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 | July 5, 2011
Scientific American has opened a blog portal, poaching a number of excellent erstwhile SciBlings and other blog buddies of mine! Head on over and greet
Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around The Clock
Krystal d'Costa at Anthropology in Practice
Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics
Janet Stemwedel at Doing Good Science
Kevin Zelnio at EvoEcoLab
Jennifer Jacquet at Guilty Planet
Christina Agapakis at The Oscillator
Eric Michael Johnson at The Primate Diaries
SciCurious at The Scicurious Brain
Christie Wilcox at Science Sushi
Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology
Jason G. Goldman at The Thoughtful…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2011I suddenly have this unaccountable urge to comment on the current issue of National Geographic Magazine. Maybe that isn't so strange. I mean, after all, I like reading the mag and I'm on record as saying, in the Swedish Skeptics quarterly no less, that my ideal museum exhibition would be a 3D version of a Nat Geo feature story. Though I wonder if that's the only reason. Well, anyway:
Nat Geo covers quite a bit of archaeology, usually of the same Great Civilisations and Opulently Furnished Tombs of Antiquity kind that we meet with in more specialised international pop-archaeomags such as…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2011Here's a piece of radical Libertarian politics for you. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, Svenskt Näringsliv, is a respectable mainstream employers' organisation. Their people have identified a problem with the Swedish university system, viz, that unemployed people are entering undergraduate programs that do not actually make them employable. The Confederation points out the Humanities specifically. And they suggest a solution: students in these programs should not receive the same amount of study loans as other students.
I agree that the problem exists, but not with the suggested…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2011Andreas Oldeberg (1892-1980) is rumoured to have had some pretty ugly political leanings. But just because you like cheese, you needn't socialise with cows. If you're into Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age metalwork from Sweden, there is absolutely no getting around Oldeberg's huge illustrated catalogue from 1974.
I'm currently grabbing data out of the catalogue for my sacrificial sites project. And I've come across a funny detail that shows that old Oldeberg was not up to speed with his day's archaeological methodology.
Whenever Oldeberg describes a spearhead, he classifies it according to…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2011
I've written before (1 - 2 - 3) about the Kenyan village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Medieval Chinese sailors. Now my buddy Axel Andersson has alerted me to a similar case. But here it's sort of the other way around: a Chinese village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Roman soldiers.
The village of Zhelaizhai (formerly Liqian) is in Gansu province in northern China, on the border towards Inner Mongolia and on the edge of the Gobi desert. People here tend to have an unusually Europid appearance by Chinese standards,…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2011I don't like Falun Gong, which I regard as a crazy manipulative cult. And I don't like the Chinese government, which I regard as a repressive capitalist dictatorship. These two organisations, in turn, hate each other. And it looks like someone in the Chinese government is trying to use me to disseminate anti-FG propaganda.
This morning I received two letters from people claiming to be FG members trying to convert me. Neither letter is very long. Both contain loudly racist statements about black people and "mix-blood". It is a matter of public record that my wife is Chinese and that we have a…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2011
Geocaching is a GPS-aided combination of hide the Easter egg and orienteering for internet nerds. I have logged >700 caches since 2005 and had lots of fun.
Borås Tidning now reports about a not terribly thoughtful geocacher. He had placed a cache in a space locked with a combination lock. Part of the puzzle was to figure out the combination. So far so good.
But.
The locked space was a sealed 650-meter utility tunnel excavated through bedrock for a sewage line at a depth of up to 10 meters below ground surface. And the sewage tends to leak hydrogen sulfide, which makes the tunnel a…
aardvarchaeology | June 21, 2011
Is this part of the Stone of Mora?
After some issues with the image resolution in the PDFs, we've now put Fornvännen 2010:3-4 on-line. Read new research for free!
Middle Neolithic festival site in Scania
Roman bronze coinage found in the woods of northern Sweden
Roman mirror shard found on the coast of Western Bothnia
Pre-demolition documentation of a richly be-muralled Medieval church in Småland produced in the 1820s
1st millennium AD gardening
Thieves, counterfeiters and murderers in Birka
What happened to the Stone of Mora onto which Medieval Swedish kings were hoisted at their…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2011
Spent four hours at the EuroCon 2011 science fiction convention Sunday afternoon. That's about enough for me. Though I love sf, and I've made a few appearances as speaker and panelist at cons, I've never really been part of sf fandom. It has always struck me as a strangely rearward-looking kind of futurism as Swedish sf fandom's oft-recalled glory days occurred in the 70s. But there certainly is life in the movement still: this con was the biggest one ever in this country, with ~800 international participants.
I came mainly to hear Charles Stross do a reading. iPad in hand, he gave us an…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2011
The rivers run almost dry in Qingtian prefecture, Zhejiang province, China, because of recently built power dams. This particular dam on a tributary of the main river was completed three years ago. The resulting lake is 100 meters deep above the drowned villages on the valley floor.
And if they didn't build these dams? Either burn coal, build more nuclear plants or stay an undeveloped nation.
Cultivation terraces and tombs that were once way up the mountainside and hardly accessible at all are now at the lake shore. Note the zone of silt-grey terraces just above the current water level…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2011Current Archaeology #254 (May) has a pretty funny 6-page feature by Spencer Smith of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. He claims to have found the site of a Surrey manor house that saw the birth of the last Prince of Wales who was actually an independent Welsh prince: Owain Lawgoch, Owain of the Red Hand (b. c. 1330, d. 1378). But reading the article, I found that it is actually a long piece of special pleading to explain why Smith did not find the desired remains on site! The whole thing was prompted by a TV documentary, where of course you have to put a…
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2011
Fecal sample submission window.
Dan, be cake. Because the Danish-Belgian Cake Company says so.
"Busen" means "breasts" in German and "the naughty one" in Swedish.
No appointment needed. Come whenever you lie fallow.
"Shroff" means "tariff" in Engrish. Maybe.
Porular blog Aardvarchaeology a rad.
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2011
Ever since I started blogging in 2005 I've been talking about my Ãstergötland project, where I've been chasing the elite of the mid-to-late 1st millennium in one of Sweden's richest agricultural provinces. This project has produced a number of journal papers, talks, radio appearances, archive reports and additions to museum collections. But there hasn't been a book (though Dear Readers John Massey and Deborah Sabo have helped copy-edit a manuscript).
Soon there will be one.
I'm very pleased to be able to show you its cover, designed by Tina Hedh-Gallant (who is also laying out the contents…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2011
"Lie Fallow" means "in your spare time, without a prior appointment" in Engrish.
Everybody loves Engrish, the surreal dialect of English found on signs, in menus, on clothing etc. in the Far East. Much of it seems to stem from blind over-use of dictionaries, where the non-Anglophone user picks one of the possible translations of a term at random. Here are a few examples I've caught recently at restaurants.
The breakfast menu at our hotel in Hecheng had some fine variations on rice porridge and its condiments.
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2011
I've written a bit before about the slightly odd interior decoration in Chinese hotels. Here's a Lovecraftian table lamp that sits on the check-in desk, inspiring cosmic dread, at the Relax hotel in Hangzhou.
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2011Listening to the Dice Tower and Spiel podcasts and reading forum entries on Boardgame Geek, I've come across two central aspects of US boardgaming culture that have me kind of baffled. One is the ubiquity of open-to-all gaming groups, and the other is the emphasis on the FLGS, the Friendly Local Gaming Store.
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To begin with the gaming groups, to me gaming is something I do with my friends at our houses - usually mine. The varying cast of gamers having tea at my table once a week are my guests. A recent Dice Tower episode (#205), however, featured a long discussion about what to do if your…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2011
2011
Having completed our first twelve years together today, my wonderful wife and I have agreed to go on for at least another dozen.
1999
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2011Dear Reader, it's raining in Hangzhou and I am not well. I have had the shits since Wednesday evening, some headache, and last night I seem to have had a fever. Both of the latter problems are kept at bay by wonderful ibuprophene. I was fully active and enjoyed myself Thursday and Friday. But I'm spending Saturday in my hotel room, with Junior in his across the hallway, because he's not in great shape either.
I have just finished proof-reading a large chunk of my Ãstergötland book, mainly killing mishyphenations, though I had to stop for an hour's nap while the latest ibup pill took hold. I'…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2011Here's just short note to tell you, Dear Reader, that the Great Firewall of China is fucking annoying. I am unable to access Twitter, Facebook, any Blogspot blog and often most of Google's services including Gmail.
Meanwhile, the Chinese populace is so closely keyed in to what's happening in the West that girls in remote Qingtian are wearing exactly the same ultrashort denim shorts as their contemporaries in Stockholm this spring. But I guess the Great Firewall is intended to keep domestic dissidents from reaching an audience as much as or more than to keep the Chinese from learning about the…