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 4, 2012Taking a hint from George Hrab's stage show, I asked my landscape history students to write me a question each anonymously on a small note. Or rather, I asked them to ”Tell me something that surprises you about the Swedish landscape you've seen so far”. This turned out to be a good teaching tool. I went through the stack of notes and discussed them with the students.
The Finnish and Canadian students aren't surprised by anything at all. Their countries look like Sweden, because they have the same history of Ice Ages and a sparse population and are on the same latitude as Sweden. But 1/3 of…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2012Facebook is swamped with pictures of cats at shelters that face imminent euthanasia. Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund has an ad on the Tradera auction site that says "Soft, Orange and Homeless" and invites me to support orangutan shelters.
There's a reason that these campaigns don't feature fish or lizards. And that reason is that cats and young orangutans happen to be cuddly and the size of human babies. But disregarding our parental reflexes, there is no more (or less) reason to mourn a dead cat than the chicken you had for dinner yesterday.
But I'm willing to believe that an orangutan is…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2012The dust has settled after Sb's migration in late May from Moveable Type to Wordpress. I'm glad we switched, but we lost a lot of traffic in the process. Mainly it seems to be due to changing URLs (the web address of each blog entry) that threw the search engines off and lost us RSS subscribers. In Q3 2011 Aard had 780 daily readers on average and a Google rank of 7. In Q3 2012 it's looking to be more like 540 daily readers, and the Google rank is 6. Dear Reader, to keep things lively here, I'd be grateful for your help. In the following weeks, if you read something you like here, please hit…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2012My cousin Annika kindly forwarded me this postcard from a budding archaeologist just out of high school and on his first dig. I translate:
*
Hazor-Haglilit July 15th, 1990, 12:05 [Sunday]
Shalom!
Mainly I'm digging. At the same time we exchange some language teaching – my new Israeli acquaintances call each other “whitstevell” in passing [Sw. skitstövel, “shit boot”] (think about it and you'll get it...), and I've learned things like makush (hoe), makushon (small hoe), benga benga (work, work!), yalla (faster!), malofofon (cucumber), and ma-eem (water).
I've got today off, and I have the…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2012The people behind the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone made an odd design decision. They got rid of the standard fastening point for a strap. And the backshells on the market don’t have a fastening point either. But I really want a strap to be able to pull my phone out of my pocket and to keep from dropping it. Here's what I did.
Get a shock-absorbing plastic backshell (I'm not talking about the cover of the battery compartment, but a secondary shell that fits onto the back of the phone when the battery cover is in place) and a strap or lanyard of your choice. (I prefer a short wrist strap…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2012
Fazer's old packaging
Fazer has removed the cartoon East Asian from one of two versions of the packaging for their chocolate-covered puffed rice. Only the conical straw hat remains, an "abbreviated motif" as Karl Hauck would have put it. Tørsleff still has the guy on their gel agent. Gabob recently published the fine boardgame Wok Star which is full of cartoon East Asians.
Tørsleff's gel agent
Thinking about these images, I've decided that I don't find them racist. The old Fazer and Tørsleff cartoons are certainly outdated, since few people in East Asia wear conical straw hats or queue…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2012In this guest entry, my friend Milka Zelić reports on the gritty realities of public transport in Slumberland:
It wasn't enough that I had a rough time at work last night. When I finally got to bed I ended up working a second shift.
Because of construction work on the subway a temporary ticket booth had been set up in the home of an Ethiopian family on the Rinkeby council estate. I had to settle in with my cash register, stamp and stuff in their little bathroom, which could somehow accommodate an extra table and chair (pretty many chairs actually, I had some trouble choosing). I relieved a…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2012I've blogged before about authors who write fiction in the first person past tense but clearly have no idea of in which situation or at what point in time their narrator resides while telling the story. This is one of the problems with David Tallerman's 2012 novel Giant Thief. But what made me quit reading it was another problem: Tallerman forgetting who his narrator is entirely.
The book is set in a vaguely European world with giants and magic and a material culture apparently on the High Medieval tech level, just before the invention of fire arms. Yet the narrator's voice marks him as a…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2012Martin Carver in the editorial to the current issue of Antiquity:
If the PhD is an apprenticeship, why does it include no formal training in fieldwork—our method of recovering primary data? Quite apart from the fact that the world is already full of academics who don't know how to dig (but think they do), not every doctoral student is destined for a job in a university. The commercial sector, as archaeology's largest employer, needs their talents too—but it would help if they were trained. Six months in the field, out of 36 months in a library, strikes me as a minimum (leaving 30 months to…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2012Here's an interesting legal conundrum. The pseudo-archaeological power duo Bob Lind and Nils-Axel Mörner have been excavating without a permit again (as confirmed to me by the County Archaeologist). But the site they have chosen is a disused quarry of indeterminate age. Though protected by the letter of the current law, such a humble and probably not very old site would not in practice receive the full treatment afforded e.g. a prehistoric settlement site.
However...
Lind and Mörner claim that the quarry dates from the Bronze Age. So they have dug into a site they believe to be legally…
aardvarchaeology | August 21, 2012Kai gave me this lovely piece of old Scientology propaganda. The 1968 book Scientology: A History of Man is a re-titled edition of something L.R. Hubbard completed in 1951-52 and disseminated under the title What To Audit. After the formerly secret teachings about Xenu the evil space emperor etc., this is probably the most widely ridiculed text of Scientology. But with the fine cover image (apparently painted by Hubbard himself) and the new title, the book clearly aims to say something about humanity's ancient past – which is my job.
In the foreword Hubbard assures the reader that "This is a…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2012My professional goal since undergraduate days 20 years ago has been to divide my working hours between indoor research, fieldwork and teaching. And so I applied for my first academic job in June of 2003, shortly before my thesis defence. When I saw the list of applicants (this stuff is public in Sweden) and checked everybody in the bibliographical database, I was optimistic. I had way, way more publications per year after age 25 than anybody else! But the job went to a guy who was twelve years older than me. What counted wasn't your output rate but your output sum: the thickness of your stack…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2012Early this morning this little guy found a really good crack in some wood where s/he could sleep during the day. Unfortunately the crack turned out to be the space between the gate to our yard and the door jamb, so all day the sleeper has been see-sawing to and fro as we have opened and closed the door. I don't know what kind of moth it is, only that it looks lovely. Can you identify it, Dear Reader? To narrow down the possibilities, note that this moth lives on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago at about N 59° 18', E 18° 15'.
Update same evening: Johan Lundgren pinpointed the moth…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2012I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, "Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future" (freely available as a PDF). I found some but not too much of the usual unrealistic sloganeering about how useful the humanities are to society, and a lot of pretty sobering statistics. In the following note that the typical basic degree in Sweden is the MA. I translate:
"… among those with a basic degree as highest qualification, humanities graduates clearly have the lowest annual incomes in 2008 ... Humanities graduates with basic…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2012I don't like the loud rattle of dice or the way they careen across the table, scattering game markers and ending up on the floor. And so I've been thinking about buying a dice tray. With low walls and a soft interior surface, it solves both problems. When my friend Foaad gave me a huge gift certificate at Dragon's Lair, one of Stockholm's best board and card game stores and the only one to my knowledge which offers gaming tables, I decided it was time.
Check out my beautiful new handmade dice trays! Per Landberger makes these without even being an underpaid Third World sweat shop worker. And…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2012
My musical taste spans half a century, but like many people I have a particular soft spot for musicians of my own age and the albums they made during our 20s. I really love 90s neo-psych. It was disconcerting when these musicians started putting out divorce albums (of Montreal's brilliant 2007 Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?) and organising reunion tours (The Olivia Tremor Control in 2005). And now they've started dying.
Bill Doss of The Olivia Tremor Control and The Apples In Stereo died on 30 July, aged 43. He brought the 60s sunshine pop element to OTC's mind-bending musical stew,…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2012The Curiosity rover / Mars Science Laboratory has landed safely on Mars and is returning data! So now we have two rovers on Mars again, Opportunity and a new one of unprecendented size and instrument sophistication. Curiosity has a laser gun that allows it to measure emission spectra at a distance, an instrument that allows it to identify minerals directly without inference via their elemental composition, and more. Looking forward to new discoveries!
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2012Spent a week gloriously off-line at my mom's glorious summer house in the archipelago. Oh the joy of reading 300 pages for fun in one day without feeling the need to check e-mail! Here are the books I read:
Invented Knowledge. False history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Ronald H. Fritze 2009. One amazing essay covers the scifi con-man religion Nation of Islam. Did you know that Louis Farrakhan started out as a calypso singer, and that George Clinton's Mothership was a concept borrowed from NoI mythology?
Falling Free. Lois McMaster Bujold 1988. Charming fast-paced scifi. Four-armed…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2012Last week my dad and his wife took us to Tärnskär, "Tern Island" again like three years ago. This time we looked closer at the lovely glacial abrasion features on the island's higher end.
aardvarchaeology | July 24, 2012Reading Anund & Qviberg's new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: "The Grateful Dead". (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.) The earliest version of the legend is found in the German Cistercian prior Caesarius of Heisterbach's 13th century book of miracle stories, the Dialogus miraculorum. This book was hugely popular for centuries, and though Caesarius is largely forgotten today, we do remember his chilling line about how to tell a Cathar from a Catholic, attributed by Caesarius to one of the Albigensian Crusade's…