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 | March 14, 2011Juniorette is a precocious seven years old. Here's her rendition of Leonard Cohen's 1984 song "Hallelujah", with the Swedish lyrics by Py Bäckman. The performance is influenced to a certain degree by another young Swedish singer's version, Molly Sandén's on her 2009 album Samma himmel.
While Cohen's beautiful lyrics deal mainly with broken love affairs through biblical allusions (compare the Pixies' "Dead" and "Gouge Away"!), Bäckman's lyrics are a bit too churchy for my taste. "[The song] has something that takes hold of you / And leads you from night to day / And suddenly you want to…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2011Here's an idea that I'd like some reader feedback on.
Would it be worthwhile to put together an EPUB e-book, about as long as a 200-page paperback, of selected blog entries of mine? I'm thinking I'd organise it in thematic sections and sort each section chronologically. And publish the thing for free on Smashwords.
If I go through with this, what EPUB authoring software should I use? Preferably for Linux.
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2011Less than a month now! Dear Aard readers Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich of the University of Minnesota have invited me to speak there in April. My wife will accompany me and interpret whenever we run into someone who speaks only Mandarin.
Now, Dear Reader: can you offer me further Minnesota speaking gigs to help fund the trip? Pointers to Scandy associations that I should contact? I could speak about pretty much anything Scandy, not just archaeology. Heather has already given me an awesome contact list.
Update 13 March: I'm bumping this entry along month by month to gather more reader…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2011"The main strength of the book lies in the description of the numerous ways in which peat was utilised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author clearly proves that peat is a fascinating substance with qualities that made it suitable for a wide variety of tasks, from horse bedding, to soap and paper manufacture and as a soil improver and building material. In the UK and Germany its properties were even promoted in health spas, with treatments such as immersion in hot electrified peat and the even less enticing hot rectal peat douche."
Richard Brunning reviewing Ian Rotherham…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2011
In Sweden, as increasingly in the entire industrialised world, the cost of archaeological rescue excavations rests upon the land developer. This is known as "contract archaeology" or, euphemistically, "mitigation". Here it's largely an affair within the public sector: most of the fieldwork takes place because of state road and railroad projects, and most of the contracts are picked up by state or county organisations. Though private foundations and limited companies do operate here, Swedish contract archaeology is mainly a question of routing money from taxpayers to public-sector…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2011Dear Bloggers,
We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that ScienceBlogs is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has blocked a range of IP addresses involved. While this means that ScienceBlogs is now loading correctly for most users, the attack is still ongoing and other users may still encounter sporadic loading problems, or be blocked entirely if they were incorrectly included in these preventative measures.
We're…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2011
From the York office of archaeology's equivalent of Nature:
Antiquity invites the submission of high-quality archaeological photographs for publication in the journal.
Two photographs will be selected and published each quarter. A judging panel will decide the best photograph published each year and a cash prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner.
Photographs must be sent as digital images at a minimum width of 135mm @ 300 pixels per inch and a maximum height of 165mm. All photographs should be accompanied by a short caption providing details of the site/artefact, when the image was…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2011
The National Geological Survey of Sweden has put an interactive deglaciation and shoreline displacement model for the country on-line for free. You can download detailed hi-res maps of your favourite parts of Sweden for 0-16 thousand years ago, and a few thousand years into the future! (But only at intervals of whole millennia.) Invaluable for Swedish prehistorians!
Above is the area between LÃ¥ngbro and Hjortsberga in VÃ¥rdinge parish, Södermanland, where I'm planning some fieldwork, as it looked in 1000 BC according to current knowledge of the shoreline displacement process. I scouted the…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2011I've told you before about the Chiemgau Impact Hypothesis, where a small group of researchers cultivate a minority view of a glaciogenic lake basin in Bavaria as a meteorite crater dating from the 1st Millennium BC. Here on Aard I've published a paper in collaboration with geologists Robert Huber and Robert Darga where we explain that it's an unlikely fringe idea. And now a peer-reviewed paper (pay wall) has appeared in Antiquity where the hypothesis is refuted, gently but crushingly.
Gerhard Doppler and colleagues at the Geology Service of the Bavarian State Board for the Environment explain…
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2011
I've shown samples of Spanish archaeopotter Pablo Zalama's Beaker Culture pieces before. Here are some new replica Roman lamps of his.
If only Swedish pottery had been this good prior to the High Middle Ages! OK, the burnished ware of Ãland and Gotland in the Early Roman Period is good. And some of the stamped ware of Gotland's Migration Period isn't bad either. But when I read Thomas Eriksson's recent & solid PhD thesis on our Bronze Age and Earliest Iron Age pottery, I almost wept at how ugly and poorly fired the stuff is.
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2011Sweden is shaped like a ski, and people live mainly in the southern quarter, but in the other three-quarters there are many skiing resorts. I've been going there every few years since I was three. I'm not a competitive or particularly elegant down-hill skier, but I enjoy it and I can get down all kinds of slopes and I rarely fall.
In recent years my wife and I have taken the kids to one of the country's southernmost skiing resorts, simply because if one of you is going to spend most of their time on the kiddy slope with a neophyte, then there is little reason to drive for seven hours one way…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2011
Jack Chick is an insane Christian cartoonist. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an atheist horror writer who wrote about people being driven insane. In Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis's brilliant 2000 tract, Chick and Lovecraft are made one.
Thanks to Kalle Bäcklander for the tip-off.
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2011I spent most of last weekend in Blankaholm, a small village on the Baltic coast of Sweden between Kalmar and Västervik. My colleague Michael Dahlin (who keeps the Misterhultaren blog) lives there, and this weekend was the fourth time that he headed the annual Blankaholm conference on Swedish east coast archaeology. There's nothing quite like it that I know of: a true grassroots event, gathering amateurs with no formal training, amateurs with archaeology degrees, trained professionals and even a few pros without formal training. 25 hours of talks, discussion, book trade, communal meals and…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2011
A citizen in the island province of Gotland has submitted a Roman cavalry-officer's helmet mask to the County Archaeologist. It is said to have been in the family for some time. The state of the piece shows that it can't be from a ploughed field, which makes it unlikely to be a recent metal-detector find.
Thanks to Jan Peder Lamm for the tip-off.
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2011My detectorist friend Svante Tibell pointed me to an extremely interesting term paper by Ingrid Ulst, one of Marge Konsa's students at the university of Tartu in Estonia. The title says it all: The Regulation of Metal Detectors and Responsible Metal-Detecting: the Examples of the UK, Sweden and Denmark. Check it out!
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2011
Here's another artisan taking inspiration from archaeology: Ted Bouck made the above arm ring out of brass sheet, punch-decorated and silver-plated it. Ted comments, "I left the perimeter wave from stamping because I liked the organic look. The diamond with dot inside is a period stamp, though not from the York armring. I did not want to make my armring an exact duplicate." He is currently working with new versions of the Small Punched type of domed oblong brooch that was common in south-east Sweden in the early 8th century.
Below is the original: a gold arm ring from the Vale of York hoard…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2011
Being a prehistorian, I tend to see Stockholm as a cancerous growth. It has expanded for the past seven or eight centuries from small beginnings on an island right where Lake Mälaren debouches into the Baltic. In this process, the city and its suburbs have ruined or covered up great swaths of a pristine rural landscape and archaeology. Sitting on the border between the Medieval provinces Uppland and Södermanland, Stockholm has even managed to rearrange the country's provincial borders. A new-fangled Stockholm county now covers large chunks of the two older provinces.
An expanding city is,…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2011
When skeptical darling George Hrab released his latest album, Trebuchet, he placed a golden ticket in the sleeve of one copy that went into regular distribution. On the ticket was Hrab's phone number and a promise to come and play a gig for free at the venue of the recipient's choice. When the call came, it was from a guy in Helsinki.
Upon Hrab's mentioning this on his podcast, I suggested to my fellow board members of the Swedish Skeptics that we might make the trip worthwhile for the man and organise some Swedish gigs. Everybody liked the idea, and Hrab was happy to oblige. Then the…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2011[More about archaeology, reenactment, darkages, shields; arkeologi, vendeltiden, Uppsala, sköld.]
David Huggins is a member of the Wulfheodenas Dark Ages re-enactment group. Among mid-1st millennium Scandies, a wulfheoden was a kind of berserker warrior, only one who identified with wolves rather than bears. David recently commissioned Polish master artisan Grzegorz Kulig to make a replica of a display shield from boat grave number 7 at Valsgärde near Uppsala, whose inhabitant was a 7th century petty king among the Swedes. I think this is a thing of astonishing beauty.
All archaeological…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2011
Recently my mind has been blown twice. First by listening to the first four songs on Funkadelic's acid-drenched 1970 album Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow. Then by studying the above picture.
It's comet Tempel 1. Up close in interplanetary space. And it's been visited twice by different space probes: first Deep Impact imaged the comet on its way towards the sun in 2005 and shot an impactor point blank at it. Then the Stardust probe, originally designed and launched to meet with another comet, was sent to meet Tempel 1 on its way out again from the sun. Today Stardust imaged the comet…