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 | August 8, 2011
Last Wednesday this brig came past my mom's summer house off Bullandö in the Stockholm archipelago. It's the Eye of the Wind, built in 1911 at Brake in Lower Saxony and originally christened Friedrich. It's featured in the 1980 movie The Blue Lagoon.
Did you know that there's actually a ship spotting web site?
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2011
Here's the second t-shirt design suggestion, from Stacy Mason! Compare the first one from Jim Allen/Sweeney.
And Barn Owl has volunteered to distribute the shirts! So unless a third design comes my way soon, I'll set up an on-line poll to decide which image goes onto the Aardvarchaeology t-shirts, and then place the order.
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2011I always enjoy reading Current Archaeology, both for the quality content and for the simple fact that it's about the UK, an area whose archaeology I have some little insight into and a great deal of interest in. (My interest hinges largely on the many similarities with the Swedish record and my knowledge of the language.)
The cover story of the current issue (#257, August) treats contract excavations at a graveyard near the original Bedlam mental hospital in London, or the priory of St Mary of Bethlehem as it was originally known when founded in 1247. The burials actually don't have much to…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2011Littering really annoys me, indoors, in the streets, in parks - and particularly in woods and wilderness. My whole family often collects bagfuls of garbage on walks or visits to the lake. I can't understand the mind of a person who drops an ice cream wrapper on a forest trail, particularly one that they walk themselves all the time. To me, its like crapping on your own couch.
But thinking dispassionately about it, I realise that most litter is an aesthetic problem and not an ecological one. It isn't toxic. Few pieces of litter hurt wildlife in any mechanical way. Most of it quickly degrades…
aardvarchaeology | August 3, 2011Here's a few thoughts stemming from comments on my recent post regarding the Norwegian terror shootings. The discussion got a little confused as people thought I wanted to discuss psychiatry, when I was really only commenting on the judicial concept of criminal responsibility versus insanity.
Why do modern states have systems of judicial punishment? If you look closer at this issue you'll find that there are several independent motivations that sometimes operate against each other.
1. Violence monopoly and collective revenge. Having been wronged, many people want revenge on the perpetrator.…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2011Here's a guest entry from Charm Quark, one of the bloggers at Skepchick Sweden. When I read it there I asked her to give me a translation for Aard.
I have alopecia, an autoimmune disease in which hair follicles go into a resting phase, causing hair loss. The form I've got, alopecia areata, causes hair to fall out in in patches. The disease continuously regresses and relapses, and I have gone trough several bouts since the age of seven. Luckily, the disease is completely harmless and I have no other symptoms, but you appear to be very ill indeed when you have no hair/eyebrows/eyelashes.…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2011Charles Higham remembers his first digs in France, at age 16, in 1956.
[My brother] Richard and I began in the Grotte de L'Hyene. This was a tunnel complex that contained the occasional Neanderthal artefact. It was dark and cold, and at lunchtime we crawled out into the welcome summer warmth for food, liberally enhanced with the local red wine. All then retired for a much needed siesta, to be awakened for further digging by the sound of Mongolian bagpipes played by Professor Leroi-Gourhan, 'Le Patron'.
Current World Archaeology 48 (Aug/Sept 2011), p. 14
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2011
Here's the first t-shirt design suggestion, from Jim Allen/Sweeney! Says Jim, "The image could be printed in black or white on a contrasting shirt, or even in three colours - say, white for the eyes and trowel, tan for the outline and green for the lettering." I'm thinking that the URL would go on the back.
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2011It's that time of the year again when little usually happens and Sweden's loudest and most aggressive amateur archaeologist likes to get in the news. As mentioned here before, Bob G. Lind has managed to get my otherwise respected colleague Wladyslaw Duczko to join him and dowsing-rod geologist N-A. Mörner for some fieldwork near a lovely standing-stone ship in Scania, the famous Ales stenar, built in the 7th century AD. Duczko's involvement solved the problem previously alluded to here, that when local bodies give Bob funding for fieldwork, they're betting on a horse that can't actually get…
aardvarchaeology | July 25, 2011A company has offered to sponsor Aard with 15-30 free printed t-shirts bearing the design of my choice, delivered to a US address. I'd like to accept their offer, and so I need help from my readers.
1. I need a hi-res design to put on the shirt. I only have the blog's venerable masthead as a lo-res file, and the anonymous artist who made it four years ago doesn't reply to email on their old address. If you want to submit a design, please write me for info on how to go about it.
2. I need a regular commenter based in the US who is willing to take delivery of the t-shirts and send them on to…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2011I spent yesterday afternoon and evening on Twitter and news sites, following the information that came out of Norway about the terrorist attacks. At current count, a madman has murdered 87 people, most of them teens he mowed down with an automatic rifle, and injured a similar number.
The killer targeted the Norwegian Labour party and is an Islamophobic opponent of a multi-cultural society. I am a Labour voter and a member of a multi-cultural family. People of 70 nationalities live in my neighbourhood. The ancestry of my friends is all over the map. I always keep chicken meatballs in my…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2011
Of late I have spent some time in the nightmare world of P.G. Wodehouse, reading his 1946 novel Joy in the Morning.* Written though it was after WW2, it is set in a timeless travesty of pre-WW1 England. Much of the humour, as you will know, revolves around the interplay between the mentally challenged Bertram Wooster and his manservant Jeeves who possesses Holmes-like intelligence and enormous erudition.
Wooster is about 30 and independently wealthy. He spends much of his time at gentleman's clubs, when not getting snagged in extremely contrived intrigues that usually involve people…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2011Since the autumn of 2009, I've spent most of my research efforts studying sacrificial finds in the Bronze Age local landscape. I was thus pleasantly surprised (though a little disappointed because I missed the whole thing) when I learned that there had been a symposium on the theme "Sacrificial finds in the Late Bronze Age local landscape" at the museum in Viborg, Jutland, in March last year. Recently, only about a year after the event, a fine proceedings volume (104 pp., A4 format, 2-column text, colour printing) was published, and I was kindly sent a copy for review here on Aard.
The volume…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2011
"Pyramidology", says Wikipedia, "is a term used, sometimes disparagingly, to refer to various pseudoscientific speculations regarding pyramids, most often the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt." The encyclopedia goes on to explain that there are several kinds of pyramidology that do not necessarily correspond, one of which is the metrological kind, where the dimensions of these great edifices are studied. In the archaeological trade, we sometimes (uncharitably) refer to writings of this kind as "pyramidiocy".
In late March I got a call from Lars Lison Almkvist who has…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2011Neal Stephenson is an unusually inventive writer of historical and futuristic fiction. I have previously reviewed his 2008 novel Anathem here. And somehow I have now come to think of one of his weirdest ideas: the subterranean orgy computer in The Diamond Age.
This 1995 book bursts with far-out motifs and ideas, to the extent that I can't say I really understood everything very well when reading it back then. I found the ending confusing and dissatisfying, possibly because I wasn't entirely clued in to what happened or what it meant. But I did get this about the subterranean Drummer…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2011
Driving through Hagby parish in Uppland on a tiny road Friday, I was lucky enough to cross the bridge at Focksta right at the moment when the afternoon sun hit this lovely runestone straight on. I didn't even have to get out of the car to take the photograph.
Dating from the early 11th century, the stone is an unsigned work of Ãsmund KÃ¥resson (U 875). It's unusual in that it has a couple of Bronze Age cupmarks too. The inscription reads, "Tyrvi and Ingegärd and Tjälve had this stone erected after Kalv, Tyrvi's husband. May God and God's mother help his spirit."
Note the cross and the…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2011
In the Lake Mälaren area of Sweden, you rarely find any large pieces of Bronze Age metalwork in graves or at settlement sites. When the beautiful larger objects occur - axe heads, spear heads, swords, neck rings, belt ornaments - they almost exclusively come from odd find contexts that I for one feel comfortable with terming sacrificial deposits. My current main project aims to find out the rules that decided where people made sacrificial deposits. This entails looking at the finds we already know of and trying to trace the find spots, which is difficult as most finds were made about 1900…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2011
My wife's from Zhejiang province, and so is this can of pickled cabbage that she bought yesterday. I like the label a lot. It's not quite Engrish: of course, we would say "people's mess hall", but the Chinese characters actually denote an extremely basic canteen-like eatery. A mess hall, a canteen, maybe a refectory; very latter-day Maoist. It's a correct translation.
I endorse the pickled cabbage of the Chun'an Qiandaohu Nongxing Food Co., Ltd.. It is by far good enough to be served not only in mess halls.
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2011Skogs-Tibble parish near Uppsala is unusually rich in Bronze Age sacrificial finds, so I'm looking closer at it for some future fieldwork. And I found an awesome site in the Sites & Monuments Register, Raä Skogs-Tibble 93:3:
Skrubbstenen [The Scrubbing Stone]. Boulder with oral tradition, granite, c. 4 by 4 m a side ... According to Ivar Hall, 80 years old, of Sågstennäs, his maternal grandfather told him that trolls used to scrub and delouse themselves against the inward-sloping side of the boulder in the two cavities there.