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 2, 2016Ulvåsa in Ekebyborna is a manor near Motala with two known major Medieval elite settlement sites. Excavations in 2002 proved that the unfortified Gamlegården site was established before AD 1100. The fortified Birgittas udde site has seen no archaeological fieldwork since 1924, when the main building's cellar was emptied and restored. Its date is only known to the extent that almost all moated sites of this kind in Sweden belong to the period 1250-1500. My current book project deals with Östergötland province's fortified sites of the High/Late Middle Ages, and so I decided to spend two weeks…
aardvarchaeology | June 27, 2016 René Lund Klee's tattoo
In our series of metal detectorist tattoos, where people put pictures of their best finds on themselves -- usually on their detector arms -- we now pay a visit to René Lund Klee. His tattoo depicts an Urnes brooch that he found on the Danish island of Lolland. The needlework was done there by Sandra's Ink in Nakskov.
Urnes brooch from Lolland
The Urnes style of c. AD 1050-1125 forms the end of the Scandinavian animal art tradition, which produced astonishing artistic riches during the Late Iron Age (c. 375-1125). Named for a Norwegian wooden church from the 1070s…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2016 Jan Mortensen's tattoo
Another metal detectorist tattoo! This time it's Jan Mortensen who has decorated the arm with which he brandishes the detector. The object is a 10th century trefoil brooch that Jan found in Holbæk municipality, northern Zealand. Hugo Tattoo in Holbæk did the needlework.
Trefoil brooches were worn by South Scandinavian women as a third brooch, to close their cloaks. But the overall shape descended from high-end acanthus-decorated silver mounts for the bandoliers worn by Charlemagne's vassals around AD 800. Their trefoils joined the strap from the scabbard to the ends…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2016As I blogged about in late May, a recent find from Blekinge has cast light on an enigmatic oval mount that my team collected in Östergötland in 2007. We can now say fairly confidently that the object type belongs to the 19th century. And yesterday Karin Tetteris of the Swedish Army Museum came through with evidence that strengthens this dating and suggests a function for the mounts: horse harness.
Specifically, we're dealing with cruppers, Sw. svanskappor, "a soft padded loop under the base of the tail, to keep the harness from slipping forward" as Wikipedia explains. None of the mounts in…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2016 Nyckelviken's folly
Dropping off Jrette at sailing camp for her 2nd summer. Just like her brother in '09. Just like me in '86.
Heard new interviews with Andy Weir and Larry Niven on Planetary Radio. I love the Internet!
Kelley Johnston on self-defense training for daughters: "I'd rather bail you out of jail than identify you at the morgue".
Depeche Mode's 1984 Some Great Reward was the first album I bought. I just listened to "Blasphemous Rumours" for the first time in decades and was impressed.
Starting from the lines "Taken away to the dark side / I wanna be your left hand man", I began…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2016 Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England
Back around Christmas I reviewed the first three chapters of Toby Martin's big book about Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. Those are the technical chapters dealing with typology and chronology, and I loved them. They are rock solid. Now I've read the remaining four chapters that deal with the societal interpretation of the brooches. In the following I am going to use the author's given name because Martin is me.
I think Toby's investigations and interpretations here are excellent. I particularly like his painstaking study of how…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2016There's a scifi convention in my home municipality near Stockholm this weekend: Fantastika 2016. I'm giving a talk on my Medieval castles project, and I'm also on a boardgame recommendations panel. Below is the list I'm bringing: it's a selection of my favourites with an emphasis on the period 2010-2016.
"BGG rank" refers to the Boardgame Geek web site, where lower is better. So the higher the number here, the less conventional the recommendation. To put the rankings in perspective, note that BGG covers tens of thousands of games.
Plato 3000: game design by Sheamus Parkes, art by Steven…
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2016Like Romanticism, Post-Modernism is a poorly defined term that means different things in different contexts. But in academe, pomo can pretty much be equated with relativism. This term also means several different things, but all of them apply to pomo.
The relativism that makes me hostile to pomo is knowledge relativism or epistemological relativism. “All statements of fact are historically and culturally situated and thus meaningless outside a local contemporary sphere”. This stance can be applied to itself and immediately yields absurdity.
The other pomo relativism is aesthetic. “All value…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2016One of the synths on Gentle Giant's "The Boys In The Band" sounds like mp3 glitches.
Very soon my commuter train will enter a many-years-long period of refurbishment chaos. It's going to be a hassle. But I just feel excited about it. Something new along some of the most well-trodden and least pretty paths of my life!
A film studies professor once told me that prior to the VCR, a lot of the basic data presented in published research in her field was simply wrong. It was really hard for scholars to rewatch and pause movies. Like studying frogs and only being able to glimpse one a few times a…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2016 Basia Bulat
Here's some good tunes written and sung by women that I've come across recently.
Broen – Boy (2015)
Basia Bulat – Fool (2016)
Feist – Mushaboom (2004)
Florence and the Machine – Dog Days Are Over (2008)
Imogen Heap – Hide And Seek (2005)
Julia Holter – Betsy On The Roof (2015)
Lucius – Turn It Around (2013)
PAUW – Memories (2015)
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2016I've linked before to Christina Fredengren's ground-breaking paper in Fornvännen 2015:3 about human and animal remains found in wet contexts in Uppland province (the area around Uppsala). The study's empirical base is solid and eye-opening. I don't find find the theoretical superstructure that the author briefly sketches onto it (the titular ”water politics”) convincing. But that's not my main complaint about this otherwise excellent piece of research.
Look at the map above, covering a small part of the study area. Bear in mind that due to the relieved pressure of the inland ice, land rises…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2016This writer knows what glass cutters are for but doesn't know what they look like. She's having somebody behead plastic dolls with one.
You know suits of armour? Almost all are Early Modern LARPing costumes for festive tournaments. Not Medieval, not used in battle.
Not having any teaching gig this semester is straining my finances. But I also miss belonging. Really enjoyed lunch & afternoon snack with colleagues at the Swedish History Museum today as I was there to look at finds.
Trying something I should probably have done many years ago: looking at a form letter when writing a job…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2016Myself, Ethan Aines and Mats G. Eriksson are proud to present our report on last year’s fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Östra Husby parish, Östergötland. Lots of goodies there, and with an added meaty report on the bones by Rudolf Gustavsson! It was a very fruitful two weeks at the site, during which we found the missing half of the perimeter wall, abundant fine pottery from around AD 1300, a runic inscription by a certain Helgi, the bones of a skinned cat, and more.
Here on Sb: Stenso 2015 Report (High-res, single-sided print)
And on archive.org.
See also the report for 2014, the first…
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2016In April of 2007 I directed a week of metal detecting at sites in Östergötland where there was a potential for an elite presence in the period AD 400-1000. These investigations were part of a project that I published in my 2011 book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats.
One site that proved a dud for the project's exact purposes was Tuna in Östra Husby parish. But my friend and long-time collaborator (and these days, colleague) Dr. Tim Schröder found something pretty damn cool anyway: a gold finger ring from AD 310–375, the last phase of the Roman Iron Age. It had been twisted up and thrown into a…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2016 Doesn't this picture of Västra Eneby church's body storage shed in winter put you in a festive mood? Party. Party. Par. Taaaay.
My selective breeding programme for a future master race is producing good results. Jrette just beat her entire class (admittedly, a class selected for musical ability) at the national maths test. Meanwhile her brother is using seven programming languages while his classmates are learning one.
Have you heard Clint Eisteddfod's new album, Good, Bad and Ugly Songs?
A bright former student of mine has made a narrow escape from the archaeological job market. Phew! And…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2016Last Saturday I attended a rare event: a Swedish metal detector rally. At their worst, in some countries these are like pick-your-own strawberry plantations: pay to loot. But Swedish heritage law is uniquely restrictive around metal detectors, and Swedish daylight detectorists oppose looting, so this rally was an event where any archaeologist could feel at home. It was organised by the Swedish Metal Detector Association (SMF; founded in 2012) in collaboration with the Östergötland County Archaeologist's office. The latter has issued me many a research fieldwork permit involving volunteer…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2016Unpleasant discovery. I've known for a long time that looking at the age of people who get lectureships in Scandy archaeology, the third quartile is at 46. In other words, 75% of all the jobs are given to people aged 46 or less. But now I've looked at the contents of the fourth quartile. And it consists almost entirely of the value 46. In fact, I know of only one case where someone older than 46 got a job, and that was a short part-time temp job. Well, at least this gives me a definite date for when I can finally quit reading the damn job ads.
Senior archaeologist calls lo-tech traditional…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2016Spent two happy days at the LinCon 2016 gaming convention in Linköping. 1500 gaming geeks of all ages from newborn to dotage, and with a very good gender balance. The only age/gender demographic that was visibly missing was old women. But brown and black people were sadly almost entirely absent. My own main complaint though was that for the first time neither of my kids came along to the convention.
This year I didn't learn any new games, but I taught a couple and I took part (rather ineptly) in a little Blokus tournament. Here's what I played, all enjoyable games that I recommend.
Agricola (…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2016Myself, Ethan Aines and Mats G. Eriksson are proud to present our report on last year's fieldwork at Landsjö Castle, Kimstad parish, Östergötland. Lots of goodies there! Construction on the castle seems to have begun between 1250 and 1275, and the site was abandoned halfway through an extension project some 50-75 years later. We also found a Middle Neolithic fishing site and an Early Modern smallholding among the ruins.
Here on Sb: Landsjo 2015 Report (single-sided print-web, high res)
And on archive.org.
See also the report for 2014, the first documented excavations at the site.
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2016Happy archaeo-dad pastime: Jrette helped me enter the humongous tables of stats on rock art from Mats Malmer's 1981 book into a computer spreadsheet, and we checked his sums, finding them all to be correct.
Funny how common it is even for educated people to believe that the Vikings would send their dead out to sea in a (sometimes burning) boat. Have they never considered what would happen two hours later when the boat landed on the other side of the fjord?
I'm measuring stuff on my computer screen with a ruler to get the relative scales right on two shots of an ard tip.
Trying to convince…