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 | November 22, 2012All the monotheistic religions have a problem known as Theodicy or The Problem of Evil. Simply put, it's the question “How can there be evil and suffering in the world?”. The religions in question posit that their god knows everything that happens, so he isn't ignorant of the shit that's going on. And they posit that their god is endlessly well-meaning and loving, so he isn't the one inflicting the evil and suffering upon hapless humanity. And they posit that there is nothing he cannot do if he wants to, so he isn't watching powerlessly as evil and suffering happens. But evil and suffering…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2012The former Swedish state church has been reasonably independent for twelve years. Now Juniorette's school plans to send the kids walking in festive procession with flaming torches to the Swedish church's local branch for an "Advent gathering". Good fun no doubt, and Juniorette would probably be most displeased if I made her stay in school with the more orthodox among the Muslim kids and a temp teacher.
I don't enjoy being pushed to make this call. So I've drafted a letter of protest to the headmistress where I point out that such non-educational favouritism for one of the country's many…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2012These days I usually stick short updates of things I'm thinking about on my Facebook feed, and use the blog for longer pieces. But some of those snippets make me kind of happy, so here's a selection of recent ones.
I never give money to beggars. Instead I make an annual donation to Stockholm's biggest organisation for meals, showers, beds for homeless people. Right about when it starts to get cold and nasty outdoors.
Why is a Swedish dance orchestra playing a slow boogie version of "Anarchy In The UK" in my head?
OK guys, here's the deal. An elite is a group of people. If you're talking…
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2012My part-time employers the Academy of Letters are charmingly unworldly in a muscular way. They're not a government body and are beholden to nobody except King Gustav III who laid down their bylaws in the 18th century. He hasn't cramped their style in quite a while. And they are quite comfortably funded indeed through various bequests and donations they have received through the centuries. The Academy is essentially an invitation-only club for professors in the humanities and social sciences, and their priorities are not of this world. Edit and publish the correspondence of a 17th century…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2012Check it out in full, for free!
Kim von Hackwitz on miniature Middle Neolithic battle axes around Lake Mälaren
Roger Wikell & Jörgen Johnsson on the re-discovery of a runic inscription on a cliff side near Stockholm
Herman Bengtsson & Christian Lovén on indications in Medieval church art about the contents of a lost longer version of the legend of Saint Eric
Jens Heimdahl on the medicinal use of henbane in 12th century Nyköping
Magnus Källström on the re-discovery of archive documentation of two lost rune stones near Uppsala
And an unusually pugnacious debate section
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2012Icelandic sagas and a single archaeological site in Newfoundland document a Viking Period presence of Norse people in the Americas. Now National Geographic's November issue has a piece (here and here) on new work in the field, lab and museum collections by Dr. Patricia Sutherland. It deals with a group of additional and somewhat later sites that may expand that evidence. Dr. Sutherland, of the Memorial University in Newfoundland, kindly answered some questions of mine via e-mail.
The best site is near Cape Tanfield on the south coast of Baffin Island. Dr. Sutherland emphasises the following…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2012
Qoph is an excellent heavy psych rock outfit from Lidingö not far from where I live, and I'm really excited to learn that their third album is on its way! Here's the first single. I like it!
aardvarchaeology | October 28, 2012Current Archaeology #271 has a long interview with Mick Aston of Time Team fame. When asked how he got into archaeology, Aston paints a little vignette of the renowned High Medieval archaeologist, professor Philip Rahtz:
[At Birmingham in the mid-60s] Philip Rahtz had just been appointed, and was living in this lilac caravan on the university car park. There were all these letters about him in the university newsletter, asking “Who is this long-haired bearded hermit in the car park?” Anyway, Philip put up this little sign saying “Anyone who wants to go digging, come to me on Saturday”. I…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2012Riding the subway back into town today after a morning of looking at sites with an old course mate, I became aware of a loud woman a few seats away who would not sit still. Skinny, early middle age, simple clothes. At first I thought she was talking on her cell phone, but then I realised that she was talking to nobody in particular, keeping up a continuous monologue. What little I could make out was about DJs and clubs and 1990s pop stars. She was wearing a scruffy blonde wig, staring into space, her wide brown eyes quite beautiful in her lean face. At one point I thought she was trying to…
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2012Jack Parsons (1914-52) was a rocketry pioneer, a science fiction fan and a deeply committed occult follower of the aged Aleister Crowley. I recently read the 2004 edition of John Carter's biography of the man, Sex and Rockets. The Occult World of Jack Parsons.
Despite such promising material, it's not a very engaging or well-written book. It's largely about rocketry and occultism, but neither field is contextualised very well. There's lots of detail but not much in the way of a bigger picture. And Carter equivocates in his attitude to occultism. Sometimes he seems to believe in it, sometimes…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2012
My landscape students in Växjö did extremely well on the exam: 79% passed with distinction. And they were extremely kind in their evaluation of the course, which took place before the exam.
I've been put in charge of an on-line course in upplevelseproduktion, tourist site production, and so will spend the entire academic year of '12/13 as an employee of the Linnæus University at 20-25% of full time. Yay!
My buddy Martin is sending me the manuscript of his new novel for test reading.
Fornvännen's autumn issue just came from the printers with a lot of good stuff, and we're handing the winter…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2012Let's make a list of religious prophets! But only the ones who, having convinced their faithful followers that they spoke the word of God, suddenly received revelations to the effect that God totally wanted them to fuck children or adolescents. I know of three to start with. Let's have some more, with references!
Muhammad, Islam's Prophet. In sura 33:50, God told the Prophet: “We made lawful for you [several categories of women]. Also, if a believing woman gave herself to the prophet—by forfeiting the dowry—the prophet may marry her without a dowry, if he so wishes. However, her forfeiting…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2012My dynamic friend and colleague Frans-Arne Stylegar has managed to liberate a respectable sum of Norwegian oil money to fund a collaboration with Ukrainian archaeologists under the direction of professor Igor Khrapunov. The first results of this collaboration have been two international conferences on the theme “Between Two Seas. Northern Barbarians From Scandinavia To The Black Sea”. I was kindly invited to take part in the second one, at the beach resort of Gaspra near Yalta on Crimea's Black Sea coast, from which I now report to you, Dear Reader.
The reason that scholars in Ukraine and…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2012Spent Friday though Sunday in London with Junior and his buddy, both 14. My original plan had been to find a gaming convention with both a video game track and a boardgame track. But failing that, I got tickets for the Eurogamer Expo at the Earls Court Convention Centre in London, which is all video games. My once substantial interest in such has long evaporated, but I kept the Saturday free for other activities.
In order to be sure to get the boys into the fair I had to buy a ticket for myself as well, and I checked out the place without finding anything that caught my interest. It was all…
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2012I've been aware of fossils since my dino fanboy days in Greenwich Country Day School, and I used to collect them in a small way on family trips to Gotland. Back home, I would put fossils in malt vinegar and see bits of shell emerge from the limestone matrix. But I never found a trilobite.
Trilobites are the best fossils. Detailed, complicated, and often complete, unlike for instance the crinoids I would find of which only bits of stem like corrugated cigarette butts remained. More structure to the trilobites than to the orthoceratites every Swede treads on in the limestone stairs and hallways…
aardvarchaeology | September 18, 2012A few weeks ago my friend Tobias Bondesson and his fellow amateur detectorists Iohannes M. Sundberg and Tommy Olesen found a 3.5 kg silver and gold hoard from the 5th century AD near Roskilde in Denmark. They reported their find to the town museum, the hoard was lifted by experts and excavations are ongoing. This closed find, consisting of ~1500 pieces of metal and the pot in which they were buried, is of immense value to archaeology and numismatics thanks to the snapshot of coeval objects it gives us. This not just bullion: many of the objects are typologically distinct. I'd love to help…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2012The Chinese Twitter equivalent Weibo censors searches for the names of places where there are protests (currently Shenzhen). You could write a script that searches for the main Chinese cities on Weibo and plots the ones that are censored on a map. Presto, a dynamic map of Chinese political unrest! With data supplied by the Chinese government, no less. Who will do it first?
Update same day: Daniel Becking points to the highly informative web site Blocked On Weibo. It has a wide remit. The most recent entry explains why the two characters for "pantyhose" are blocked.
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2012My dad's a member of a yacht club in order to have sheltered jetty space for his motorboat. It's not a fancy affair, most of the boats being small and decades old. But many of them are sailboats, and for the past ten years the club has been organising family-oriented mini races in the evenings. A few weeks ago they were a guy short on a boat where my dad is a sometime crew member, so he asked me if I wanted to come along. I sailed dinghies as a kid, so I know the basics.
My first race was on a rainy evening. I got wet and I got cold and I still enjoyed it. The second race was on a lovely…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2012Yesterday I went to Öland and showed my students some sites and landscape. We were joined by human geographer Carl-Johan Nordblom who knows all the post-Viking stuff. Lovely day! Though we couldn't find our way to the best-preserved of the Resmo passage tombs. The land owner has tired of visitors and closed off the driveway from the main road.
My ride Stockholm-Kalmar was a fun little flying school bus, the Swedish 1983 design SAAB 340, seating 34 people. I had a great view when we flew back north in the sunset, golden horizontal lighting bringing out the surface contour.
There was a little…