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 | December 10, 2010Yesterday I had been invited to speak at a seminar organised by the Forum for Heritage Research, a network sponsored by four Swedish organisations in the field. The headline was "Hope for the Humanities", and I must admit that I gritted my teeth at the idealist, anti-market and downright unrealistic perspective presented in the invitation copy. Here's a piece based on what I said at the seminar.
I'm very interested in the humanities, particularly archaeology, which is my profession. But I have no interest in TV game shows, even though I know that they're extremely popular. Why is that?
A…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2010
Hot on the heels of the Motala bone boner, here's another ancient likeness of a wee-wee.
Dear Reader Martin Kenny has kindly given me permission to publish a few pictures of his cock. It's made of sandstone or a similar rock, and to my eye it's pretty clearly modified by human hands, though it may have originated as a fossil cavity of some ancient mollusc. Measuring 6 inches long by 1.5 inches thick (small by Martin's standards, he assures me), the rock-hard member was found in the 1990s on a construction site near Red Point in Elk Neck State Park, Elkton, Maryland.
I must admit that the…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2010In October, I wrote about a ruling of the European Commission against Sweden's restrictions on metal-detector use. The angle, kind of irrelevantly one may think, was that our rules counteract the free mobility of goods, which is of course a central concern of the EU.
On 30 November Sweden's Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied to the European Commission. The gist of the reply is that "We think protection of the cultural heritage, which is also central concern of the EU, should trump the free mobility of goods in this case".
Up until §27 there is little new here. But then we get this (and I…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2010Update 13 December: Florian at Astrodictum Simplex has translated the whole entry into German. Thank you, Florian!
Update 21 December: German pop-sci web zine Scinexx reports on the poor status of the impact hypothesis and refers to this blog entry. They also mention a really weird idea of the CIRT's that I hadn't heard about: that the impact event somehow taught certain Celts to make better steel, and that this material eventually allowed the Roman empire to expand!
Back in August, I blogged about this dodgy paper that had been published in Antiquity. Subsequently, German geologists Robert…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2010
My old buddy, Aard regular Hi33y, spotted something worth taking a picture of Tuesday night in Birmingham. Not only have I apparently been canonised, I am also the owner of a Brummie rag market!
Yesterday at Landvetter airport near Gothenburg, I found a local wood-stove company demonstrating this fine gynaecological model. It'll keep you warm all night long.
Some weeks ago after the Kritisk Masse skeptics conference, I was interviewed by the Trondheim student radio. Listening to myself, I find myself sounding like the love child of my friends Tor and Jesper. I didn't even know those two…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2010I was at a Viking Period workshop in Birmingham until Wednesday noon. A sudden, major and sustained snow dump on the area south of London meant that I couldn't go home the way I had planned: train to London, train to Gatwick airport, plane to Skavsta, bus to Stockholm, be home in the early hours of today. Instead I had to sleep at a B&B near Gatwick, and then strike out for home after breakfast.
Here's what I've managed so far. Bus through the snow from Gatwick to London, train from London to Stansted airport where I type this, and now I have an air ticket for this evening to Gothenburg.…
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2010Reviewing David Wengrow's What Makes Civilization? is made difficult by the discrepancy between its title and its contents. Out of about 240 pp in total, only ~180 are intended to be read, the rest being comprised of bibliography, index etc. And these pages do not offer meditation on the necessary conditions or definition of civilisation. Instead, a series of observations on the early state societies of the Middle East and Egypt fill the first 150 pp, and then the modern reception of these cultures is covered on 30 pp.
Wengrow's main goal with the book (p. XIV) is to offer a new account of…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2010In the preceding entry I gave a list of good stuff about a Gambian vacation. Here's the flip side.
My first trip to Africa, a week in Agadir, Morocco in the mid-1990s, was marred (but not ruined) by the locals' constant begging and aggressive attempts to sell me stuff. I recently relived this experience in Gambia's coastal resort district. The Gambians don't beg. But everybody tries to sell you goods and services all the time, often making you feel quite besieged.
The room cleaner tried to sell my wife apples in the bathroom. The hotel's tailor nagged us daily about arranging an outing for us…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2010Gambia is Africa's smallest country, with 15 million people living on a flat stretch of river plain carved out of central Senegal. Besides peanut cultivation, tourism is an important source of revenue, and indeed coastal Gambia is one of the most Westernised parts of sub-Saharan Africa in this respect. I recently spent a week there with my wife and kids. Here are some of the high points of our stay.
Sunshine, heat, beach, hotel swimming pool. These were the main reasons for us to leave Sweden at all.
The locals are friendly, sociable, and not in the least deferential to tourists. Most speak…
aardvarchaeology | November 28, 2010Excellent Swedish feature-journalism magazine Filter has a 17-page piece about the skeptical movement in its current issue (#17). Magnus Västerbro's take on the movement in general and the Swedish Skeptics Association in particular is supportive yet not uncritical. I've been a board member of the Swedish Skeptics (VoF) since 2004, and I think the article is excellent advertising for us. Västerbro's main message is that the Swedish skeptical movement has long been academic, small and low-profile, and is now becoming more youthful, more inclusive, more active and louder. I think he's pretty…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2010
I'm angry and confused. Death has never hit this close to home with me before. Anders was one of my best friends, a frequent guest at my table. I knew him for over 20 years. And now he's dead at 45, apparently of a heart attack. I'm stunned and full of disbelief.
By profession an engineer and a programmer, Anders was also a prodigious traveller, a perennial student, an avid reader and a music lover. "Heart attack at 45" conjures the image of some hard-partying coke fiend. But Anders lead a quiet, even prim, bachelor's life and liked to play badminton.
I knew this guy from my mid teens on! We…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2010
Any Dear Readers in Birmingham? I'm going to be there from Monday to Wednesday for a Viking studies workshop. Email me your cell phone numbaz and maybe we can meet up!
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2010A Gambian moment.
We're in an extremely dilapidated taxi that has stalled at the roadside, just a stone's throw from Tanji village's main taxi hub. Before getting into the car, my wife and I had to haggle for ten minutes with the drivers assembled there under the dull gaze of the village idiot. And then we were accused of rich white chauvinism by an angry man whose whole family the assembled drivers forced to change cars because of us. But now the car has stalled, and no amount of joining the two wires dangling under the wheel will get it to go.
All the windows are open in the afternoon heat…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2010Re-run from 25 December 2005 (no, Swedes pay no attention to Christmas Day, preferring to get worked up about Christmas Eve).
In Skive, Denmark, there's a pond dug to accommodate a plywood Viking ship that was never set afloat.
My friend Rud Kjems tells the story in local-history annual Skiveegnens jul 2005. Skive museum was incorporated in 1910, but only in 1942 did it get premises of its own. When the museum building was finally becoming a reality, the organisation received some unusual corporate sponsorship.
Danish brewery Tuborg financed a film set in the Viking Period for the…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2010Re-run from 22 December 2005.
The Viking Period was a funny time, only three centuries long, leaving a huge footprint in terms of ideas and archaeology. Speakers of Scandinavian languages lived mainly in the fertile southern third of Scandinavia, most of them being subsistence farmers. The endless pine woods and ground-down mountain ranges of the north were home mainly to Saami and Finnish hunters and freshwater fishers. But along the Norwegian coast, deep-sea fishing and sea mammal hunting supported Scandinavian settlements all the way up to the edge of the Arctic ice. Here's where the…
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2010It's re-run week! I've gone back to my first month of blogging and found some good stuff. Here's a piece from 20 December 2005.
Lately I've been washing a lot of ruined building materials, debris from a house fire 2000 years ago.
Me, my friend Howard and his students excavated a Viking Period boat burial in Ãstergötland last summer. It dated from the 9th century AD and was sitting on the remains of a settlement from the 1st century BC. We weren't there to study that period, but we ended up with a shitload of burnt daub. Thousands of pieces of fired clay with imprints of twigs and straw.…
aardvarchaeology | November 17, 2010
My dad is building a guest house and an octagonal two-story sauna on the steep scarp from his house down to the sea. Things suddenly got very hurried, and I was called in as a building hand to help get the roof onto the sauna before winter. So in addition to a lot of travel, lately I have learned a few things about how to put an octagonal roof onto a two-story building. Crazy scaffolding...
I'm filled with respect for the builders of the past, like the ones behind the Medieval churches that dot the Swedish countryside. We have power tools, spirit levels, boards in exact dimensions... They…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2010
I spent most of the weekend at a gaming retreat organised by my buddy Oscar. It was like a small exclusive gaming convention. Oscar found a small B&B outfit in Gnesta, a small town an hour's drive from Stockholm, and negotiated a deal with them. 18 people, two nights' board, two excellent dinners and breakfasts and lunches. Everybody paid about $220 (1500 SEK) for the package (not including drinks).
And we had two days of solid board gaming. We were 15 guys and three ladies, all between 25 and 45, and all boardgame geeks. Everybody was extremely friendly, as gamers are wont to, and I had…
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2010
As mentioned here recently, the Nazis didn't like Modernism, pessimism or decadent urban themes in art. So in 1937 they sanitised German art museums, removing stuff they didn't like. Between 1937 and 1941, a selection of the censored work formed a travelling exhibition under the title Entartete Kunst, "Degenerate art". The intention was to teach the public what NOT to like. As you can imagine, artists since then haven't minded much if you call them entartet.
Now something mind-boggling. During an excavation for an extension of Berlin's subway in RathausstraÃe, archaeologists have found a…
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2010
On Sunday 14 November at 1400 hrs I'm giving a talk on the aristocracy of the 1st millennium AD at the Town Museum of Norrköping, Holmbrogränd.
On Monday 15 November I'm speaking at a seminar in Gothenburg about social media and scientific and political communication. My talk will be some time between 1300 and 1600 hrs, and treat of how I as a professional research scholar take part in the writing of Wikipedia. The venue is most likely at the IT University, Forskningsgången 6 on Lindholmen.
On Thursday 9 December some time after lunch I'm speaking at a seminar in Stockholm about the…