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 | September 8, 2010
At my wife's suggestion, I quit work 1½ hour early today and cycled with her and the kids into the woods to pick mushrooms. Lovely sunny afternoon, and I can report that the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trehörningen are rich in boletes right now. Here are the species we got:
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
Orange Birch Bolete, Tegelsopp, Leccinum versepelle
Copper brittlegill, Tegelkremla, Russula decolorans
Chanterelle, Kantarell, Cantharellus cibarius
FÃ¥rticka, Albatrellus ovinus
[More about mushrooms; svamp.]
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2010
To my horror, Ystads Allehanda reports that Wladyslaw Duczko has joined Nils-Axel Mörner on a project to excavate the famous Ales stenar stone ship.
Why does this pain me? Because while (as I have reported here before) geologist Mörner and his collaborator homeopath Bob G. Lind are Swedish archaeology's most notorious cranks, Duczko is not. He is a respected senior archaeologist and known as an authority on Slavic silver jewellery of the Viking Period.
If I had heard that Duczko was going to excavate Ales stenar, I would have said "Well done, Wladde, I'm looking forward to seeing your…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2010
Had breakfast guests: a beautifully pregnant old friend and our old boss/buddy came at ten and I cooked us all a full English. Everybody who's into the Gustavian / Georgian era and reads Scandy, read Kristina Ekero Eriksson's new popular biography of Märta Helena Reenstierna, the Lady of Ãrsta! I read it in manuscript, and I loved it.
Played Lost Cities against my wife who is getting worrisomely good at it, and Puerto Rico and Space Alert against gamer buddies. The latter game is highly unusual. It's a cooperation game played against the clock, with a twist I've never seen before: it…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2010There's a parliamentary election in Sweden on the 19th, and everybody's hoping that the country's little right-wing populist party won't get over the 4% threshold needed to grab any seats. The "Swedish Democrat" party mainly offers a We Hate Foreigners ticket, with some Law & Order and Respect Your Elders thrown in to attract voters in the early stages of Alzheimer's.
The SD is generally despised among mainstream political parties and the media. So I was surprised but entertained when I found the ailing Swedish Church trying to smear the Swedish Humanist Association by means of a far-…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2010[More about archaeology, metaldetecting; arkeologi, metallsökare, Uppsala.]
The view from my second investigation area. The great barrows were erected about AD 600.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday metal-detecting for my buddy John Ljungkvist on some of the most storied soil in Sweden: Old Uppsala. Archaeology and early historical sources unanimously point this village out as one of the Lake Mälaren region's most important power centres from shortly before AD 600 until about 1250, when it was superseded by the nearby town of (New) Uppsala. My Ãstergötland project in 2004-2009 largely aimed…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2010Archaeological chronology aims to answer the question "When did this or that event happen?". This question can usually be re-phrased as "When was this or that thing made?", where the thing under study may be anything from a bead up to the Great Wall of China.
Most dating evidence is based upon similarity: people are almost incapable of doing anything in exactly the same way for any long stretch of time, and when they try to return to an old way of doing something, they never get all the details right. Such similarities (again on all scales of evidence) are dealt with in a more or less…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2010
Grötkräkla, "porridge sceptre"
The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival first opened its gaudy tent flap almost four years ago, in October 2006. Since then, 50 blogs have hosted it, 32 of which are still active. The record for most 4SH hostings is shared by Afarensis and Remote Central, both of which have hosted seven carnivals. Well done, everybody!
Here are the submissions for the 100th instalment:
Krys at Anthropology in Practice discusses the Piltdown hoax.
Dan at Neuroanthropology writes about linguistic relativism, the idea that our language forms our world rather than the other way…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2010My debate piece in Antiquity has proved popular (many people have asked me to send it over, and now I've received the journal's permission to place the paper on-line for free in PDF format) and controversial (several have offered criticism in comments here). Mainly replies seem inspired by the two paragraphs I quoted from the article in my blog entry. Both deal with my opinion that archaeology needs to be fun and popular, because boring archaeology that interests few people is effectively worthless. In the following I will reply to the most interesting comments. To see if I've sneakily…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2010
The centre piece of St. Mary's square/park in Stockholm is a brass sculpture group in a fountain, sculpted by Anders Wissler and put in place in 1903. It depicts the god Thor at the moment when he's fished the Midgard serpent up to the ocean surface and prepares to whack it in the head with his hammer. The serpent looks like a standard-issue Medieval dragon. But to either side of it are smaller lizard-like beasts that are clearly modelled after late-19th century palaeontology's ideas about dinosaurs. One is a plesiosaur. The other one, I don't know, but it's got a cylindrical snout,…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2010
[More about sex,, humour; sex, humor.]
One of the perks of keeping a well-visited blog is that you get to spy on people using search engines. Extreme Tracking keeps a list for me of the latest search terms which have led people to Aard. It turns out that they're always largely porn surfers. My entry about the German locksmith who has four children with his long-lost sister / common-law wife attracts continual interest from people who are probably really disappointed to find nothing prurient there. And there's always the people who mistype "big booty" and end up at my entry about Iron Age…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2010Back in February I posted snippets of an opinion piece I'd been asked to write about the current state and future prospects of Swedish archaeology. Now the thing has appeared on-line in Antiquity (behind a pay wall, but see below), though the journal's autumn issue has not reached subscribers on paper yet.
For you nat-sci types, I should probably explain that Antiquity is my discipline's equivalent of Nature. So, getting to inaugurate a new recurring heading there, "Prospects", is something I'm very proud of.
Archaeology should have a popular/populist slant designed to please tax-payers. We…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2010I've spent three days with my son's class at Ãngsholmen summer camp where the 12-y-os got a chance to reaquaint themselves after the summer and do some fun stuff together. My job, like that of the other three parents who came along, was basically crowd control and security. The camp is on a small U-shaped island, a former base of the coastal artillery, which once defended the Gällnö port narrows on an important shipping lane. There's a sizeable decommissioned underground fort at one end, probably dating from the inter-war years. The kids swam, canoed, sailed Monark Avanti skiffs, did…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2010The 100th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run here at Aard on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to me, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2010Dear Reader, do you come across a lot of ancient blubber concrete in the course of a normal day? I got some exciting news from Mattias Pettersson Tuesday morning regarding his and Roger Wikell's Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve. As Aard's regulars know, Tyresta is a former archipelago that is now wooded highlands due to isostatic land uplift, all full of early post-glacial seal-hunting camps. It's easy to share Mattias's enthusiasm (and I translate):
Does anyone remember the burnt bubbly lumps we found under the hut floor at the 85 m a.s.l. site in Tyresta? Now Sven Isaksson of…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2010Reports Swedish Broadcasting, Dagens Eko:
When two school girls in the 13-16 years age bracket found a lost key ring for their school's teacher break room, they had an idea. They bought simple audio surveillance equipment in a tech store, waited until everyone went home, and installed the bugging gear in the break room.
Their idea was to snoop on a grades conference planned for the following day, thereby to glean information that they might use to improve their grades.
The plan failed, as one of the girls happened to reveal it on Facebook.
Instead of secret information and raised grades, the…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2010
Sunset seen to the NW from the birthday party
Made huntun (wonton) with my wife & kids, "good to eat and fun to make", as the song about cookies that Junior likes goes.
Watched The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with wife & son. It's a mid-quality Terry Gilliam film, better than the dreary Brothers Grimm that preceded it but not on a par with excellent films like Brazil or 12 Monkeys. Dr. P is beautiful though, and I'm sorry I didn't watch it on the big screen.
Made a mix CD for a birthday boy.
Went to birthday party with the kids, though I had gotten the wrong coordinates and…
aardvarchaeology | August 21, 2010
I put together a mix CD today for Simon who's celebrating his 60th birthday. He's the husband of a colleague of mine, and all I really know about him is that he's English, he's a semi-pro musician and he likes Keith Jarrett, Juan Gilberto, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Hermeto Pascoal. So I thought I might share some tunes from the past few years that he may not have heard.
1. Comets on Fire - Hatched Upon the Age
2. Dungen - Mon Amour
3. Fleet Foxes - Your Protector
4. Frank Black - If Your Poison Gets You
5. George Hrab - One Hypnopompic Jerk
6. Maggi, Pierce & E.J. - Snowed In With You…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2010The ninety-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2010For everybody who's in a Lovecraftian mood after that podcast, here's a ghoulish news item. Reports Emma Persson Hennig in Sydsvenskan, and I translate:
Staffanstorp municipality. A woman placing flowers on a grave at Brågarp churchyard suddenly sunk into it when the earth collapsed. One of her legs sunk into the grave and she could not get it free unaided. The accident happened at 17:30, Wednesday evening. As an evening service was being prepared, there were several witnesses. They called for help and the woman was freed.
[...]
The recent heavy raining is believed to be the cause of the…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2010My friends Petra Ossowski Larsson and Lars-Ãke Larsson have synchronised and analysed large chunks of the Belfast dendrochronological data (that were made publically available by court order), and published them on their web site in standard dendro file formats.