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 | October 28, 2011
As noted before here on Aard, last winter a man handed in a 2nd century Roman cavalry parade mask to the authorities on Gotland, an island province of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. He says it was found illicitly in the 1980s by a recently deceased metal detectorist. The old man in question was a known nighthawk, and seems to have stuck a spade right through the mask when digging it out. Yet the mask has an excellent find context. The owner pointed to a Late Roman / Migration Period house foundation, my Visby colleagues excavated part of it this past summer, and they found a mixed metalwork hoard…
aardvarchaeology | October 26, 2011In the 90s, Norwegian death metal musicians were notorious for Satanism, violent crime and church arson. One of these twits burned down the stave church of Fantoft, which though moved in the 19th century had originally been built in about 1150. Any one of my atheist buddies could have told them that it's OK to like churches even if you don't like the Church. And by the way: which is the more evil world view from a Christian perspective: Satanism or atheism/materialism? At least the Satanists believe in a higher power that has the decency to fight with the Christian god over people's souls.…
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2011A pop musician's and a mathematician's twenties are a precious part of their life. During those ten years of early adulthood, there seems to be a residual childlike creativity or randomness in the brain at a time when a person has had a chance to amass skills and experience. In some fields, the window in time when you will produce your best work is open only during your twenties. Take the Beatles, whose albums appeared when Lennon & McCartney were 23-30 and 21-28 respectively. Few would argue that either of them made a Beatles-quality album after the split, and looking at other bands, I…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2011
Here's what's currently outside my kitchen window. Rosehip in the foreground, rowan berries in the middle, and cloned white brick houses like my own in the background.
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2011
I am making fårikål, a dish whose name has a kind of brutal literality, meaning "sheep in cabbage". It doesn't ring quite so harshly in Swedish, as we have no separate word for mutton, using the same word for the animal as for its meat. I'm making fårikål because I had it in Oslo a few weeks back when I happened to visit that city on the day following the great Sheep In Cabbage Day, which has been celebrated on the last Thursday of September since 1997. (Here's a basic recipe. Opinions differ as to whether you should use black pepper or allspice, and possibly add bay leaves and thyme.)
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2011
Though I played a lot of tabletop role playing games in the 80s and 90s, I've never been much of a live action role-player (LARPer). Just seems to be way too much preparation for such short events. So the only real LARP I ever took part in was in May of 1992 (it was called Saturday Night Live, ha-ha-ha) - until this past Sunday, when I tried again. And it was fun!
Boardgaming buddies head-hunted me for this extremely well organised LARP because they had a male deficit. The event was titled Kärlek och fördel, "Love and Advantage". The idea was basically to collect all the main characters…
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2011
Here's my talk about the Mead-halls book, from the Gothenburg Book Fair, 23 September. It's in Swedish, the background noise is awful and I had a pretty poor voice that day. But anyway.
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2011Swedish academic archaeology has a few hard-core post-modernists. Their attitude to the discipline tends to be meta-scholarly (they study people relating to the past rather than the remains of the past), radically knowledge-relativist (they reject rationalist science with its aim to gain cumulative objective knowledge about what the world is like) and influenced by Continental philosophy, sociology and "critical theory". My attitude to these colleagues is such that if I were the one who decided who gets research funding and teaching jobs, they would all be doing fieldwork on highway projects…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2011Steve Jobs is dead, an unfortunate victim of cancer and quackery. I never paid him much attention while he lived. Nor did I ever care much about Apple's products. "Aha", I hear you say, "this is one of those 'PC is better than Mac' screeds". Not so. Because I have been an off-and-on Mac user since the mid 80s. But I don't care about Macs. Nor about PCs. I could go so far as to say that I'm a bit annoyed with recent versions of Windows. But it's no big deal to me. These things all work well enough.
In '84, my cousins' first Mac introduced me to the mouse and the window environment. We drew in…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2011
Wednesday 5 Oct. 17:00. About Fisksätra before the 1970s housing development. Fisksätra shopping centre, HAMN project office.
Thursday 13 Oct. 10:00. About Bronze Age sacrificial sites. Uppsala, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3, Dept of Archaeology.
Monday 17 Oct. 18:30. About pseudoarchaeology. Stockholm, KTH, Lindstedtsvägen 5, lecture hall D2, Swedish Skeptics.
Thursday 27 Oct. 14:00. About the late-1st millennium aristocracy. Norrköping, Saltängsgatan 7, Senioruniversitetet.
Thursday 3 Nov. 14:30. About the new media. Kristiansand, Vestre Strandgate 7, Radisson Blue Caledonien…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2011
My buddy Oscar doesn't like roughing it at gaming conventions, sleeping on classroom floors, eating cup noodles etc. So for two years now he's organised civilised boardgaming weekends where he's gotten a bunch of gamers together and booked a small hotel for us (here's about last year's). It's 48 hours of gaming in good company with meals and nice rooms, all for a very reasonable off-season price. This past weekend. I played sixteen sessions of thirteen different games, as follows.
Innovation. Card game out of MIT, nominally about the rise of civilisations, where the cards keep interacting…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2011
So yeah, Kickstarter now offers you the opportunity to back a card game set in a Lovecraftian girl school.
Via Kenneth Hite.
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2011
Blues & metal fans, take note. The album you need to get right now is Hisingen Blues by Swedish sensations Graveyard.
And check out the Aardvarchaeology Merchandise Store!
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2011Friday was quite a day for me: wake up at 5 after a restless night, travel by air, give test lecture, get praised beyond belief, eat excellent mutton & cabbage, do very friendly interview, become optimistic, meet up with local skeptical buddy, return home. Then a metal gig headlined by Graveyard, whose stellar new album Hisingen Blues is a must for all Zeppelin fans, preceded by Top Hawk with a basso singer and Horisont as fine openers, the latter with a particularly impressive drummer and an 80s-style high-tenor singer. (All three bands also had technically brilliant lead guitarists who…
aardvarchaeology | September 28, 2011
Uppåkra near Lund is Scandinavia's largest 1st millennium settlement site and may (for some definitions of "town") have been the first town north of Germany. Its finds are absolute top-quality and occur in vast numbers. For many object types, there are now more specimens from Uppåkra only than we used to have from all of Sweden. I've had the pleasure of working with some 7th/8th century brooch types from the site, and I always read news about the ongoing investigations at Uppåkra with great interest.
Now they've found something unique again. Rolf Petré calls it a mount, possibly for a…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2011
Those free Nigerian scam t-shirts never materialised, but still, the affair prompted me to get some excellent merch art made and set up a web shop. A good thing about this is that now I can offer all three designs submitted by Jim Allen, Stacy Mason and Joe Hewitt!
Dear Reader, hie thee over to Ye New Shoppe and check out the wares! If there's any item you're missing and onto which one might conceivably stick the art, then please tell me and I'll try to add it to the lineup.
Now I want you guys to send me pics of yourselves wearing Aard t-shirts and/or swigging beverages from Aard mugs!
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2011
I visited the Gothenburg Book Fair for the first time because of my new book. The Academy of Letters needed people to put on the Researcher's Square stage, and conveniently one of their staff had just published a book with them - me. When the local organiser saw me she did a double take because I was way younger than she had come to expect from the Academy.
The book fair, as I understand it, exists to let publishers and writers communicate with each other and their customers, and also to entertain and inform these customers. The main convention hall is packed with display booths and throngs…
aardvarchaeology | September 21, 2011The top official in charge of protecting and making accessible the archaeological record in Sweden is titled Riksantikvarie, "Antiquarian of the Realm". In English, this title is usually translated as "Custodian of Ancient Monuments". How should a person act in practice as custodian of ancient monuments?
Everybody understands that you need to keep people from damaging sites & monuments through digging, ploughing, dynamiting, covering, and graffiti. But you can't just declare a site out-of-bounds and leave it to its own devices: pretty soon it will become so overgrown that it is…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2011
The Mesolithic is the period between deglaciation and the introduction of agriculture in Europe (up to about 4000 cal BC in my parts). Within Swedish research into this period in recent years, no single site has been able to compete with the small town of Motala in Ãstergötland county. Located at a series of rapids on the main waterway from Lake Vättern to the Baltic, the spot has always been important for fishers and travellers. Its Mesolithic record has gained the limelight thanks to major railroad construction in an area with waterlogged sediment that preserves organics. Thus any number…