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 | January 7, 2011
Boat Hill, where I live since two years back, is a 70s tract-housing estate where roofs are almost flat. Snow thus tends to build up on them. Of course, pile enough snow onto any structure and it will collapse. But I've come across a curious notion here. Several neighbours have told me to beware wet snow "because it's so heavy".
They're not talking about snow that becomes secondarily soaked by rain that adds to its weight. They believe that if I have a tonne of powdery snow at -10 Celsius on my roof, I'm OK, but if that tonne approaches 0 Celsius and compacts down into a thinner, less fluffy…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2011
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars seven Earth calendar years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and at least Oppy still works fine! Spirit has sadly been stuck on the edge of a small dust-filled crater since May 2009, one set of wheels inside and one outside the crater. It is currently incommunicado because of the Martian winter, being in a poor position for solar power. But it still probably works. And Oppy trundles on toward Endeavour crater. Currently it's…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2011[More about architecture; arkitektur.]
View from the west, 9 January.
Back in November I blogged about how I helped put a roof on my dad's octagonal sauna. A reader asked to see the plans of the building. And here, with my dad's permission, are plans and elevations by architect Ulf Gillberg. Isn't this pretty damn neat?
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2011Historiography is meta-history, that is, the historical study of historical studies in the past. It is useful and valuable to historical research as ongoing quality control and provides a kind of user's manuals for those who wish to use old literature in new studies of the past. Also, it can often help explain political ideas, movements and propaganda in the past, as that field in society often attempts to use and manipulate history. I am, however, of the firm opinion that if you are interested in, say, the High Middle Ages, you have no reason to delve into Victorian ideas about that period.…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2011
Check out Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's poignantly beautiful photographs of abandoned buildings in Detroit! Explains Wikipedia,
Detroit has numerous neighborhoods suffering from urban decay, consisting of vacant properties resulting in low inhabited density, stretching city services and infrastructure. These neighborhoods are concentrated in the northeast and on the city's fringes. The 2009 residential lot vacancy in Detroit was 27.8%, up from 10.3% in 2000, with the population continuing to shrink and foreclosures that exacerbate the problem. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of lots are…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2011
I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids.
When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder God, has written a Lovecraftian poem on the same theme (in all likelihood quite independently of that 1986 pewter giggle-shudder item). Hear Norm perform the poem on the Drabblecast's Christmas Special!
'Twas the Night
By Norm Sherman
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the edifice…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2010Looking for a good book? Here are my best reads in English of the past two years.
2009
The Colour of Magic. Terry Pratchett 1983. Lavishly ornate humorous fantasy.
Dancing with strangers. Inga Clendinnen 2003. On contacts between the first English penal colony and the aboriginals at Sydney Cove in 1788-92.
On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin 1859. (Abbreviated version of the 1st edition, ed. J.A. Secord 2008.) Don't miss the appended collection of contemporary reactions!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Michael Chabon 2000. Two Jewish kids make up a comic-book super hero…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2010Yesterday my buddy Swedepat showed up at 13:30. (That's his name to help distinguish him from Irish Pat.) I hadn't been able to find a third or fourth gamer on short notice. But our plan was to try out the new games in my house, and we started off with Juniorette's Christmas present, Forbidden Island. Of course she wanted to play too, and her mother joined in just to be sociable.
I'm a geek living with, not a jock girl, but more kind of a hipster. My wife's a journalist who's into fashion and literature and fancy cooking. A good thing about East Asian families is that they appear to teach…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2010
One of the songs my old band played was a tune that Anders had written to a poem by Hermann Hesse. It's in his 1927 novel Steppenwolf and treats one of the central themes of the book, the idea that immortal genius (such as that of Mozart or Goethe, Hesse felt) might exist on a plane immeasurably far above everyday human life. Writing the book, Hesse was close to suicide from trying to live alone on this rarefied plane. The novel describes his alter ego's return to the simple mortal pleasures of earthbound humanity.
Anders used the 1932 Swedish translation by Sven Stolpe (or was the poetry in…
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2010
The Swedish Skeptics' annual awards for 2010 were just announced.
Ãsa Vilbäck, MD, receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... who has described diseases and treatments in an unbiased and informative manner on her TV show Dr. Ãsa on Swedish state television. By upholding a good popular science standard on her show, Ãsa Vilbäck has emphasised clearly the importance of evidence-based medicine. She has also warned viewers of dangerous alternative medical methods."
Enlightener Vilbäck receives a cash prize of SEK 25 000 ($3700, â¬2800).
The Stockholm Initiative lobby group receives the…
aardvarchaeology | December 25, 2010When I turned 25 my friend Sanna gave me a little poetry anthology that I have since treasured. Kathryn & Ross Petras's Very Bad Poetry (1997) is a lovely read. One of the versifiers most voluminously represented there is W.T. McGonagall (1830-1902). After quoting his words, "The most startling incident in my life was the time I discovered myself to be a poet", the Petrases comment, "Many people in his native Dundee, Scotland, apparently disagreed with his discovery."
Here is McGonagall's "The Death of Lord and Lady Dalhousie".
Alas! Lord and Lady Dalhousie are dead, and buried at last,…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2010Archaeology mags have accreted on my shelf, though something's happened to my subscription to the always enjoyable Current Archaeology. I've written the editors.
Populär Arkeologi 2010:4 opens with a look at the garishly painted reality of Classical sculpture. The only place where you could see white marble statues in ancient Greece and Rome was actually a sculptor's workshop.
Then there's a spread by my buddies and Fornvännen contributors about this summer's rock-art discoveries in Småland province, reported on here and here back in May.
Johan Rönnby reports on a beautifully preserved…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2010Dear Reader, are you of such a bent that you are not content with reading what I write in English? Is your inclination also to hear me speak in Swedish? Is that what you want, now? Is it? Say it! Is it?
Let's be frank. I think we both know what sort of pleasure-seeking little beast you are.
So head on over to Skeptikerpodden and hear their long interview with me about the Swedish Skeptics Society, ending with some views on archaeology.
[More about skepticism, podcasts, archaeology; podcasts, skepticism, arkeologi.]
aardvarchaeology | December 20, 2010
I'm eager to start reading more e-books. I rarely re-read books (except for work), and my friends rarely borrow paper ones from me, so I have little reason to hang on to paper books. E-books would be just the thing. But the prices aren't any good. I either have to pay more for an e-book than what it costs me to order a paperback from England, or I can get it for free through illegal file sharing. It's amazingly easy: just try googling a book's title, your preferred file format and the name of a file sharing service like Hotfile or Megaupload.
I am well aware that I wouldn't be supporting the…
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2010
Thebes is a multi-award-winning 2007 German board game by Peter Prinz. I just bought it on a tip from my buddy Oscar, who found a good offer on-line and thought of me because of the game's theme. It's about archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s. The box is big, the production values are lavish, and I really look forward to learning it. But before I can say anything about its qualities as a game, I have to share an opening paragraph from the rule book with you (and I translate from the Swedish version).
The players travel as archaeologists through Europe to gather needful knowledge…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2010
According to a fresh press release from the County Museum of Bohuslän in Uddevalla, western Sweden, the museum's maritime archaeologists are studying a well-preserved shipwreck whose construction date lies in the AD 1210s or 1220s.
The shipwreck is in shallow water in the Jore fjord and was identified on aerial photographs by the local firm HydroGIS Ltd, whose staff reported it to the museum. HydroGIS also provided the photographs shown here.
Dendroanatomical measurements have not only proven the wreck to be the oldest known to date along the Bohuslän coast, but have also shown that the…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2010
Today is my fifth birthday as a blogger! (Here's my first entry from 2005.) Five years, that's 13% of the time I've been out of the the womb so far. I had no idea that I'd be doing this. Funny how your life can change.
My mean number of unique readers per day has been as follows.
2006: 157 daily readers
2007: 852 daily readers
2008: 937 daily readers
2009: 714 daily readers
2010: 1005 daily readers (updated after year's end)
These stats might suggest that the blog has just regained its health after a serious slump last year, but actually the mean values for '07 and '08 are skewed by huge…
aardvarchaeology | December 15, 2010Junior, who is a digital native and knows way more about current net fads than I do, turned me on to the multi-talented Neil Cicierega and his band Lemon Demon. Excellent synth pop that should hit the sweet spot of any Apples in Stereo fan. I know it hit mine!
Here are the beautifully clever and happy-sad lyrics to the Lemon Demon tune "Amnesia Was Her Name" that has been playing in my head lately. It's from the 2008 album View Monster.
Amnesia was her name
By Neil Cicierega
Amnesia was her name, she had beautiful eyes
And every word she said, it was a little surprise
Can't remember when I…
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2010Here's a case of odd priorities. The Royal Library in Stockholm keeps a copy of everything that is printed in Sweden (and Swedish), and also has a lot of people tending LIBRIS, the national bibliographic database. Recently, the folks who keep track of scholarly publications in historical research (through the Swedish Historical Bibliography project) completed the digitisation of a huge printed bibliography for their field, which means that LIBRIS now contains references to almost every piece of historical research that has ever been published in this country.
Now, how is the Royal Library…
aardvarchaeology | December 13, 2010A re-run from 12 December 2006.
Tomorrow's the feast-day of St Lucy, and my son's school started off the celebrations a day early. So this afternoon, along with a lot of other parents, I had saffron buns and watched kids in Ku Klux Klan and Santa outfits form a long line and sing Christmas carols. One end of the line was mostly a few bars ahead of the other.
As a pretty recent tradition, the morning of 13 December is celebrated in Sweden with quite a bit of ceremony. It involves white-robed, predominantly young female carolers led by a candle-crowned girl, performing a specialised repertoire…