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 19, 2011
Bamse magazine is one of Sweden's most beloved childrens' publications, with a readership mainly about age 10. Its title character's name does mean "The Big One". But still, I must say that I was as surprised as Bamse himself and the squirrel when I saw what that troll is doing with such glee to the cow on the cover. Also, I wonder if those are silicone udders.
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2011
Here's a quick look at the most recent windfall of popular archaeomags that has reached my big black mailbox. I've decided to terminate a few of the complimentary subscriptions, so these rundowns will be shorter and/or less frequent in the future. If you want, Dear Reader, you can check back at the five instalments I've written since late December: 23 Dec - 27 Jan - 15 March - 30 April - 14 June.
To me, the high point of Archaeology Southwest #25:2 (spring '11) are two aerial photographs of the Gran Quivira / San Buenaventura mission pueblo in central New Mexico (pp. 6-7). Here is a major…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2011
Came across this viper on a bike path one evening in July. It got shy when we stood around admiring it, so it disengaged from the shrew and slithered off into the greenery. May have saved it from getting run over by a bike.
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2011
Rode a funny plane to Visby: an ATR 72-500. It's a 1997 version of a French 1988 design with two propellers whose six blades curve rearwards. The rear undercarriage sits in bulky pods on the fuselage, right below the wings. Makes the plane look like it's got a beer gut. And its cargo bay is right behind the cockpit! Pleasant ride though.
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2011
My wife just returned from Beijing where she's been collecting interviews for a TV project. And I find that her beauty is not luxurious imagination.
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2011Dear Reader, please try saying "ENSKTBLEH". Yes, six consonants in a row. ENSKTBLEH. OK? Now sing it, loudly and happily. Go!
I've spent three happy days at the first ever Picture Stone Symposium in Visby, listening to papers, moderating some bits and giving a presentation of my own that went down pretty well. And one evening I was reminded of a) that I'm a weird singer, b) that one of C.M. Bellman's least felicitous phrases occurs in one of his best-beloved song lyrics.
During a reception Thursday night in the Picture Stone Hall of the Gotland County Museum, a UK colleague asked me and a…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2011Those who want hard copy or are unwilling to wait six months for the free PDF can now order my Mead-halls book on-line for SEK 180 / U$D 27 / â¬20 / £17 plus postage.
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2011When annoyed, my dad (born in '43) will sometimes use a pretty awesome expletive that has largely fallen out of fashion. Men då får han väl se till och ordna det då, för höge farao! "So he'd better make sure to get it done then, by the Great Pharaoh!"
This expression belongs to a common category of mild Swedish curses where a word similar to something nastier is used. Farao is similar to fan, "devil". Likewise, we'll say jösses (Jesus), tusan (a thousand [devils]) and sjutton (seventeen [thousand devils]) . Meanwhile, Swedish doesn't even have a word for "bugger" and the activity seems…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2011Dear Reader, help me interpret this odd situation.
It's 5:40 in the morning. I'm on my way to the commuter train. Passing the vacant lot of the closed school that burned in '06, I first see a van that stands with flat rear tyres backed into the leca gravel that covers the house foundation. It bears the logo of a housing company and looks slightly beat up.
Then I see a grizzled long-haired man kneeling in the gloom under a tree next to a partly dismantled red four wheel motorbike. Its seat is on the ground. The guy is frantically tearing up tufts of grass as if he's dropped some small part of…
aardvarchaeology | September 6, 2011
Rundkvist, Martin. 2011. Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats. Elite Settlements and Political Geography AD 375-1000 in OÌstergoÌtland, Sweden. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien (KVHAA), Handlingar, Antikvariska serien 49. Stockholm 2011. 165 pp. ISBN 978-91-7402-405-0.
Abstract
The Swedish province of OÌstergoÌtland has long been recognised as one of the 1st millennium's political hot spots. Splendid single finds, though never before surveyed comprehensively, offer a rough idea of where elite settlements might be sought. But not one of the ostentatious manorial buildings…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2011
In 2009, geologist Nils Axel Mörner and Bob G. Lind (and a distinguished third author who was not consulted about having his name on the publication) had a paper published in Geografiska Annaler about the Ravlunda 169 cemetery. This was an outcome of the pair's unauthorised digging at the site in 2007. The paper is a mess and shouldn't have been accepted. Tellingly, the topic is archaeology and quaternary geology, while none of the authors is an archaeologist and the journal is about geography.
Now Alun Salt and I have replied to Mörner & Lind's paper, also in Geografiska Annaler. At…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2011The t-shirt deal is starting to look like a Nigerian scam. The original offer was that I would get some free printed t-shirts from Ooshirts.com if I advertised about their site. Now have a load of this:
Do you have an American credit card? ... I know that you're getting the sponsorship amount off your order, but our site automatically charges every customer one cent as a security measure no matter what their total. Even my boss has to do this when ordering with the company card. I should have mentioned this earlier but did not think of it at the time. It's a feature that some people find…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2011
Scandinavian Bronze Age art features a number of motifs having to do with the movement of the sun through the heavens during the day and the underworld during the night. Here on Aard, we've previously seen a recently found sun-chariot rock carving, which most likely depicts a wheeled bronze model. But more commonly, there's a horse pulling the sun's disc across the sky without the benefit of wheels. This motif is known from several rock art sites on Sweden's west coast.
Awesome rock art surveying team Roger Wikell, Sven Gunnar Broström and Kenneth Ihrestam have recently found the first two…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2011
I'm a single dad now for two weeks while my wife's in China shooting interviews for a documentary series.
Aard's been getting a lot of comment spam lately, and the filter isn't working properly, so I've turned on comment moderation.
After digging in that cave I did four hours of metal detecting at the Lilla Härnevi hoard site because it has been ploughed and harrowed since April when we were there in force. Only one semi-worthwhile metal find: one of those fyrk coins of Queen Christina's. Also two pieces of knapped imported flint, and Magdalena found a grindstone. No hoard bits.
I bought…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2011
Few Swedish caves contain any known archaeology, and those that do mainly feature Mesolithic and Neolithic habitation layers. The Pukberget ("Devil's Mountain") cave near Enköping is a rare exception. In the mid-20th century a fox hunter crawled into the cave and felt his way around. His questing hands encountered something on a ledge which he put in his coat pocket. When he came out into the open air, he saw that he'd found a bronze spearhead and a horse tooth. Both are now in the Museum of National Antiquities. The spearhead dates from the Late Bronze Age, about 700 BC.
I've spent the…
aardvarchaeology | August 21, 2011Feels like I've got a bit too much on my plate right now. Tonight's boardgame night, so I need to get everything packed up before dinner. "Pack up what?", I hear you say. Well, I'm spending the next couple of days digging & sieving test pits in a cave near Enköping where a Bronze Age spearhead has been found. While I'm there I'm also going to do half a day or so of renewed metal detecting at one of the hoard sites that proved non-productive back in April. The farmer has ploughed and harrowed the spot so new stuff may have emerged up into detector reach. During fieldwork I also have to…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2011
Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre is the artist who rendered almost the entire ScienceBlogs stable as zombies last summer. He has submitted the third t-shirt design, and when I saw it I thought, "Screw the reader's poll, this is the one I want!". So although I'd very proudly wear shirts with the designs by Stacy Mason and Jim Allen/Sweeney too, I've decided to go with Joe's image. Keep your eyes open for a future sweepstakes.
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2011
Earlier this summer I did some upkeep on the board fence, pergola and yard gate of my house. Swapped some rotten boards and beams, put on some paint, whacked a few nails back in that had crept out. Easy work since I didn't have to design anything: I just measured the original parts and copied them with fresh material. And today I cycled to the builder's store and brought a few short boards home to fix the door of the garden shed. The lower four boards were rotten. Pleasing work, not least because I noted the need myself and did the job in my own good time.
What about you, Dear Reader? Done…
aardvarchaeology | August 12, 2011
All multicellular land species of life in Scandinavia are invasive: the area was covered by kilometres of ice until yesterday, geologically speaking. But some species are more recent invaders than others. Where I live, we currently have three species of large-bodied snail or slug: the Black slug (Arion ater, Sw. svart skogssnigel), the Burgundy snail (Helix pomatia, Sw. vinbergssnäcka) and the Spanish slug, (Arion vulgaris, Sw. spansk skogssnigel). That's the order in which they arrived: the Blacks during prehistory, the Burgundians most likely during the Middle Ages, and the Spaniards from…