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 | December 8, 2011
Three years ago when we moved into our house, the stones of our patio were newly laid and all level. Since then we have been walking across that surface, usually along the diagonal between the patio entrance + shed door and the front door of the house, sometimes around the corner to the compost container. Every step we've taken has caused a stone to settle infinitesimally into the substratum. Every step the kids have taken has on average made a slightly greater impact as they've grown. And when it rains, you can see that it all adds up. If I had a more volatile psychological constitution,…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2011Here I go again, bad-mouthing Thor Heyerdahl to his countrymen. But note that I'm quoted as saying, "Norway is a country that has produced many great archaeologists. Thor Heyerdahl was not one of them." Proud Norwegians, your country is great! And its greatness does not hinge upon the posthumous judgment of that guy with the raft.
Hear the audio clip here.
Update same day: Hehe. Some commenters on the NRK website are offended. One feels that I am just a kid with a lot of opinions, which is rather flattering to this balding father of a teen. Another thinks I'm just trying to become famous in…
aardvarchaeology | December 5, 2011
The Curiosity rover, a science robot the size of a car, is on its way to Mars where it will use a new landing system and hopefully spend several fruitful years trundling about. One of the coolest instruments on it is a laser gun coupled with a spectrometer: Curiosity can zap a rock from a distance and determine its chemical composition by looking at the colours of the light emitted by the heated material. I'm going to watch this mission closely.
On the rover is the above sundial cum camera calibration target, designed by Jon Lomberg (who already has three pieces of art on Mars). Note the…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2011
Sweden's goodbye to religious faith and cult continues apace, and so does the relocation of the population from the countryside to the cities. Here's a sign of the times. The National Heritage Board has recently re-issued its 1998 how-to guide for (rural) congregations who wish to quit heating their churches (available as a free PDF).
Sweden's rural churches, many of which were built in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, have only been heated for the past century or so. It's comfier for the congregants and it reduces humidity, thus improving preservation conditions for some materials. But…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2011For the past few days, Swedish skeptics have been shaking their heads in disbelief over Mora municipality's office for the environment. The office had taken the complaints of a man with radiation phobia seriously and demanded that all radio transmitters in the area be turned down or re-pointed to ensure that the man's house would not receive more that 50 nanowatts of radio - an extremely low value. The thing about radiation phobia (or "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" as it is called by sufferers, "electricity allergy" in Swedish) is that it is all in one's head. These people have real…
aardvarchaeology | November 28, 2011
Here's a cool new detector find from Hvirring in central Jutland, Denmark. I've never seen a piece like this before: measuring only 45 mm in length, it must be a top mount for something - box, horse yoke, staff? But the motif, four dancing gripping beasts, and the style they're executed in, place the thing firmly in the 9th century. Note the little round ears and the cross-hatching on chest and rump.
Thanks to Dear Reader Jakob for the tip-off.
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2011
Junior made this with his drawing tablet and Photoshop. It's him and his buddy poking each other.
aardvarchaeology | November 23, 2011Current Archaeology #260 (November) has a piece on the Roman baby burials at Yewden villa in England. Excavated in the 1910s, they have long been suspected to represent infanticide. Now Simon Mays has been able to prove that this is indeed the case by means of new osteological methods and comparison with other burial sites. People have wondered if the site was a military brothel. Since it's a rural high-status habitation, this seems rather unlikely. But Mays suggests that if the child murders were spread out over three centuries, what sets Yewden apart is mainly the tenacity of the custom.…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2011
I've written before about the archaeological landscape surrounding Arlanda International Airport north of Stockholm. Following on yesterday's post about the fake archaeology in Oslo airport, here's a piece of landscape that has been moved inside Arlanda's terminal 2. It's an 11th century runestone commemorating one of the men who died on Ingvar the Far-travelled's disastrous expedition to the east. The stone was found in 2000 when the road to the airport was widened, suggesting an impressive age for the road. Placing the runestone in the airport terminal ensures its protection from the rain…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2011
I've written a bit before about Thor Heyerdahl's hyperdiffusionism and the status as a Norwegian national hero he still enjoys despite being completely discounted as a scientist. Last time I passed through Oslo airport I discovered this Kon Tiki-themed restaurant with a faux Ecuadorian Bolivian stele. I think what Heyerdahl interpreted as a full beard is more likely to depict a decorative face plate hanging from the man's nose. And anyway, a beard is of course not evidence that a man is a civilisation-bearing Ãbermensch from Europe.
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2011
Here are some albums that I've been listening to lately. (The previous peek into my listening habits is from May 2010!)
Daikaiju. Daikaiju. 2005. Virtuoso instrumental surf rock.
Dungen. Skit i allt. 2010. Psychedelic 70s prog.
Graveyard. Hisingen Blues. 2011. Bluesy and psychedelic 70s metal.
Jobriath. Jobriath. 1973. Piano-heavy folk/glam rock.
Jobriath. Creatures of the Street. 1974. Piano-heavy folk/glam rock.
Karaboudjan. Sprodj. 2001. Heavy instrumental prog metal.
Mercury Rev. See You On The Other Side. 1995. Psychedelic art rock.
OK Go. Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. 2010. Funky new…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2011The Kensington runestone of Minnesota is a rather obvious 19th century fake. But in a recent paper in Saga och Sed 2010, Mats G. Larsson shows something less obvious: the hidden signature of the stone's carver, who also was its finder.
Olof Ãhman came from Forsa in Hälsingland, central Sweden. He claimed to have found the stone among the roots of an aspen tree he had felled with his son. Now Larsson points to the unique rune for à on the stone, which is an O with a small N inside. This looks a lot like O-n, an abbreviation of the man's surname. And as it turns out, Ãhman came from a…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2011
I spent yesterday in good company at the FlemCon 2 gaming convention organised by the S.M.A.S.H. gaming society at Södertörn University College. Juniorette was at a friend's house and Junior is too cool for small cons these days.
Left you see me emoting the "nature red in tooth and claw" competitive theme of Dominant Species, a fun though somewhat drably produced 2010 boardgame about natural history. I played the mammals and got resoundingly beaten by the arachnids. For you gamers out there, Dominant Species is worker placement, no hidden information, hardly any book-keeping or resource…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2011
If we look only at contemporaneous written evidence and disregard kings, Iarlabanki Ingefastson is probably the most copiously documented Scandinavian of the Viking Period. But his name does not occur even once on vellum. His memory lives entirely in the many rune stones he commissioned.
Iarlabanki (Jarlabanke in modern Swedish) was a major landowner in Uppland north of Stockholm, and his lifetime happened to coincide with the great mid-to-late-11th century rune stone craze in that province. Iarlabanki was a Christian, probably only of the third generation, and like other monuments of the…
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2011
Fornvännen 2011:1 is half a year old, and so has been published as an open-access full-text journal. Six months is the Berlin Declaration's limit for what qualifies as Open Access. Check it out!
Joakim Goldhahn on early Swedish rock art documentation
Frans-Arne Stylegar et al. on two bronze masks from Avaldsnes in western Norway that look Celtic and may thus either be pre-Roman or Viking in date
Jonas Monié Nordin on rural Medieval social/religious guilds
Sonja Hukantaival on Finnish folk magic as seen in archaeology and early folklore documentation
Sven-Gunnar Broström et al. on new…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2011
Dear Reader Jim Allen of Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia, kindly volunteered to design some Aardvarchaeology merchandise, for which I am very grateful. Here's Jim at his local museum along with fellow volunteer Charlotte Rogers, in the first picture of readers using their Aard merch! You too can enjoy caffeinated beverages in as stylish a manner as Jim & Charlotte: just head over to the Aard shop for mugs and t-shirts.
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2011German archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn (1905-90) is a contentious figure. A passionate Nazi soldier and SS archaeologist up until 1945, he became one of the country's most influential post-war archaeologists from the late 50s onward. Fornvännen 2011:3 has just come out containing a contribution on the younger Jankuhn's heartfelt Nazi enthusiasm, as documented by recent archive finds.
I'm reading Wolf-Dieter Tempel's charming professional memoir, Am Rande der Archaäologie. Here's a wonderful snippet from his recollections regarding Jankuhn, who was his teacher (and I translate).
The Göttingen…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2011
Yesterday my dad had his boat lifted out of the water like he does every autumn to keep the ice from damaging it. I hadn't seen the lift they used before: it's a remote-controlled motorised thing, fast and nifty. Note the yellow control box.
This reminded me of a fairly common motif in Bronze Age rock art, the boat carrier. Boats are extremely common, and sometimes you'll find a guy lifting the boat, crew and all. I think this is probably a depiction of the Sea God. But it may also be a human lifting a wooden ship model. We have a few bronze figurines that look like they may have adorned…
aardvarchaeology | November 1, 2011Year after year, the Swedish language is spoken by a smaller percentage of the world's population. And year after year, the geographical area where Swedish is spoken shrinks a little. But year after year, Swedish is spoken by an increasing number of people. How does this work?
Although Swedish speakers in Sweden and SW Finland have low nativity figures, and thus lose relative ground locally to Finnish speakers, and globally to the fecund masses of e.g. India, Sweden also receives immigrants who cause the country's population to grow slowly but steadily. And they all learn Swedish. In my area…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2011Back in February I wrote about a new issue of Halland County Museum's periodical Utskrift. And now I have already received two new issues! I'll talk a little about #12 here as I haven't read #11 yet.
The volume is an homage to Lennart Lundborg on his 80th birthday. Lundborg is a beloved figure in Halland archaeology and a former employee of the museum. Fittingly, five of the twelve papers deal with the Bronze Age in Halland province, the man's main field of study, and three with other aspects of his work, including the many comics he's drawn!
The three longest papers (all 14 pp.) are a report…