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 | May 23, 2010
The 93rd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at The Prancing Papio on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Raymond, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 23 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2010
Chore in order to achieve future fun: my wife called in a stump grinder a few days ago and had the remains of a thuja in one of our planting beds disintegrated. I emptied the crater of wood chips (harrisian single-context fieldwork methodology, you know) and she planted a magnolia on the edge.
Outdoors Chinese dinner party with good food and animated incomprehensible conversation. One guest, a retired Peking opera singer, had made excellent wonton soup where the meat stuffing was mixed with a common garden weed, Shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris, Sw. lomme). Nice cabbagy taste, and…
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2010
Wednesday was another day guest-digging at one of Mattias Pettersson & Roger Wikell's sites in the Tyresta woods, this one in the huge denuded area of the great forest fire. Otherworldly scenery! It's the unusually high site discussed here three years ago by Mattias. And since we're dealing with seal hunters in an area with swift shoreline displacement, it's in all likelihood the oldest of the lot: 10 000 years, give or take half a millennium. It's so old that it's pre-stone-axe. The characteristic greenstone flakes left over from the making of Mesolithic axes don't go as high as this.…
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2010The Sb Overlordz have reinstated the Ask a ScienceBlogger feature. Now, Dear Reader, you already ask me a lot of questions in comments here on Aard. But to give your archaeology questions (and possible my replies) a bit more exposure, you might post your question as a comment on the blog entry linked to above, or email it to editorial@scienceblogs.com.
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2010
The increasing number of podcasts I subscribe to has tended to crowd music out a bit from my earbuds in recent months. But I do have some good albums to recommend. Here's what's on my smartphone right now.
Fleet Foxes. Fleet Foxes. 2008. Folky guitars and complex vocal harmonies.
Heavy Blinkers. Better Weather. 2002. Bacharach-obsessed orchestral pop.
Jet. Shaka Rock. 2009. It rocks. And shakes.
MGMT. Congratulations. 2010. Psychedelic New Wave.
Midlake. The Courage of Others. 2010. More folky guitars and complex vocal harmonies.
I've run similar lists before in 2008 and 2009.
Then there's…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2010
Roger Wikell, Kenneth Ihrestam and Sven-Gunnar Broström during a recent documentation session with oblique lighting in Småland. Photograph by Emelie Svenman.
Many important categories of archaeological site are never discovered by academic archaeologists. In the case of wetland sacrifices, it's simply because nobody's figured out a method to look for them. We just have to sit around waiting for decades until one turns up in the course of some unrelated activity. But in most cases, our problem is actually that we aren't good enough at the methods that exist, simply because we don't spend…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2010Archaeology Magazine's May/June issue (63:3) has a good long feature by Jarrett A. Lobell & Samir S. Patel on North European bog bodies including some new finds: Lower Saxony in 2000, the Hebrides in 2001 (you may have heard about the weird re-interred bog bodies found under a Bronze Age house) and Ireland in 2003. One of the bogged-down Irishmen was found with a bit of metalwork, which is to my knowledge unique.
The piece that really caught my interest though was Eric A. Powell's critical appraisal of a recent speculative History Channel program on the 19th century fake rune-stone from…
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2010
My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to the whole thing with such gusto. On Thursday evening, for instance, he was play-testing a convoluted unpublished sci-fi board game with some guys in their 20s and 30s while I sat at another table some ways off and played simpler games with my friend Hans and others. Dad proud.
Everybody at the convention was uncommonly friendly and open, as gamers often are. Most of us looked pretty geeky, but not…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2010The ninety-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Raymond at The Prancing Papio. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is already on 9 June. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2010Facebook has turned up security a notch and effectively locked me out when I'm on the road.
I have hundreds of Fb contacts that I don't actually know and wouldn't recognise if I met them in the street. Mention their names to me and they ring no bell. This is partly because of this blog, partly because skeptics around the world like to have exotic Scandy contacts. Now, Facebook notes that somebody's trying to log onto my account from an unfamiliar location. Imagine what happens when it starts to show me pictures of random people from my contact list, with a selection of seven names each to…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2010
Yesterday I did another hour with my metal detector in the disused potato patch where I found a 17th century coin in September 2008. No luck really this time: the only coin I found dates from 1973 and the rest of the stuff wasn't much older than that. But I did make one unusual find: a nickel-silver soup spoon from about AD 1900.
It's not an unusual kind of cutlery. The design, known as Gammal Fransk, "Old French", is a perennial classic. But you rarely find complete pieces of cutlery in tilled soil. It probably ended up on the plot with garbage after cultivation ceased.
Nickel silver, by…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2010Get this. Perennial provocateur artist Lars Vilks lectures about free speech at the University of Uppsala just an hour's ride from my home -- and is attacked by audience members chanting about Islam!
It's time for a re-run of my own likeness of Mohammed from February '06.
This is a picture I just drew of a guy named Mohammed. Millions of Mohammeds have lived and still live on Earth. In order not to get harassed by religious bigots, I'm not telling you which one of them I have made a likeness of. (Historically, a lot of artists greater even than me have had no such qualms.)
But I'd like to…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2010Escape Pod episode #235 has been sitting on my smartphone since January because of its beautiful writing and archaeological theme. Jay Lake's 2009 story "On the Human Plan" is told in a gentleman-rogue style reminiscent of Leiber and Vance, and is set in a far future Dying Earth environment with ambient magic-level tech that is also very Vancian. Here's a choice snippet for all you diggers:
Anyone with a bit of talent and the right set of bones to throw can foretell the future. It is written in fat-bellied red across every morning sky. But to aftertell the past, that is another trick entirely…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2010
Last year part of my daughter's schoolyard was landscaped and fitted with new entertainments. The landscapers also built a stone circle right next to her classroom. (I attended that school myself in 1982-85. The building in the background was the council dentistry clinic where I was fitted with braces.)
Structures like these are known as domarringar, "judge circles", in Swedish archaeology. They're Early Iron Age grave superstructures dating from c. 500 BC to AD 500, each usually with a cremation urn buried somewhere inside the circle. The term "judge circle" comes from recent folklore (or…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2010
Rock art in southern Scandinavia generally dates from the Bronze Age and depicts boats, long war canoes with lots of oarsmen. Here are some recently found ship panels at Casimirsborg in northern Småland, the new big dot on the country's rock-art map.
Although rock art is some of the most intriguing source material Bronze Age people left behind, we have a perennial problem tying it into its wider societal context and understanding it. There are few examples of rock-art motifs repeated on bronze artefacts, and few examples of rock-art located in or near other kinds of Bronze Age remains such…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2010I've been staying away from Twitter for fear that it would eat my life. But I guess I have at least to try it. So, Dear Reader, feel free to follow my tweets! And tell me who I should follow. Ideally, I want people who tweet something really witty like every second day and who shut up when they have nothing worthwhile to say.
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2010The 92nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Sam, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 9 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2010Information is easier to move than matter. A good way to travel between the stars would be if you had a matter scanner at one end, an instant information transmitter, and a matter assembler at the other end. Then you could fax yourself across the galaxy. James Patrick Kelly's award-winning 1995 story "Think Like A Dinosaur" revolves around this idea. More specifically, it's about what happens to your original once you've assembled a copy somewhere else.
I'm re-reading Clifford Simak's 1963 novel Way Station for the first time since I was a boy. To my surprise I find in ch. 12 that he's got…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2010
The dams in River Eskilstunaån at Hyndevad regulate the water level in Lake Hjälmaren. Around 1880 when they were built, and the lake lowered, the river bed was temporarily laid dry. A major prehistoric sacrificial site was discovered, and luckily geologist Otto Gumaelius was there to document it. (He used the finds to date events in the watershed's recent quaternary geology.) The landscape has since been thoroughly messed up at Hyndevad, but still I went there yesterday to get a feeling for the place. I wish I had the resources to lay a few lakes and river stretches dry.
[More blog…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2010The local cub scouts had asked me to accompany them on a forest walk to give them some culture and history. And so I guided them in the evening sun to the singing of blackbirds along the wooded southern shore of the Baggensstäket narrows. History is thick there.
Early and Late Modern sea-lane tavern.
Napoleonic era small fort.
20th century cemetery.
Early Modern customs station.
Viking Period cemetery.
1719 battlefield.
1905 memorial celebrating the 1719 debatable victory.
Early and Late Modern cemetery.
And all the while across the water, Boo Manor with more Viking Period burials, a rune…