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 | May 28, 2011
Len Fisher is an Australian physicist based in England. He's also a foodie involved in molecular gastronomy. In 2002 he published an essay collection on the UK market, The Science of Everyday Life, which has now been re-issued for US readers.
Before looking at the book's contents I have to comment on how Fisher's US publisher, Arcade, has packaged the thing. On the front cover is a nonsensical pseudo-mathematical formula made from clip-art, stating that one's enjoyment of a doughnut approaches infinity as the amount of coffee and the number of empty cups associated with it decreases. This…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2011I've criticised Western museums for buying or accepting as gifts looted Chinese antiquities. This practice, in my opinion, stems from an outdated and irresponsible fine arts perspective where the exact provenance of a museum piece is not very important. When you're dealing with anonymous prehistoric or early historic art, you can't attribute it to any named artist, and so an art curator will quite happily settle for "Han dynasty, probably the Yellow River area" as a date and a provenance.
As an archaeologist, I do not accept the category "fine art", and I claim precedence for the…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2011
Chinese tourist sites follow a set of conventions that seem to go back hundreds or thousands of years, far into a past when tourism, as we understand it, did not yet exist. Essentially we're dealing with named and inscribed sites. I have visited many in my Chinese travels, but since I can't read the language I have formed my ideas about them from reading English-language signage and asking my wife to translate or explain. So I may have misunderstood the nuances. Here nevertheless are my impressions.
A Chinese tourist site always originates with an educated male member of the elite some time…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2011
My mother-in-law grew up in the mountains near Fushan in the prefecture of Qingtian (pronounced CHING-tien), inland Zhejiang province. Though the prefecture's name means "Green Field", it's pretty poor and has been a major emigration area for decades. The owners and staff of many or most Chinese restaurants in Sweden are from Qingtian. Yesterday we rode a train for nearly seven hours from Hangzhou to get to the district capital, and all along the way we were accompanied by a line of enormous new concrete stilts on which a future fast railroad will run. Next time the trip may take only an…
aardvarchaeology | May 22, 2011On the flight from Amsterdam to Hangzhou Saturday, I observed some interesting behaviour on the part of my Chinese co-travellers. After the main meal, the stewardesses went around hawking tax-free goods. At this time, a bunch of people stood up and formed a large prattling group in the aisles toward the rear of the plane where myself and Junior were seated. They seemed to be discussing the merits of the wares among themselves and with the Chinese stewardess, reading labels and handing packages around for inspection. The whole thing looked like a cross between a cocktail party and an Oriental…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2011
Marabouts are West African con men & fortune tellers who market their services in Europe with little flyers printed on coloured paper. In France, there's an ongoing collectors' craze for these notes. I found one under my windshield wiper the other day. I translate:
Mr Seeki
Fortune teller, international marabout
Born with spiritual power. I am known worldwide. I can solve all your problems e.g. love, health, family problems, business, legal issues, financial transactions, weight loss. You learn how to protect yourself and your family from the enemy and how you get your near and dear…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2011
Here's a fun find, courtesy of my buddy Claes Pettersson. As detailed on Jönköping County Museum's blog, a funny little cast-brass trinket came to light during fieldwork at Odensjö ("Odin's Lake"), where recently a very fine Roman era weapon burial has also been unearthed. From a functional point of view it's hard to say what the thing has been used for (no surviving pin arrangements on the back side to identify it as a brooch), but Annika Jeppson's analytical drawing allows us to date it firmly to the Early Viking Period, probably the later 9th century.
Two birds are pecking a round-…
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2011
I've reported before [1 - 2] on the on-going discoveries in the Tjust area of NE Småland province. Here Joakim Goldhahn is employing the country's best rock-art surveyors to work through an area that is turning out to be extraordinarily rich and diverse in Bronze Age petroglyphs. These years will be remembered as a time when the Swedish rock art map was redrawn in a dramatic fashion.
Here are two fresh finds from last week, pics courtesy of my friend Roger Wikell. Some of this rock art is pecked on quartzite, a material so hard that Roger compares it to bullet-proof glass. The cool thing…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2011One of the stranger concepts in Tolkien's writings is that of "High Elves". Why are these elves high? It has nothing to do with drugs, though in the Tolkien Society we used to joke about them smoking lembas. And it has nothing to do with stature, though nobility and body height go together in Tolkien, nor with elevation above sea level. I've got an idea.
According to Robert Foster's 1978 book Complete Guide to Middle-earth, Tolkien uses the term as a synonym for the Eldar. These were a subset of the original Elven population who accepted a summons to join the gods in their brightly lit…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2011
My colleague Karl-Magnus Melin specialises in ancient and modern woodworking and has a major paper in Fornvännen's summer issue about well fittings made from hollowed-out tree trunks. He's kindly sent me some post-conservation pics of a Viking Period wooden drinking bowl. It's lathe-turned unless I'm very much mistaken. The bowl was found sitting in a back-filled well last autumn, during excavations directed by Anne Carlie for the National Heritage Board at Lindängelund near Malmö.
Waterlogged wood is a bit like precious metal in that little really happens to it as the centuries pass.…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2011In the car yesterday I listened to two excellent narrations of Lovecraft short stories. And I marvelled upon re-encountering the opening paragraph of "The Picture in the House" from 1919.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2011
Today I did four hours of metal-detecting at a site in VÃ¥rdinge where a Wendelring bronze torque from about 600 BC has been found. Reiner Knizia's popular card game Lost Cities has a thinly applied archaeological theme, and on the board is actually an image of a Wendelring torque just like the one from VÃ¥rdinge. (A Lost Cities deck can easily be made from two packs of normal playing cards using a marker pen on a few cards.)
The torques often come in twos and threes, so I was hoping to find another one today. In early April when my team was there, the site was still largely covered with…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2011Once I went metal-detecting without my GPS. Luckily the site was not far from my home and I found only one object worth collecting, so I could mark the spot with a stick and return after dinner to get the coordinates. Another time I forgot my rubber boots and was confused by my detector's strange behaviour until I realised that I was wearing heavy steel-capped workman's shoes that triggered the detector at a distance of decimeters.
These days I have a checklist that I use to pack for metal-detecting. Here's what I need to bring when going into the field.
Metal detector (!)
Batteries
Spade…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2011The other day asked what UK practice regarding the treatment of archaeological human remains has been like in recent decades. Dear Reader Dustbubble gave such a good answer that I must promote it to guest-entry status.
Martin sez ".. But what, then, was the practice like between 1857 and 2008?"
Well from personal experience, in the last quarter of the C20th it would be infinitely carefully excavated and drawn/photogged in situ (did you know that a well-preserved adult skeleton, if arranged in the now-traditional urban mediaeval digger's fashion, fits perfectly in a two-gallon builder's bucket…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2011Funding trips for classes of school children is a complicated business in Sweden. This is due to two commonly held conventional ideas. One is that it would be unfair to ask each family to simply pay for their kid, since not all families may be able to afford the trip. The other is that the kids should somehow prove themselves worthy of the trip through work. Typically, this will lead to a great number of schemes and events to collect funds for each trip. And these fund-raising activities have a few things in common: they pay poorly, most of the labour is put in by a few parents (not the kids…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2011For some years I have been a happy reader of (and frequent commenter on) Current Archaeology. Now Dear Reader Marcus Smith has arranged (or bought?) a complimentary subscription for me to the other big UK pop-arch mag, British Archaeology. While CA is a private property, BA is published by the Council for British Archaeology, "an educational charity working throughout the UK to involve people in archaeology and to promote the appreciation and care of the historic environment for the benefit of present and future generations", as Wikipedia puts it.
The first issue of British Archaeology to…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2011Bertil Albrektson is a very cool Bible scholar. A former professor of Old Testament Exegetics in Turku, Finland, he was on the most recent Swedish Bible translation commission despite being an atheist. His ground-breaking little 1967 book History and the Gods. An essay on the idea of historical events as divine manifestations in the ancient Near East and in Israel was recently re-issued, and I read it for the first time. Its basic message is that on two important points, Hebrew monotheism is not as dissimilar to other religions of the Ancient Near East as had previously been argued. Good…
aardvarchaeology | April 26, 2011
[More about photography, children, childpornography, pornography, porn; fotografi, barn, pornografi, porr, barnporr, barnpornografi.]
In issue 2011:1 of Fotografisk Tidskrift, the journal of the Swedish Photographer's Association, is a fine essay in Swedish by Jens Liljestrand (Twitter @jensliljestrand) about current attitudes to images of children and the definition of child pornography. Before the piece could be printed with the accompanying photographs, the journal's editor, my friend Jenny Morelli, had to clear its contents with the rights holders, who don't know Swedish. So she asked me…
aardvarchaeology | April 24, 2011The other day I overheard a cringeworthy conversation between two 70ish ladies of the New Age persuasion. They were talking about how a great change is imminent in our society, as heralded by the unusually many catastrophes taking place (huh?), and by the 2011 end of the Mayan calendar, "or was it 2012?", the Maya being of course the people who built Macchu Picchu (nope). The ladies seemed to think that the change, though scary, would be a good one. And then I remembered what the term "New Age" actually means. I just had to sing a line from the musical Hair to them:
"This is the dawning of…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2011
When I was a kid, beavers were kind of exotic animals that lived in distant parts, like bears or wolverines. Over the past decade or two though, they've multiplied here in Nacka municipality, much as the wild boar population has exploded in this part of Sweden. Still, the beavers haven't really reached my part of Nacka -- until now.
Today I found their tell-tale felled trees on the edge of the fen next to the Ãstervik commuter train station, a few minutes by bike from my home. This means that soon we'll see them in Lake Lundsjön / Dammsjön where we swim every summer! (It used to be two…