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 | August 16, 2010When was the last time you read H.P. Lovecraft's 1921 story "The Outsider"? Have you ever? Let me tell you, it's a rare dark pleasure.
Written when Lovecraft was 31, the story is one of the high points of his early work when the influences of Poe and Dunsany were still strongly in evidence. It is made particularly interesting by the autobiographical sub-text under the overt horrific surface. Lovecraft was a lonely child, brought up by elderly relatives and reading voraciously in his grandfather's library of 18th and early-19th century books. After years of solitary introspection, he then…
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2010The 99th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at A Very Remote Period Indeed on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Julien, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 15 September. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2010I used to play a lot of computer games, and 12-y-o Junior loves them. His gaming experience is of course different from mine back in the day, not only because the games look much better now, but also because of on-line interactivity. There are a couple of developments that surprise me a great deal.
One is the Let's Play film clip. These are clips on video sharing sites where someone plays a computer game while commenting on it, and they're really popular with kids. You don't have to be extremely good at the game or record clips of hidden or hard-to-reach areas. You don't have to say anything…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2010The Public Library of Science publishes a number of peer-reviewed Open Access research journals, most of which specialise in some specific field within the natural sciences. But PLoS ONE has a much wider remit within the sciences. When it first opened a few years ago, I looked for archaeology in it and was disappointed. But now you get 121 hits when you search the journal for "archaeology archeology". This means that PLoS One might be a potential publication venue for research in my discipline.
So, what sort of archaeology does PLoS One publish? Well, just because a paper mentions the word…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2010There's ScienceBlogs and recently we got Scientopia. And now I discover Field of Science, another good science blogging community, which has apparently been up for a year and a half though I've managed to miss it. Check it out!
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2010In the podcast liner notes to his new album (starting at 14:21), George Hrab talks to Milton Mermikidis for a space about how neither of them does any heavier drugs than caffeine. I realised that in close to five years of blogging, I've never talked specifically about my own drug abstinence, though I've mentioned a few times that I'm tee-total. So I thought I might say a few words on the subject.
The culturally accepted heavy drug in Sweden is alcohol, which is strongly mind-altering if used in a sufficient dose and lethal if overdosed. Drinking is so common here that if you don't, then it…
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2010Shortly after my buddy Jeff Medkeff died in 2008, a joint book review of ours was published in Skeptic Magazine. Here we criticised a book by Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, two aeronautics engineers, where they claimed that a 7th century BC cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia described an asteroid striking the Austrian Alps in 3123 BC. Their argument was in our opinion extremely speculative or pseudoscientific, regardless of whether you saw it from an astronomical, geological or archaeological point of view.
Bond & Hempsell self-published their book. But to my surprise, the summer issue of…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2010
And here's star philologist and religion scholar Ola Wikander with a guest lesson in Akkadian.
The word of the day is nuḫatimmu. It means "a cook" in Akkadian (or sometimes "a baker"). Maybe something to interest Gordon Ramsay? And wouldn't it be great if there was an Akkadian version of the TV show MasterChef, named Rab Nuḫatimmê? Taken literally, that term means "top cook", "best cook", but it was also used in a slightly different context way back when. In 586 BC, when Jerusalem had surrendered to Babylonian invaders, the victors sacked the city under the command of a certain…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2010
I met this nice guy at the gaming convention this last weekend. Anders Larsson is a talented artist and graphic designer who works in paint and pixels. Check out his site!
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2010The ninety-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Prancing Papio. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
The next vacant hosting slot is on 15 September. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2010
Fornvännen's winter issue (2009:4) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!
Anna-Sara Noge looks at burnt mounds, Bronze Age heaps of fire-cracked stone, with bones in them, just like I once did for my first academic paper. But unlike me she has actual osteological data showing that there are human bones there!
Ny Björn Gustafsson looks at Viking Period bellows shields, pottery or stone barriers that kept a metalworker's bellows from catching fire from the heat of the furnace.
Mathias Bäck presents new evidence for Viking Period settlement outside Birka'…
aardvarchaeology | August 3, 2010I've found out about the spooky cartoon show my daughter watches that I wondered about, the one where one character looks just like Riff-raff in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's Die Schule der kleinen Vampire / School for Vampires, a co-production among Germany, Italy and Luxemburg. The Riff-raff look-alike is named Nestor (Lenny in the English version). Explains the show's web site,
Nestor is the heart and soul of the school.
Driver, cook, janitor, secretary, guide, nurse - there is nothing that Nestor can't do.
And he is the only one at the school who was not born a vampire, but was…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2010There's a new science blogging network, Scientopia, it's full of ex-SciBlings and other good bloggers, and it has no ads! Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science is there, as is Grrlscientist, Krys also of Anthro in Practice, the Voltage Gate, Drugmonkey, Christina Pikas, Mark of Good Math/ Bad Math, the Questionable Authority, Scicurious formerly of Neurotopia, Zuska, PAL MD and others. The site is open to applications from new bloggers.
Good luck, guys! Anybody on Scientopia who has written something about archaeology and/or skepticism, and who'd like a share of my traffic, just…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2010Swedish author, dramatist, director, comedian etc. Hans Alfredson once said that the brain is an organ with which we think (tänker) that we think. The Swedish word used here does not mean "believe": it means "cogitate". So, since my teens I've read this as a lovely materialist aphorism about how everything that goes on in our heads is actually just simulated in wetware. Our brains help us compute the illusion of cogitation.
Now I find that Alfredson was actually translating something that Ambrose Bierce said in his Devil's Dictionary (1911): "Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2010The 98th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at The Prancing Papio on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Ray, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 15 September. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2010I spent Friday and Saturday with Junior at a small gaming convention in Katrineholm, a town two hours' drive from my home. (I stayed nearby in May of last year with my wife.) With less than 100 participants, not all of whom were there at the same time, it was a friendly and welcoming con where it felt like our presence made a difference. Here's what I played:
Descent, a dungeon game very reminiscent of 70s Dung & Drag when everything was still combat-centric and no role-playing asked for. Fun game though the underground catacombs full of magically appearing monsters of course have no…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2010In the early 15th century, Imperial Chinese mariners under the eunuch admiral Zheng He made great voyages of discovery in enormous ships. Then the Hongxi Emperor decided that what they had found on far shores was underwhelming, the whole fleet was scuppered and the Chinese paid no further attention to seafaring. In 2007 I discussed a silly story about alleged descendants of Zheng He's non-eunuch crew in Kenya who had suddenly remembered their Chinese heritage, which was convenient since the Chinese were interested in local mining rights.
Now the Guardian has news about the Kenya - Zheng He -…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2010
I got the Aldiko e-book reader for my Android phone the other day - for free over the net. It came with two apparently random free books in epub format: H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Sun Tzu's Art of War. And whenever I like I can get more books for free over the net from within the e-reader: either old ones whose copyright has expired, or newly written ones with a Creative Commons licence. Austen, Doyle, Lovecraft, Twain, you name it! I can also buy copyrighted e-books and put them on my phone. The cost works out to about the same as if I mail-order a used paperback from the UK, the…