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 | January 4, 2013The wonderful Curiosity rover on Mars has been much in the news lately, but let's not forget about the previous rover generation! Opportunity landed on Mars nine Earth calendar years ago today on 25 January, and it still works fine. Its mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn’t avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.
Oppy is still on the rim of Endeavour crater, the area where it's…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2013The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2012. Both the Enlightener award and the Deceiver award are given to the editorial staff of programmes on Swedish national radio.
Medierna is a weekly media criticism show. They roast journalists in an excellently skeptical fashion and have during the year touched upon mistreatment of subjects such as climatology, alternative medicine and vaccination.
Nyhetsguiden is a daily news analysis show. In April and May they ran several anecdote-based antivaccine stories about the ongoing effort to vaccinate prepubescent girls against the…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2013Here are the ten boardgames I played the most over a year with about one gaming session a week.
Innovation (2010)
7 Wonders (2010)
For Sale (1997)
Glory to Rome (2005) *
Lost Cities (1999)
Verräter (1998) *
Pergamon (2011, reviewed here) *
Telestrations (2009) *
Last Night on Earth (2007) *
Wok Star (2010) *
These are mostly short games that you can play repeatedly in one evening. The longer games that we played more than twice were Last Night on Earth and Yggdrasil. I played 74 different boardgames in 2012. Looking back since mid-2008, the number is 171.
Stats courtesy of Boardgame Geek.…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2013Here are my best reads in English during 2012. I read 50 books this year, six of which were e-books. I flirted with LibraryThing for a while, but lately I've found that Goodreads is more the kind of leisure reading database/community that I enjoy. Find me there.
Packing for Mars. Mary Roach 2011. Delving into space exploration history to get a perspective on the gritty realities of a future human-staffed Mars mission. (Let's first do sample return.)
My Early Life. Winston Churchill 1930. Scion of power spends his youth trying to get involved in war and trains as a cavalry officer as one of…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2012I saw something odd in Marrakech recently. Along the main avenues there was a considerable amount of construction going on. But also properties right next door that had clearly been vacated years ago without receiving new buildings. And newish buildings and shop space that were boarded up. Freshly painted fronts of closed restaurants that looked like they'd opened and failed within the past year, right on downtown main street.
Moving out a few blocks from the main drags, there were entire abandoned buildings. And in the Medina / Old Town, buildings that had been abandoned so long ago that…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2012Yesterday the 29th was Aard's sixth birthday, but I was busy making Småland elk meatball lasagna and playing boardgames so I forgot to post. The State of the Blog is good and I have lots of year-end entries to write, as well as a stack of archaeomags to comment on, and hopefully I will get the finder's permission to publish some photographs here of a mind-boggling new Danish find that Aard regular (since at least July 2011) Jakob tipped me off about the other day.
Overcast weather has caused me to spend most of my Christmas vacation indoors. I'm looking forward to some crisp and sunny January…
aardvarchaeology | December 25, 2012In recent years there's been increasing numbers of archaeological research projects that reference climate change as part of what they want to study. This is at the same time wise and a little silly. It's wise because science should serve the concerns of society, and because if you want research funding it's a good idea to latch onto themes that people outside of your narrow speciality care about. But it's also a little silly because it's such transparent pandering to the funding bodies. I was taught about the threat of the greenhouse effect as a kid back in the 80s, and no archaeologist…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2012Remember blogging? It was really big back in 2005. My wife and her journalist friends all took it up. And eventually I did too -- a bit more than a week before Christmas that year. A year later I got onto Scienceblogs. And look at me now, seven years down the blogging line. Still enjoying myself! Traffic has been down since we upgraded to Wordpress back in spring, but it's slowly recovering.
Are you still doing things you started in 2005, Dear Reader? What things?
aardvarchaeology | December 13, 2012Science Publishing Group is another scam Open Access journal publisher or academic vanity press. Yesterday they sent me a form-letter invitation to submit papers or become member of an unspecified editorial board or become a peer reviewer. "Join us!" But they don't even publish an archaeology journal. The closest they get to one is a godforsaken excuse for a journal named Social Sciences. It allegedly caters to everything from law to anthropology.
The best part is that they sent the letter to my Academy address. The one I use when editing Fornvännen, a rock-solid paper and OA archaeology…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2012A perennial annoyance for me as a parent is the many odd ways in which schools force parents to organise the funding for trips and stays at camp collectively. The general idea is sound: it would not be fair to make the parents pay up front, because then the poorer families might not be able to send their kids. But our specific cases are ridiculous, because my kids' schools cater to some of the most affluent communities in the history of the world. I'm by far the poorest of the parents involved, and I can easily afford to pay for my kids' trips and camp stays.
What's particularly silly is that…
aardvarchaeology | December 11, 2012I'll tell you two things up front: this book is my friend's first published novel; and I would have read it with great enjoyment even if I had no idea who the guy was. Paddy Kelly classifies it astutely as “Dick lit / Romantic comedy”: it's Bridget Jones or Sex and the City, only from a male perspective. The plot revolves around the love lives of two young Irishmen in 00s Stockholm: one a neurotic recent divorcé and part-time single dad, the other a carefree ladies man. They've both ended up in Sweden for love, as “erotic refugees”. And here's a freebie for future literature scholars trying…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2012I'm bothered by odd redundancy in an 80s song lyric. Millas mirakel advises us that "It is better to light the fire of life than to never be allowed to be yourself". Yes, and? That turn of phrase should compare two undesirable things, like "It is better to lose one toe than to lose both eyes." Here Milla, who I might add is overall a strangely schoolmasterly and archaic pop lyricist, is basically saying "It is better to win the lottery than to lose both eyes."
This is why we shouldn't have freedom of speech.
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2012I haven't blogged much about my research lately. One reason is that I am only working with it at ~50% this academic year since I'm teaching in addition to my usual 25% editor's job. Another is that I'm in an intensive desk-based data collection phase, which gives rise to a lot of hypotheses and hunches but not much in the way of analytical conclusions. Here's what I'm doing.
I've got a great big database of about 400 Bronze Age finds from the Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren provinces. This sample is delimited thusly:
a) datable finds
b) that are not demonstrably from graves or settlements
c)…
aardvarchaeology | December 5, 2012Mads Dengsø Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark wrote me to say that he and his colleagues are re-launching the old Journal of Danish Archaeology (1982-2006) as Danish Journal of Archaeology at Taylor and Francis On-Line. Three papers will hopefully come on-line before Christmas, and further ones will see rolling electronic publication from then on, with an annual physical print volume appearing in ~May.
Subscribers get access to the full back-catalogue of the old JDA, as well as new papers. You can also buy PDFs of single papers without subscribing, but this is jævle expensive. Whether…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2012Today is the Swedish Skeptics Society's 30th birthday! It was started in 1982 on inspiration from the American organisation CSICOP (est. 1976). I've been a member since 1996 and now I'm the society's sixth chairman.
So, what does a skeptical society do? We're a science-friendly resistance movement. We fight quack medicine, newspaper horoscopes, spiritualist mediums, climate change denialism, anti-vaccine propaganda, technophobic scare mongering etc. We make the New Age a Past Age. This we accomplish by publishing a quarterly journal, organising lecture series and pubmeets, handing out prizes…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2012For over 20 years I have received Pax, the journal of the Swedish Peace Society. I have always read it as a matter of duty. Rarely has it interested me much. I am a passive pacifist -- a passivist, as a radical relative of mine once wrote me from prison, where he had been put for vandalising a fighter plane.
Now Pax has been discontinued. I won't miss it. I'll just continue to pay my membership dues and a monthly donation to investigate the Swedish arms industry. In fact, I'm going to hike the donation up to compensate for inflation.
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2012Beer & Vikings – of course I had to review this new Italian boardgame, the follow-up to 2011's Sake & Samurai in the “Spirits & Warriors” series. Let me say at the outset that the game art shows little influence from actual Viking Period material culture and the text shows little influence from Old Norse literature. This is a humorous game about Conanesque barbarians with beards and a mighty thirst. I accept this point of departure and will look at the game's qualities within the given parameters.
The game is played with cards and tokens. The winner is the player whose character…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2012Our municipality has contracted a survey firm to evaluate the after-school activities for children that it supports. Circus school, piano lessons etc. Questionnaires have been sent to (some? all?) enrolled children.
My kid is in three of these activities. I got three almost identical questionnaires, interpreted them as a mail-merge glitch, responded to one and threw two away unexamined. Then I was nagged about those two.
If I were running the survey I would purposely avoid collecting data on the same kid for more than one activity.
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2012I found this lovely portrait on Wikipedia. 18th century portraits almost exclusively show people with European looks. But here a Russian painter has painted a Kalmyk girl in 1767. The Kalmyks are a Western Mongolian group living in south-west Russia. The girl looks just like Juniorette's buddy whose parents are from Afghanistan and Korea! This picture presses all my dad buttons.
Her name was Annushka and she was a serf and protegée of Countess Varvara Sheremeteva (later Countess Razumovsky). In the picture, the girl is holding a portrait of the Countess. The painter, Ivan Argunov, is a major…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2012This past weekend saw my third annual boardgaming retreat: 48 hours in good company at a small Nyköping hotel during the slow season, all meals included. Me and my buddy Pieter took a walk upriver to the first bridge and back past the castle ruin late on Saturday night, but otherwise I spent my waking hours in the gaming/dining room.
I played eleven sessions of nine different games. To give you an idea of how popular each individual game is, I've included its current BGG rank. For instance, Indonesia's “98th” means that right now there are only 97 board games that the largely US-based users…