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 6, 2010
My house. It's L-shaped; of its six walls, only these two lack windows.
In January, a house near ours caught fire in the middle of the night and was pretty much burned out. A malfunctioning electrical blanket on a couch in the living room was the cause. Nobody got hurt. But it was scary, because Boat Hill is all kedjehus, "chain houses", separate nearly identical brick buildings with narrow roofed spaces between them, forming contiguous blocks. The house that burned was in the block next to ours, a stone's throw away.
An identical house seen from the same perspective.
This morning they…
aardvarchaeology | July 5, 2010The 96th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Testimony of the Spade on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Magnus, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 21 July. 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 5, 2010
The recently found Norwegian 5th century runestone of Hogganvik carries a memorial inscription and so might be expected to have stood on or near a grave. My buddy Frans-Arne Stylegar has excavated the site and sadly found no preserved burial, but he did find the original stone setting of the monument. This is a rare kind of knowledge, as many runestones have been moved around through the centuries. Now the runestone stands again, the site has been cleaned up, and the public is free to come see the most important early runic document to surface in many decades.
Photograph by Frans-Arne…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2010My buddy Micke and his Japanese college room mate:
"I'm Ken Nakamura. Ken means 'heresy'!"
"Really? That's kind of... odd."
"Yes! It means 'HERESY'! Rike when you are never sick!"
"Ahaaa, you mean 'healthy'..."
"Yes! Correct! What does your name mean?"
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2010
Image by Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre.
Archaeology is a famously ghoulish pursuit whose practitioners are always on the look-out for dead bodies to gloat over. If we can't find a grave, then at least we'll try to get hold of animal bones from kitchen middens and sacrificial deposits. I've seen desperate Mesolithic researchers cackle with funereal glee over the toe bones of long-dead seals. Osteologists are of course the worst necrophiliacs of the lot. But nobody's immune. There's an anecdote going around about my old favourite teacher, where he lifts a pelvis out of a Middle Neolithic…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2010
Reiner Knizia is one of the board-gaming world's greatest celebrities, famous for a long string of hit games. According to the members of Boardgamegeek.com, the best of Knizia's games is Tigris & Euphrates (1997), which is #11 on the site's thousands-strong ranking list. I can't really compare against other Knizia games, but I do know that it's one of my favourites.
As you may imagine, I was very happy the other day when I discovered that Boardgamegeek.com actually offers on-line T&E for free, played against real people! The rules are available in many languages on BGG. Let's have…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2010Californian Roy Zimmerman is a satirical singer in the vein of Tom Lehrer (who endorses him). He recently released his seventh solo album, Real American, and I'm happy to say that Zimmerman has lost none of the brilliance us fans have come to expect.
The disc has 13 tracks of which 3 are spoken political comedy. My favourite is the live-recorded boogie tune "Socialist!", which recalls "I'll Pull Out" from Zimmerman's previous album. It's sung in the voice of a hillbilly Republican who sneers at all the socialists in the audience. They've driven to the gig on public streets, gone to public…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2010Jan Zalasiewicz is a geologist active at the University of Leicester. His 2008 book The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? is an interesting read even though the title does not correspond very well to the contents. Zalasiewicz does answer the question about what legacy humans will leave in the rocks. But on their own, these answers would only provide material for a magazine article. The bulk of the book is instead an introduction to geology which allows the neophyte to understand what will happen to the remains of today's world as millions of years pass.
Having no…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2010The ninety-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
The next vacant hosting slot is already on 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 | June 23, 2010Friendly correspondent Peter Woods is working with chapes or ferrules, that is, metal mounts from the ends of knife sheaths or sword scabbards. He has sent me lovely images of these things in the hope that Aard's readers might be able to suggest parallels. Neither of the finds has any solid provenance, and though I believe them to be from north-west Europe and date from the 11th/12th centuries, I've never seen anything quite like them in my work with Scandinavian small finds. Being fragile yet excellently preserved, they're almost certainly grave finds, not metal detector finds from plough…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2010Using the @johndoe method to communicate over Twitter is a really stupid way to use the medium. Aren''t people aware that all their followers receive those tweets just as if they were normal ones? And aren't they aware that many of their followers will thus receive only half of a usually pretty pointless chat conversation? It's as if the newsreader on TV left his mike on and broadcast his lines in a water-cooler conversation about sports.
I think this behaviour is amazingly stupid. If I subscribe to a Twitter feed and discover that it's full of banal lines from one-on-one conversations, I…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2010
For me, the main drawback of switching to an Android phone was not having a physical keyboard any more. Typing on the touch screen keyboard is infuriatingly slow and error-prone, even if you use the word-suggestion feature. (It isn't very smart, offering word suggestions not in order of how frequent each word is in everyday text, but in alphabetical order.)
But now it seems I've found the solution, that allows me to type fast in English and a few other large languages. Swype is an input method where you write each word by drawing a continuous line on the soft keyboard from key to key. When…
aardvarchaeology | June 21, 2010
Summer temp journalists are here again. Today, Swedish Broadcasting's radio news ran a really silly piece about invasive species. It made two main points: a new foreign species of plant or animal is discovered every month in Sweden, and some of them are poisonous. It's basically a case of botanical xenophobia. The journalist also made the astonishing claim that these poisonous species pose a threat to the country's biodiversity!
Poisonous plants and venomous animals are rare in Sweden, whose flora and fauna are quite poor because of the cold climate. On the other hand they are common in rich…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2010There's not much detail available yet about the event, but I for one have written an Oslo trip onto my schedule for the last weekend in October. See you there!
WWW: www.kritiskmasse.no
Facebook: www.facebook.com/kritiskmasse
Twitter: twitter.com/kritiskmasse
[More blog entries about skepticism, Norway; skepticism, Norge.]
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2010The 95th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Afarensis on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to the hominid, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 7 July. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2010A thought about normal sexual behaviour. "Normal", in the statistical sense, has nothing to do with "healthy" or "morally sound". It simply means "the most common range of values in a variable". Now, across all of child-bearing age humanity, what is the normal attitude to getting sexually penetrated? Is it yes please or no thanks?
In the patriarchal tradition, getting penetrated hardly even counts as sexual activity. It's just acceptance: not thrashing about, kicking at balls or running away when somebody with an erect penis shows up. Being sexually active, in this view, means putting your…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2010
One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward the end of the 10th century. It's got the lines "There's thyme in it, said Toki in a cracked voice" and "He's done pissing now", and a duel that ends in a man's severed head landing in a tub of mead. (You can see why Bengtsson is one of my favourite writers.)
I recently complained about Skalk running…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2010
I spent Tuesday in the charming company of James Randi and his assistant, journalist Brandon Thorp. Myself and P.J. RÃ¥smark had taken it upon ourselves to act as native guides and gophers for Randi during his days in Stockholm at the invitation of the Swedish Skeptics. So in the morning we went cane shopping together, though none of the canes we found were sufficiently antique-looking for our guest, and he seemed to manage effortlessly without one. And then we checked out the Vasa 17th century warship museum, since this is Stockholm's one truly unique attraction as far as I'm aware. (You'll…