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 | April 18, 2011
My dynamic colleague Bengt Nordqvist, for whose project I volunteered a few days in the summer of 2009, believes that contacts of his have found two Classical figurines of Venus (above) in the Gothenburg area. It looks like a fun possible case of misidentification. I don't know Classical Mediterranean sculpture, and I don't know neo-Classical 17th century sculpture either, so I can't really comment except to say that the bearded praying guy below definitely looks post-Reformation to me. But here's what my correspondent John Kvanli tells me (and I translate).
Us in Rygene Detektorklubb have…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2011
When I was in grad school, twelve years ago to the day, my thesis supervisor gave me a part-time job. He got me onto the editorial board of Swedish archaeology's main research journal.
I became co-editor of Fornvännen on 15 April 1999. The other editors were pretty busy people, I was paid by the hour, I enjoyed the work and I saw the career potential. So I made sure from the start to grab all the responsibility I could. This state of affairs was formalised in 2008, when I was made Managing Editor, a box that hadn't existed on the org chart before. I did the journal work in my research…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2011
So Friday morning, we swam in the hotel pool after breakfast. Then we went into town and had lunch with Heather Flowers at the Acadia café, whereupon I gave a well-attended lunch talk about my Bronze Age project to staff and students at the U Minn Anthropology Department. Good to reconnect with Prof. Peter Wells, and I received a tea mug! I've already put it to good use as everything on our hotel's breakfast buffet, plates cups cutlery packaging, is disposable. (We're re-using our table gear day after day.)
Heather then took us on a road trip to Swedish immigrant country around Lindstrom…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2011Journalist Geoffrey York has dug deeper for the Globe and Mail into the story about alleged descendants of Medieval Chinese sailors on the coast of Kenya that I wrote about once in '07. He finds that not even the locals, who supposedly tell "legends" about their Chinese ancestry, believe any of it or indeed know of any such legends prior to the recent foreign involvement. He quotes me, but it's a good piece anyway.
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2011I'm a picky reader when it comes to entertainment, and if I don't like the first 50 pages of a novel I rarely continue. The most recent casualty of this policy is a book I was very kindly given by Birger Johansson, Rob Thurman's The Grimrose Path (2010). Its a modern urban fantasy with angels and demons and tricksters, and it failed to interest me much. Usually I don't review stuff I don't like here, since I prefer to offer the Dear Reader recommendations. But this book suffers from an interesting weakness that I can't remember coming across before, and I thought I might say something about…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2011
I really like this shock absorber at the end of the Minneapolis light rail line under the Mall of America parking garage. It looks like a robot rhino.
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2011
Touching down at Minneapolis airport shortly before 19:00 last night, my wife and I were met by the charming Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich from the Anthro Dept. They got us installed at our hotel and joined us for dinner at the food court of the monstrous Mall of America. (There's a theme park inside it.) Then to bed.
This morning we negotiated the ample, varied and sugar-rich breakfast buffet here at the Fairfield Inn, and then went to the light rail station. We're in the second-generation periphery of Minneapolis near the airport, outside the old industrial fringe. The roads are 6-lane…
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2011Three years ago I visited the US. Security at Newark was a little slow, but I just showed them my Swedish passport and sailed in. You see, there was a visa waiver agreement back then. And I thought there still was until 1½ hours before I was scheduled to take off to the US again this morning.
I don't know if any country still has that agreement with the US. Sweden doesn't, and I found this out at the luggage drop. There's an on-line application routine for the visum (sing.) that often works really swiftly, but in my case it didn't. It's a black box and nobody knows how it works. So I missed…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2011
Success and failure in archaeological fieldwork is a graded scale. I wrote about this in autumn 2008:
My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2011I joined the Swedish Skeptics Society in 1997. Not because I was particularly aware of or bothered by paranormal claims or alternative medicine, but because I was an unhappy grad student in an Artsy post-modernist environment that was extremely hostile to the idea of cumulative rationalist Enlightenment science. It was a huge relief for me to come into contact with science and engineering people with an unabashedly scientistic world view. They would happily say "There's no data on that issue so its useless to speculate about it" and "Both interpretation A and interpretation B can't be true",…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2011
Birger Johansson is an awesome guy. We've never met, but he's one of Aard's most prolific and witty commenters. And then, out of the blue, he suddenly tells me that he's got some free shipping to spare on Amazon and sends me a hoard of books, a DVD and a graphic novel! THANK YOU BIRGER! I hereby grant you an Earldom and the right to be called Birger Jarl!
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Douglas Adams 1987.
The Skinner. A Spatterjay Novel. Neal Asher 2002.
The Devil You Know. A Felix Castor Novel. Mike Carey 2006.
Halting State. Charles Stross 2007.
The Grimrose Path. A Trickster…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2011I've got a lot of fun stuff going on right now. Yesterday I drove to Uppsala, talked to the County Archaeologist about a site for almost two hours on an empty stomach, was fed cake by my friend and colleague Ãsa of Ting & Tankar, spoke about Bronze Age sacrificial sites to her staff at the SAU excavation unit, was treated to dinner by Ãsa and my old buddy Jonas, drove to Norrtälje, ran into the local history society's meeting a quarter late and gave the Bronze Age talk one more time. Then drove home and spent half an hour before bedtime getting paperwork into shape as per the County…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2011I just got paid half a year's back wages by the ScienceBlogs Overlords. Christmas came early! No, I mean, last Christmas came late!
Paying me off wasn't such a big deal as I usually make only $75 a month. But at least two of the heaviest hitters here on Sb have also been paid. That's a tidy sum each, which can only mean that the angel investor we've been hearing about back-stage has now taken over Sb's assets and liabilities. Excellent news! ScienceBlogs is not dead!
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2011
I was reminded of this timely song when discussing an odd 7th century burial at Norsborg with my friend Dr. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson. The buried individual has been murdered, which triggered the association.
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2011
Half a year ago I gave a talk about sacrificial sites to a Bronze Age seminar at the Stockholm County Museum. Now the contributions have appeared in a fine little volume in Swedish that can be read on-line for free or mail-ordered from the museum. Thanks, editors, for swift and accurate work!
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2011
Sankt Joachimsthal ("Valley of Saint Joachim") is the German name of Jáchymov, a small town in the Czech Republic. It's in the Erzgebirge mountains near the country's north-western border towards Germany. This place currently has only a bit more than three thousand inhabitants, and yet its name is used daily by billions of people worldwide. Jáchymov is the birthplace of the Valley Coin, the Thaler, the daler, the dollar.
In 1516 a major silver lode was discovered near the Bohemian village of Conradsgrün. The following year the village was re-christened Sankt Joachimsthal, and in 1519 the…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2011Last Wednesday I saw the first snowdrop. Last Saturday I heard the first blackbird evensong. Magpies are making these soft chirping noises that spell "let's get it on". This morning it was above 5 Celsius in the shade, and I skipped my long-johns for the first time this year. And when I went out the door, my daughter pointed out the first scilla bud. Spring is here!
Dear Reader, if you're in the northern hemisphere, what signs of spring have you seen?
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2011I'm waiting to hear about jobs I've applied for in Norway and the UK. I'm waiting for responses to a few funding applications. I'm waiting for the snow to melt and the start of fieldwork season.
Dear Reader, what are you waiting for?
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2011Skalk's first issue for 2011 opens with a great article by Mr. Bronze Age Religion himself, Flemming Kaul. It deals with two wooden votive helmets found in a bog on Lolland in Denmark. Their closest parallels are from a big multiperiod deposit of pre-Roman metal helmets found at Negova/Negau in Slovenia. One of the latter carries an extremely early inscription in Germanic, the name Harigasti, which makes the link to the Uglemose find even more interesting.
Kaul shows further parallels from coeval situla art where boxers compete for similar helmets. And then comes a passage that made me laugh…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2011Hi Bloggers,
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to manually unblock hundreds upon hundreds of individual IPs. They have advised that we invest in a firewall and additional services from them, but we are still working out what these will cost and how effective they will be. I am not sure if I was correct in thinking that these attacks are not malicious,…