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 | October 7, 2010The Indian Express reports that according to Dr. Gautam Sengupta, director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, "it is time for us to rethink our own ideas and concepts of archaeological analysis in order to combat the worldwide crisis in the discipline". Disturbing words from a very powerful archaeologist! What's going on!?
Though woefully ignorant of Indian archaeology, I have a reasonable grasp of Western European and US archaeology, and I believe I have a pretty good idea of what's going on in Scandinavia. And I have seen no sign of any worldwide crisis. Particularly not one…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2010
Thanks to Pär for the tip-off. OM's singer/bassist used to be a member of the legendary doom band Sleep.
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2010
Yesterday's walk in the woods near Drevinge garnered us the following:
Shaggy ink cap, Fjällig bläcksvamp, Coprinus comatus
Terracotta hedgehog, Rödgul taggsvamp, Hydnum rufescens
Shingled hedgehog, Fjällig taggsvamp, Sarcodon imbricatus
Common puffball, Vårtig röksvamp, Lycoperdon perlatum
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
Copper brittlegill, Tegelkremla, Russula decolorans
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
I've never picked the ink caps before as I knew that the Common ink cap is poisonous at least in combination with alcohol. But now I know better. The shaggies…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2010A buddy and namesake of mine has a father who is a literature scholar. He wrote his thesis on absurdist drama, Beckett and Ionesco, that sort of thing. This influenced his son's vocabulary. Once about 1970, when the scholar was out on a walk with his little boy in a stroller, they passed a large tractor and a group of people. The boy was greatly impressed by the tractor, pointed to it and exclaimed, "Absurd tractor!". The bystanders stared in amazement.
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2010
I once produced a small shell midden in my kitchen. Just now I made a small clearance cairn in the garden. My wife has ordered a peony bush from Gansu in China via a plant dealer in Turku, Finland, and I picked it up at a trucking firm the other day. Now it fell upon me to dig the hole and plant the thing. While digging I set aside all the stones I came upon, as lo-tech farmers have done for millennia, only at a smaller scale. And thus my little cairn.
[More about archaeology, gardening; arkeologi, trädgård.]
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2010
Here's something new in burial archaeology!
In 2008 a cremation burial of the Pre-Roman Iron Age was excavated at Skrea backe near Falkenberg in Halland province. It's unusually rich for its time, being housed in a continental iron-and-bronze cauldron and containing three knives, an awl and 5.3 litres of burnt bones from a lamb, a sheep, two pig's trotters, a bird and three people.
I've never seen a knife-handle like that before, with an iron-rod frame, but I've never really worked with the period nor with Halland so that counts for little. A bizarre detail though is that a foot bone from…
aardvarchaeology | September 28, 2010
I've felt largely like an outsider since I was a kid, but these days I rarely experience the full force of it except when I visit a news agent's and confront the glossy magazines. They carry hundreds of titles. And at a pinch I can maybe find one or two that might interest me mildly.
I don't expect to find much of interest in the ladies section. The non-gendered mags are pretty few, and it doesn't really matter to me that I don't give a shit about interior decoration or design or antiques. What gets to me is the message the men's section broadcasts to me.
"This is what interests men. If none…
aardvarchaeology | September 27, 2010
Watched most of the 1984 animated Miyazaki feature film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on DVD. Like others of his I've seen before, it's visually stunning and has a pretty pointless story.
Sat outdoors and read, probably for the last time this year barring trips south.
Went to a friend's birthday party, helped cook.
Watched Inception on the big screen. Good movie!
Played my twelfth game of Agricola and managed to win for the first time.
And you, Dear Reader?
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2010
September unexpectedly turned warm and sunny. I'm a little under the weather and so can't do anything very energetic. But reading a review copy of a new geology book for the blog in my yard, in the sun, with my dressing gown down around my midriff isn't too bad.
Photo by Junior.
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2010Immediately after the Swedish election the SD anti-immigration party made a major proclamation advocating policies copied from 1930s Germany - pertaining to the public funding of the arts.
Since the end of the war, the driver of a car is no longer known as an Autoführer, "car driver" in German. He's an Autofahrer, a "car rider". Other words have proved impossible to rehabilitate. A prominent one is völkisch, meaning "national", "ethnic", in some situations "folksy". The Nazis loved folksy culture, music with a lot of tuba and Glockenspiel, traditional songs, leather shorts, hats decorated…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2010Sweden held a general election yesterday, and it did not go the way myself and other lefties would have liked. Parliament has 349 seats, and 175 is thus a majority. Before the election, the various right-wing and centrist parties held 178 seats. Now they hold 192. But the conservative voters have not only become relatively more numerous: they have also diversified in their sympathies, propelling the brown fringe of the right-wing block into Parliament in the shape of a new populist anti-immigration party, the Swedish Democrats.
The Swedish conservatives are basically like the US Democrats.…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2010
Here's a funny find. My buddy Tobias Bondesson sent me these pics of a gneiss or granite object he's found, measuring 30 by 28 mm in diameter and 20 mm high. The find spot is near Lee church in northern Jutland (the current stone structure there goes back to shortly after AD 1100), and the metal detector finds go back at least to the 8th century. What do you think it is?
As Tobias points out, the shape and dimensions are exactly what you'd expect from a Viking Period gaming piece. But it's the wrong material. Those are almost exclusively made of bone, antler or horse teeth.
I have an idea…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2010I'll be travelling a lot in October and November and giving some talks. Aard readers in the afflicted cities, drop me a line and maybe we can meet up!
16-18 Oct, TAM London.
29-31 Oct, Oslo, Kritisk Masse: speaking about Thor Heyerdahl and other Scandy pseudoarchaeologists.
4 Nov, Uppsala: speaking about pseudoarchaeology.
14 Nov, Norrköping: speaking about the Late Iron Age elite in the area.
29 Nov - 1 Dec Birmingham: Viking workshop.
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2010A week ago, the Swedish Research Council's expert panel for the investigation of suspected science fraud delivered its findings regarding Suchitra Holgersson, professor of transplantation biology in the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. The panel finds Holgersson, who joined the Academy two years ago, guilty of severe science fraud in several cases where she has fabricated data (published i.a. in the Blood journal) and distorted results, and also in that she has forged documents in attempts to mislead the expert panel itself during the investigation.
Professor Holgersson's…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2010The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival lives on without a hitch thanks to Afarensis, its new editor!
The one hundred and first instalment is on-line at Sapien Games. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Let me remind you, though, that "sapiens" is not a plural.
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2010I'm giving a talk at the Stockholm County Museum in Sickla, Saturday at two o'clock, as part of a day seminar. The subject will be my on-going research into Bronze Age sacrificial sites, where I collaborate with the museum on fieldwork. Aard readers are welcome: just tell the organisers that I'm your estranged dad. And do say hi to me!
I'm a little nervous, though, as I've found out that I'm on immediately after a talk by my old coursemate Dr. Susanne Thedéen, a Bronze Age specialist, who is going to talk about pretty much the same theme! I try to console myself with the fact that she gave…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2010J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his three main books in the order their contents happen in his fantasy world. But they weren't published in that order. Young Tolkien writes the various component works of The Silmarillion, middle-aged Tolkien writes and publishes The Hobbit, old Tolkien writes and publishes The Lord of the Rings, then his son Christopher and Guy Gavriel Kay posthumously edit and publish The Silmarillion.
This means that the original readers of The Hobbit and LotR had no idea what Tolkien meant when he alluded to his unpublished mythology in those books. In fact, Tolkien doesn't seem to…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2010We interrupt this transmission for a piece of Christian chronology. Did you know that the Epistles of Saint Paul are the oldest writings in the New Testament? Did you know that Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, was written just about the time of Paul's execution in AD 64/65? Though Mark had worked as a secretary to Saint Peter who was an original Apostle, none of the authors of the New Testament ever met Jesus of Nazareth.
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2010
Apples in Stereo mastermind Robert Schneider demonstrates his latest technical combo: a vintage 80s synthesizer hooked up to a recently released EEG game controller, which allows him to change the pitch of the synth's output with his thoughts.
I particularly like the non-glitzy surroundings. The guy is sitting in shorts and t-shirt on a beat-up couch, unshaven and with his hair poking out in all directions, looking like a stoner and showing off his bizarre invention. It's very far from the Kraftwerk esthetic, yet some of the tech is decades later than Kraftwerk's.
Check out the latest Apples…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2010Through my reading I was reminded of two Scandinavian early-12th century queens whose careers are pretty amazing. Though originally probably unrelated, they became kin by marriage in several ways.
~1085. Margareta Ingesdotter born, daughter of King Inge I of Sweden. (Birth year unrecorded.)
~1100. Ulvhild HÃ¥konsdotter born, daughter of the Norwegian nobleman HÃ¥kon Finnsson of the Thjotta family. (Birth year likewise unrecorded.)
1101. As part of a peace agreement between the Kings of Sweden and Norway, Margareta marries King Magnus III "Barefoot" Olavsson of Norway. Thus her cognomen…