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 | July 25, 2010
The other night my wife suddenly hummed a familiar melody line. After some mental searching I identified it as a slightly modified version of French Canadian synth-poppers Trans-X's 1983 hit "Living on Video" that I haven't heard in 20 years or more. But my wife said, "No, it's this Robyn song I heard on a Letterman clip on YouTube". That turned out to be Robyn's 2006 treatment of the Teddybears' 2004 song "Cobrastyle", where she's backed by the Teddybears. The 2006 version introduces the Trans-X line which is not present in the 2004 original. Now I wonder, have Robyn and/or the Teddybears…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2010
Spent 5.5 hours on site in Wales today and 7 hours by car, train and plane to get from there to Skavsta airport. I've got another couple of hours by bus and train before I'm home. The trains I rode in the UK were on time but often did not leave from the platforms indicated by the online trip planner.
No big news on site today. I did some topless deturfing in the sun and taught a bright student to use a metal detector. Funny how much wordless knowledge you accumulate and spell out only when teaching. "Grab clod, wave over dish, listen, divide clod, wave, listen, toss quiet half, repeat. Close…
aardvarchaeology | July 22, 2010
The Department of History and Archaeology in Chester is moving from their lovely but run-down Georgian building at the north city gate to the main campus. So I spent most of today helping with the move: shifting finds from a Tudor manor site at Stokenham in Devon and excavation gear. On our way to the excavation site we then stopped to check out the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, an amazing 195-year-old piece of hydraulic engineering where a transportation canal has been made to cross a river 38 metres above its surface. The afternoon's fieldwork was interrupted and finally cut short by torrential…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2010
Professor Nancy Edwards and associates take stock of the western trench at the end of the day's work.
Today offered much better weather, but due to permit trouble very little metal detecting. Instead I've been "cleaning" with the students, which basically means slow removal of soil using a trowel and a brush. I found a large piece of glazed Buckley ware (19th century), a piece of clay-pipe stem, some quartz and not much more. Somebody found a piece of Roman black burnished pottery that had been partly refashioned into a crude spindlewhorl. But we're still on top of the barrow's capping slate…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2010The ninety-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Zenobia. 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 | July 20, 2010
I'm in north-east Wales for a few days' work on a Universities of Chester and Bangor dig. We've had a rainy day, which meant that we couldn't work effectively for very long. But I did some metal detecting, finding lead spatters that may have to do with 18th century repairs to the 9th century Pillar of Eliseg, and two 20th century coins, and of course a few aluminium ring-pulls. And I took part in de-turfing and trowel cleaning on the flanks of the barrow and the flat field around it. The weather forecast for the next few days looks somewhat more favourable.
Meanwhile, here at Sb, the crisis…
aardvarchaeology | July 19, 2010Over the past 4½ years I've made a habit of calling out on my blog whenever I've planned trips abroad, in the hope of meeting up with readers. As far as I can remember, the only times when this has actually led to any meetings were two years ago when I went to a) a science blogging conference, b) a skeptics' conference. Those encounters would have taken place regardless of whether I'd shouted about my trips here beforehand or not.
So now I'm taking the opposite approach. Instead of first deciding to go somewhere for a non-blog-related reason and then hoping to meet readers there, I've used…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2010The 97th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Zenobia: Empress of the East on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Judith, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 18 August. 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 16, 2010I've been fishing, swimming and walking the shoreline around my mom's summer house for almost 30 years, and so I have a pretty good idea of what kinds of fish there are out there. Most of them I have only seen during fishing with nets, so it's clear that the visible sample of fish species depends on your methods. I have never seen an eel.
Another thing I have hardly ever done around my mom's summer place is snorkeling. But during the past week, seeing as it's an unusually warm summer with unusually clear water, I've taken up that pastime. Of course, it's not anything like the coral reefs of…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2010
Motala in Ãstergötland has been recognised in recent years as one of the richest Mesolithic sites in Scandinavia north of the current and former Danish provinces. Excavations in waterlogged sediment along River Motala ström have produced great numbers of bone and wood objects that have rarely been preserved elsewhere. Most are harpoon and leister points, but now a bone dildo (a boner?) has joined the growing collection. Measuring twelve by two centimetres, its size is perhaps not very impressive, and there are many non-dildoish uses for which it may have been intended. But without doubt…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2010Archaeology Magazine's July/August issue (#63:4) has a lot of Old World articles which made it particularly interesting to me. We get Nabataean mausolea in Arabia, Europid Bronze Age mummies in Xinjiang, the Neanderthal genome, Greek temples in southern Italy, and a great feature on new developments in the urban archaeology of Medieval Jewry in France and Germany. As it turns out, Medieval Jews are to some degree archaeologically distinct from their Christian neighbours. But more importantly, their culture turns out to be distinct from recent Jewish culture and the Medieval written ideals of…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2010Last summer I battled with wasps: this years it's ants. Small black ones have underground nests in our yard, and they usually don't bother us much. But a hot and dry summer recently inspired them to investigate our house, where they found two things they really like: sugar and water. When we returned from a trip to the archipelago, a busy ant highway stretched from the side door through a bedroom, a corridor, the dining room and into the kitchen, where the main destinations were our candy cupboard and the sink. Thousands of tiny insects.
I bought some insecticide. It looks like pale pink ice-…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2010
The most dedicated man in Swedish fringe archaeology is at it again. I've reported on and off about Bob G. Lind's antics in Scania (1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5), but it's been a while now. I didn't write about the time when he interpreted a dotted line on an old map as an alignment of standing stones that had been removed, nor about his recent statement to the effect that his new discoveries would topple the current Swedish government once he presented them. But now Bob's made the news again and Ystads Allehanda has the story.
Ystad municipality has temporarily cancelled its guided tours of the Ales…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2010
Next week, 20-23 July, I will work on a Universities of Bangor & Chester excavation in north-east Wales headed by Nancy Edwards and my friend Howard Williams. The fieldwork concerns the site of a 9th century memorial cross, the "Pillar of Eliseg", mentioned here in February of last year. Having grown up with the Welsh-inspired fantasy fiction of Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, I'm thrilled to dig in Wales! I mean, the area of the site is named the Vale of Llangollen ("thlan-gottlen"), can you beat that?
Aard readers in the Wrexham/Chester area, give me a shout and maybe we…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2010I had two pages in the May issue of Forskning & Framsteg (Sweden's equivalent av Scientific American) about recent books on the Scandinavian Bronze Age. I was happy to publish there, but not very happy with the rushed chop job the contribution went through without my involvement before it was sent to the printers. So, below the fold is an uncut review in Swedish of the following books:
Det 10. nordiske bronsealdersymposium. Trondheim 5.-8. okt. 2006. Red. Terje Brattli, Trondheim 2009.
Changing landscapes and persistent places. An exploration of the Bjäre peninsula. Jenny Nord. Lund…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2010
In the past few days I have received four e-mails from Adam Bly, founder and proprietor of Seed Media Group and Scienceblogs. OK, they were group mail sent to all the SciBlings, but four e-mails from him is more than I have received before in 3½ years at Sb. And now Adam has become a SciBling himself, writing at Science is Culture. Head on over and make him feel welcome! I'm going to follow the new blog with keen interest. Folks here have wished for a long time that they knew better what Adam is thinking.
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2010
Like everything else we make and use, gaming pieces form part of the archaeological record. I once had the pleasure of lifting a particularly fine set of 9th century hnefatafl pieces out of the ground. Now I have seen a set of 20th century mah jong pieces go into the ground.
The site of the burnt and demolished house near mine is now clean and ready for the new building planned there. But, as has often been observed, two important reasons that the archaeological record contains more small objects than large ones are that the larger ones are easier to find when you lose them and they get in…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2010I reacted to the news about the Pepsiblog debacle with a cynical smirk and a sinking feeling in my stomach. Though I am interested in health-related and environmental issues, they are not at the forefront of my blogging or my professional life. Of course it hurts the Sb brand and Sb's journalistic credibility when the Overlords sell centre-column space to an agribusiness junk-food multinational. PepsiCo would be controversial among the SciBlings even if they just advertised in the sidebar. But to someone writing mainly about Scandy archaeology, skepticism, books and music, it's not such a big…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2010The ninety-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
The next vacant hosting slot is already on 4 August 21 July. 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 | July 7, 2010
A metal detector is very nice, particularly when there isn't a lot of aluminium in the ground. Archaeology cannot do without it. But what I really want now is a holographic radar instrument. Still in the prototype stage, this technology is being developed by Tim Bechtel of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and colleagues, who primarily have land-mine removal in mind. It will image underground metal objects in 3D. Gimme gimme gimme!
And oh, how I hope that my country's legislators will allow a responsible metal-detector hobby to develop here before holographic radar…