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 | March 19, 2012
Jules Verne, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.
Salade paysanne. Lardons, enfants de la patrie! Restaurant Les Pierres qui Roulent, "The Rolling Stones".
Electrical filling stations are quite common in Paris.
Carnyx trumpet, c. 3rd century BC, found in 2004 in a richly filled votive pit at a sanctuary at Tintignac in Limousin.
Brass aquamanile. Meuse Valley, 1150-1200. Musée des arts décoratifs.
King Solomon arbitrates between the two would-be mothers. Ebony cabinet, Paris, 1620s. Musée des arts décoratifs.
One of the crucified brigands. Painted limestone retable. Champagne, c.…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2012Above-ground atomic explosions and reactor leaks during the past century have produced a pretty funny atmosphere full of exotic heavy isotopes. In radiocarbon calibration this error source is called "bomb radiocarbon". A few years ago it was suggested that a person's age might be determined through looking at the amount of various isotopes in some bodily tissue (was it the eye's lens?) and cross-referencing it with the historic data on spikes and troughs in the abundance of various isotopes.
Now the always readworthy Chris Catling tells the readers of Current Archaeology #265 (April) of…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2012
Yesterday I went to Jutish Viborg by train, plane and bus. This took a bit less than eight hours. Exiting Aalborg airport into the icy sleet I managed to walk straight into the glass wind breaker outside the turnstile, banging my forehead and knee. Everybody around studiously avoided noticing my antics. On arriving in Viborg I found the museum, met some colleagues and received a key for the visiting scholars' building at Asmild that I'm staying in. Then to the city library where there is warmth and (flaky) wifi, and where I am now sitting again. Wednesday ended in good company with…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2012
Played Eclipse for the first time with my new Muscovite friends Anton & Maria and frequent guest Swedepat. This Finnish 2011 boardgame has become a runaway international hit and is currently ranked #7 on Boardgame Geek. It's about interstellar colonialism: good fun, very neatly designed, and has a lot of inherent replayability. I look forward to future games. Guess which player ended up way ahead of the cluster of three stubble-chinned losers at the end...
Cycled in brisk & sunny weather for a second attempt at two recalcitrant geocaches. Found nada. How the great have fallen.
Had…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2012
Shortly after Fornvännen 2012:1 reached subscribers on paper, issue 2011:2 has now been published on-line. Get thee there, Dear Reader, and read for free (not dearly)!
Joakim Wehlin on why some of Gotland's mightiest Bronze Age monuments were built next to the island's single megalithic tomb of the Early Neolithic.
Karl-Magnus Melin on ancient wells.
Torun Zachrisson makes an interesting suggestion as to where the church of Birka may have been located.
Jürgen Beyer tries to make sense of some semi-literate 16th century epigraphy in Plattdeutsch on Gotland.
Tryggve Siltberg criticises…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2012Juniorette: "So Thomas had his semla cream bun and he said he liked it, but later he threw up."
Me: "Thomas? Is he a new boy in your class? Haven't heard of him before?"
Juniorette: "No, he's not annoying. Not very."
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2012The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities is over 250 years old and consists almost entirely of professors of the humanities and social sciences. But don't let that fool you into thinking that it's a sleepy organisation. For one thing, the Academy is a signatory of the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. And so the venerable paper journal I edit, Fornvännen, is one of the first and most successful Open Access journals in the Swedish humanities. Increasingly, the Academy is also putting out the paper books it publishes as Open…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2012There are some good archaeology-themed boardgames out there. None depict archaeology as an activity directed towards the gaining of knowledge. Let's look at the top three on Boardgame Geek.
Tikal has a pretty absurd premise. A number of archaeological expeditions reach an area of jungle-covered ruins in the Yucatan peninsula at the same time and realise to their surprise that they all have permits to dig in the same region. The expedition leaders react to this coincidence by ordering an all-out plunderfest where everybody tries to get as much fine loot as possible, employing the locals as…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2012
Somehow I suddenly remembered the Sesame Street album I loved when I was a kid, 1977's Signs!. And sure enough, all the songs are on YouTube now!
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2012For the past two weeks I've been hearing more and more birdsong. The bullfinch is singing his characteristic snowmelt ditty, and the woodpecker is making territorial drumrolls. Some other species of small bird is having these noisy cocktail parties where they fill a tree and chatter for hours. But the winter is far from over yet. We have lots of snow and it was -9ºC this morning. It must be the lengthening daylight that triggers those bird brains. And today two magpies have started fussing absentmindedly about the big nest outside our bathroom window.
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2012
The recent launch of the Curiosity Mars rover has quietly broken the record for oldest human-made object in space, and instantly pulled numismatics, the study of coinage, into the Space Age.
Prior to the launch, the oldest human-made object in space was the Vanguard 1 satellite, which was launched in 1958 and operated until 1964. Now it is a coin!
American geologists have long used copper Lincoln pennies as scale indicators in photographs. All the Mars rover missions are geology projects conducted at a distance. And so, as a homage to professional geology tradition, a 1909 one-cent coin is…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2012
As a schoolboy I read the first original play performed publically written in Swedish, Urban Hiärne's Rosimunda (1665). Me and my friend Tor loved the absurd spelling, the odd changes that had occurred in the sense of many words and some of the comical one-liners. Recently I learned that about the same time Hiärne also wrote the first novel in Swedish, Stratonice (1666-68). Rosimunda deals with bloody intrigue at the Italian court of the conquering 6th century Lombard king Alboin. Stratonice is instead a pastoral romance set in the age of Alexander the Great. It is strongly derivative of…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2012
Dear Reader Fiona asked me to write more about archaeology, which reminded me that I haven't said much about what I've been doing in my study these past months. I find that the last time was actually in late August when I dug in the cave with Margareta and Magdalena.
So, what have I been up to during these months when no Swedish archaeologist wants to do fieldwork? I have:
Written the archive reports on my 2011 fieldwork.
Checked for fits between some copper alloy fragments we picked up at an Uppland hoard site and the hoard itself in the Historical Museum. We found no fits but two likely…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2012I've been following Roy Zimmerman's output of musical satire since his 2004 album Faulty Intelligence, and I was certainly not disappointed by the recent You're Getting Sleepy. The CD's title is shared with the opening song and refers to the hypnosis that must be going on when half of the US electorate votes for the increasingly insane Republican Party. (Remember, Mitt Romney is their low-key, sensible and uncontroversial alternative!) As resident of a country whose entire spectrum of mainstream politics lies to the Left of Barack Obama, I of course have no problem with Zimmerman's stance.…
aardvarchaeology | January 29, 2012Dungeon: a massive inner tower in a Medieval castle or a dark usually underground prison or vault. Traceable back to Latin dominus, lord.
Dudgeon: a wood used especially for dagger hilts or a fit or state of indignation. Traceable back to Anglo-French digeon.
Gudgeon: a pivot or a small European freshwater fish (Gobio gobio, Sw. sandkrypare). Traceable back to Middle French goujon resp. Latin gobius.
Bludgeon: a short stick that usually has one thick or loaded end and is used as a weapon. Unknown origin, first known use 1730.
Thanks to Merriam-Webster.
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2012British Archaeology #122 (Jan/Feb) has a good feature on the origins of Roman London, presenting and collating evidence from excavations in the 90s and 00s for a military camp immediately post-dating the AD 43 invasion of Britain. The editors have slapped a silly headline on the thing though, playing up a short passage about human heads deposited in the Walbrook stream as if this were the main issue dealt with in the piece.
The unsigned last page discusses the important work of Raimund Karl (in The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice Oct 2011; read it on-line), who has compared the…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2012
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Opportunity landed on Mars eight Earth calendar years ago today, 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 now at Endeavour crater and will spend the Martian winter in a…
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2012Car question. When I turn on my windshield wipers, the energy for those two step motors comes from the battery. And it comes to the battery from the gas tank via the alternator. This means that if I drive with my wipers on, I will run out of gas sooner. But doesn't the alternator constantly attempt to charge the battery? Where is the "switch" that allows the alternator to suck less energy out of the tank when I turn off my wipers? I imagine something like a bicycle dynamo that can be either on the wheel, imposing drag, or off the wheel.