an on-and-off thing.
Finds no 1-100 took 2 months.
101-200 took 8 months (because of winter).
201-300 took 3 months.
301-400 took 4 months.
401-500 took 7 months.
501-600 took 1 year.
601-700 took c. 2½ years.
701-…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2013Current World Archaeology #58 (April/May) has a seven-page feature on the 8th century mass graves in ships at Salme on Saaremaa in Estonia. This astonishing find interests me greatly as the ships and the dead men's equipment are Scandinavian, and so I mentioned it here back in 2008. One of the sword pommels is an example of the animal-figurine weaponry Jan Peder Lamm and myself have published on and suggest Finnish involvement. And boat burial in and of itself is a theme with which I have worked a lot. Here we seem to be dealing with Scandies who got badly beaten when attempting a raid, and…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2013
I'm not very bothered by archaeological interpretations that are proven wrong. I'm afraid of those ideas that have become accepted even though there is no way they can ever be tested.
"... it was common knowledge that local witches had killed old Mayor Niels Iversen Scribe by means of performing their bodily functions at his front door during the night." Skalk 2013:2 pp. 13-14.
Found a great podcast: Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. Two very well-read and funny spec-fic guys talk about books, history, gaming, writing.
Guy writes me to sell an event to the Swedish Skeptics, calls me lagom…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2013In your room
Where time stands still
Or moves at your will
Will you let the morning come soon
As we dance to the Masochism Tango
I ache for the touch of your lips, dear
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear
There'll be times
When my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in to sin
Because you have to make this life livable
As we dance to the Masochism Tango
You caught my nose
In your left castanet, love
I can feel the pain yet, love
Every time I hear drums
And I envy the rose
That you held in your teeth, love
Strangelove
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2013I've got a lot on my mind.
Bronze Age deposition book: visiting some sites on Friday, data collection almost done, have started doing stat analysis and writing interpretations, need to write gazetteer entries while I remember details of how I've managed to pinpoint find spots.
Also time to decide what my next project will be! I had hoped that a new place of employment would guide me in this decision. But no. Strategically, I should probably write something about the High Middle Ages or the Early Iron Age now to continue broadening my scope. Can't do Mesolithic, would have to learn to knap…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2013A few years ago I did some fieldwork at Djurhamn, a peripheral naval harbour of the 15th through the 17th centuries (and blogged much about it: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H, and published a paper on it in an anthology). Now maritime archaeologist Jonas Wiklund has published a paper on the sad fate of the Rikswasa, a nearby shipwreck that was salvaged by a diving firm and made into coffee-table ornaments in the 1960s with permission from the National Maritime Museum. Jonas has kindly allowed me to make his paper (in Swedish) available here on Aard.
Wiklund, J. 2013. Rikswasa -- från…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2013As part of my duties as chairman of the Swedish Skeptics, earlier tonight I took part in a studio discussion on Swedish TV4 about Gardasil, the vaccine against human papilloma virus that is offered to all 12-y-o Swedish girls. It was a pretty silly affair. The TV people had decided on the angle that the information given about the vaccine to young girls isn't detailed enough. For instance, the school hallway fliers don't tell the kids that the protection rate against HPV isn't 100% (duh) or that very rarely the vaccine can provoke some serious side effects (duh again). These are traits, I…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 20132009. University of Lund publishes the PhD thesis Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Created Agricultural Wetlands, dealing with biological diversity and ecosystem services in ponds in the agricultural landscape (and commented on here).
2013: Same department advertises a post-doc in the field "Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services in Ponds in the Agricultural Landscape".
Because in the Scandinavian countries' public sectors, you always have to go through these elaborate charades to suggest that you're really looking open-mindedly for the best candidate for a job, not simply for…