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 | May 1, 2012
Spring is late this year in Sweden, and the weather has been dreary. But now things have perked up, and suddenly I felt the itch to get out and check out some sites before the leaves and grass sprout in earnest and ruin visibility. So Sunday night I hurriedly checked through my database of Bronze Age sacrificial finds and picked out two nearby sites where the find spots are known to good precision. I printed out maps from the sites & monuments register and checked for coeval rock art & burnt mounds nearby. And I got the 1000 BC shoreline map for each site from the Swedish Geological…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2012
This past weekend the Swedish Skeptics celebrated our 30th anniversary with a two-day conference in Gothenburg. It included the annual business meeting of the society at which I was reelected as chairman for a second year. And at dinner, I sang a song about how I view my role in the society, and the Swedish Skeptics' role in Sweden at large. It's Tomas di Leva's 1991 Själens Krigare, "Soul Warrior". Here's a quick translation.
Can you feel it?
It is everywhere
Space opening
In our hearts
I am the soul's warrior
With love as my weapon
I am the soul's warrior
And the light in the tunnel
I…
aardvarchaeology | April 27, 2012
In England and other countries, churches have long been deconsecrated and used as shops and for housing. In Sweden, this has previously only happened to nonconformist chapels - quite frequently, actually. But now, the first Church of Sweden church with a churchyard has been sold.
Örja church near Landskrona in Scania is a neo-Gothic yellow brick structure built in 1868 after its Medieval predecessor on the site was torn down. It was closed in 2003 due to insufficient interest from congregants, and in 2005 it was deconsecrated. But unlike the nearby 1909 new church of Maglarp, Örja isn't…
aardvarchaeology | April 27, 2012
This 1976 piece of public sculpture is at the playground next to my house. It's titled Del av helhet - helhet av del, "Part of whole - whole of part", referring to its modular makeup.
I haven't really paid any attention to it since Juniorette became old enough to go out and play without grownups. But just now I took a walk in the sun and caught the piece with good lighting. It's taller than I am, a sturdy climbable aluminium structure as was en vogue in the 70s. It forms a slightly narrow double portal into the playground for people approaching from outside the Boat Hill housing area. Kids…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2012Early 20th century, a newlywed couple celebrates their wedding night at a hotel. In the morning, the young man chivalrously pricks his finger with his pen knife and smears some blood on the bedsheet.
50 happy years later, the couple returns to the hotel to celebrate their anniversary. And in the morning, the woman can finally return the favour. She blows her nose on the bedsheet.
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2012I listened to BBC Click about the future of publishing and had the idea to look at a couple of parameters in my reading habits: where I get the idea to read each book-length text, how I get hold of them and what form they take. Here's about the past year, April 2011 through March 2012 (38 books).
Inspiration
45% Author I like
32% Recommendation from friend / family
13% Chance discovery
5% Publicist pitch
5% Work demands
Access
34% Gift (all but two from Super Dear Reader Birger)
16% Library
10% Download (2 public domain, 1 creative commons, 1 pirated)
8% Workplace
8% Review copy
5% On-line…
aardvarchaeology | April 19, 2012Livescience.com asked me a bunch of question about the Ales stenar stone ship on the occasion of Mörner & Lind's new bizarro paper. They didn't use much of what I wrote, so I'll put it up here.
LS: What is the most remarkable thing -- physical, historical or otherwise - about Ales Stenar?
MR: Its excellent state of preservation and restoration. These large stone ships form a common category of monuments, but few are currently as nice-looking as this one. (Ales stenar is not one of the largest ones we're aware of.) Also it sits in a scenic spot in one of Sweden's main tourist regions.
LS…
aardvarchaeology | April 14, 2012Fornvännen is not only a paper quarterly on its 107th year, but also an Open Access journal that appears for free with a 6-month delay. The autumn issue for 2011has just gone live! All papers have English abstracts and summaries.
Påvel Nicklasson on 19th century zoologist and pioneering archaeological theorist Sven Nilsson.
Roger Wikell et al. on the horse that pulls the sun on a recently identified Bronze Age rock carving in Östergötland.
Svante Fischer et al. on a major new solidus coin hoard from Åland, in English.
Ulrika Stenbäck Lönnquist and Stig Welinder on the whys and wherefores of…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2012Perennial Aard favourites N-A. Mörner and B.G. Lind have published another note in a thematically unrelated journal. It's much like the one they snuck past peer review into Geografiska Annaler in 2009 and which Alun Salt and I challenged in 2011. The new paper is as usual completely out of touch with real archaeology, misdating Ales stenar by over 1000 years and comparing it to Stonehenge using the megalithic yard. No mention is made of the fact that this unit of measurement was dreamed up by professor of engineering cum crank archaeoastronomer Alexander Thom and has never had any standing in…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2012Eurasian Jay, Garrulus glandarius, Sw. nötskrika, "nut screecher". Photographed in Fisksätra 6 April 2012.
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2012In order to find her easter egg, my daughter first had to solve a +1 transposition cryptogram with appended translation table. It gave her the location of a note with a +9 cryptogram where she was given the offset but had to write her own translation table. This led to a +9 cryptogram that resolved into Mandarin written with pinyin. She needed little help. Though since there were no tone indicators in the encrypted pinyin, she at first searched beneath a window (chuÄng) instead of under a bed (chuáng).
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2012Aard super-regular Birger Johansson very kindly sent me a bunch of supernatural detective novels by Mike Carey, the Felix Castor series. I'm on the second one now (from 2006) and enjoying it a lot. The stories are a bit too long and meandering for my taste, but I love Carey's dry wit and fine grasp of the language. I'm pretty sure he's studied Raymond Chandler carefully. Have a look at these bits as a sample:
"Meanwhile, three miles away at the Scrubs, Saint Michael's church was invaded by some entity so powerful that just being close to it poisoned the minds and souls of everyone in the…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2012For forty years I've been one of the most fortunate people I've ever heard of.
Starting from the global perspective, there is of course hardly a single country on Earth where people live under such good conditions as in Sweden. This goes for all of us here tonight. If we had ended up somewhere else, ourselves and our loved ones would in all likelihood have had to endure illiteracy, slavery, tyranny, torture, famine, war, severe illness and a very early demise.
With my slightly odd professional perspective I'm also acutely aware of how lucky I am to have plopped down not just where I am, but…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2012
I've written before about the prolific and many-talented Norm Sherman: a podcaster, multi-instrumentalist, song writer, singer and comedian with a truly unique voice. Several unique voices actually, thanks to his ear for accents. He occupies a position in geek-orientated on-line music and podcasting similar to that of George Hrab, another one of my favourites. But while Hrab has six albums to his name, the younger Sherman has two so far: his eponymous 2007 début and now the new The Esoteric Order of Sherman.
Both of Sherman's albums are musical comedy, but where the first one is mostly…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2012Junior's been through an extended period of various lighter ailments that have affected his school attendance record (but not his grades) considerably. I believe this may be partly due to his sedentary lifestyle. He's thin as a rake, like his old man, but also like his old man he's not exactly spending his free time on a rugby court. I need to take him cycling.
My wife worries about the amount of time Junior likes to spend on the computer. I think it's more a question of him not exercising rather than what he does specifically while not exercising. And I've realised that he actually does…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2012
"The river channel at Must Farm, with bronze age fish traps and weirs, logboats and many bronze objects. The roddon is raised land formed from old river silts."
I wrote in January about the Must Farm / Flag Fen Bronze Age dugout boats at Peterborough, England when Current Archaeology covered them. Now British Archaeology has done likewise (the two mags' staff must bump into each other at British excavations all the time judging from their coverage), and there's a beautiful plan drawing in issue #123 (March/April). It fascinates me, as it has such relevance to my current research.
The dig at…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2012I got a letter with criticism from a man who believes in electromagnetic hypersensitivity and thinks I should too. Most of the letter is the Galileo argument, where the letter writer refers to an anthropologist whose ideas were, in his view, once highly respected until they were taken apart by critical thinkers. I should be as critical of the current medical consensus regarding radiation phobia as these thinkers were of the anthropologist, says the letter writer, because the current medical consensus has been paid for by the telecomms industry. In other words: it's a conspiracy.
But who, then…
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2012I had some bad news about two Boomer dudes that I know and like(d): one died of lung cancer the other day, and the other was diagnosed with leukemia. But apart from that I had a pretty good weekend:
Played Eclipse again, got royally whipped.
Gave a talk and did some debating at a skeptics' event in Eskilstuna, met loads of friendly people, all while wearing a suit and tie because I was heading directly to the following do afterwards.
Celebrated my oldest friend's 40th birthday. Met lots of surprising greying 40-y-o versions of his friends that I haven't seen much since leaving the Tolkien…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2012
I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band Howlin' Rain) has been playing in my head. I couldn't quite make sense of the lyrics, so I checked on-line, and found them (perhaps predictably) to be stonerishly meandering. But also bluntly self-referential in a way that is either really stupid or neatly self-ironic. You be the judge, Dear Reader.…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2012
Adipocere / corpse wax:
a wax-like organic substance formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue, such as body fat in corpses. ... a crumbly, waxy, water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. Depending on whether it was formed from white or brown body fat, adipocere is grayish white or tan in color. ... The transformation of fats into adipocere occurs best in the absence of oxygen in a cold and humid environment, such as in wet ground or mud at the bottom of a lake or a sealed casket ...
Wikipedia
Salami:
Salami are cured in warm, humid conditions…