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 | March 25, 2010Skalk's February issue was not up to the Danish pop-arch journal's usual excellent standard. I am always keen to read interesting news from Jelling and Lejre, the country's proto-historic centres. But in this case the editors have devoted 17 of the issue's 30 pages to articles about Harold Bluetooth's Jelling despite the fact that nothing of interest has come up there recently. One reports on humdrum trial excavations and the other on the state of erosion on the hamlet's rune stones. Denmark's archaeology is extremely rich and there's no reason to go on and on about early royal sites just…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2010While reading up on the subject, I'm writing the introductory remarks for a study of Bronze Age sacrificial sites. In January I put a couple of paragraphs up here about the possibly redundant distinction between retrievable hoards and irretrievable sacrifices. Here's some more, about ritual and rational behaviour.
Ritual and rationality
As Richard Bradley has argued at length (1995), the distinction between ritual and domestic behaviour is not very helpful when dealing with prehistoric societies. One may easily think that "ritual" equals "irrational" and thus "functionally inexplicable".…
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2010I haven't been able to live-blog from the road since I got rid of the Qtek two years ago. But now I'm trying out my new Samsung Galaxy Spica, and it seems to work!
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2010You know the bit in Khalil Gibran where he says that children are arrows and parents bows, not archers? The other day my kids recorded this rendition of the "Handy Manny" theme song, and then Junior edited it in Audacity. The same evening he played his first game of Agricola where he ended up sharing second place with me despite making tea and sandwiches for everyone while playing. He'll be twelve in July...
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2010
Celebrated the 257th anniversary of the Academy of Letters wearing tails.
Had a fine sunshine brunch on Folly Hill with my wife. The place was heavily dominated by couples born in the 70s and sporting toddlers / babies / big bellies, all probably from the expensive waterfront housing area nearby. The music was all 90s hits all the time.
Watched The Usual Suspects (1995), an OK gangster flick featuring an almost unrecognisably slim and fresh-faced Benicio del Toro who slurs his speech beyond what I thought possible.
Played Agricola with friends.
And you?
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2010
Web gems have been sent my way.
ASPEX, makers of scanning electron microscopes, offer to scan your sample for free and post the image on their site. Finally you can learn about the micro-structure of your tear-duct sleep gunk!
Pablo Zalama Torres makes lovely replicas of archaeological pottery.
An amateur volunteering for the Stardust @ Home project has probably discovered "the first known sample of matter ever collected from the local interstellar medium". Space dust!
James Randi has come out of the closet. Congratulations, Randi! Your houdinesque escape will make it easier for other gay…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2010Some time around 20 March each year, my part-time employers in The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters celebrate the 1753 foundation of the Academy. This gives me a rare reason to dress in tails. And I now look forward to performing for the first time that ultimate ritual of 20th century masculinity, leaving shirts to the dry-cleaners.
The image to the right allows anyone who is uncertain as to whether they are a girl to test this. Wise men teach us that every girl go crazy for a sharp-dressed man. Dear Reader, if you study the image and do not go crazy, then by simple logic you are not a girl.
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2010
Cosmopolitan popster Mika is a great showman and tours with a great band. The audience at his gig in Stockholm last night was thoroughly charmed by the friendliness and musical mastery on offer. Mika traces his musical ancestry back to acts like the Beatles, Queen, Elton John and George Michael, which would make for a good concert experience even if the front man didn't say a word. But he also entertained us with effortless improvised stage patter -- part of it in Swedish, even though he makes only a single stop here on his tour! Psychedelic animated backdrop projections and dancers in…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2010The eighty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Ad hominin. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Greg Laden. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 12 May. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2010How long ago was the time of Emperor Augustus? Most educated people, including professional historians and archaeologists, will reply "about 2000 years" if you ask them. But a considerable number of amateur dendrochronologists say "about 1800 years". And because of an unfortunate peculiarity in how professional dendrochronologists work, it is very hard to convince these dissident amateurs that they are wrong. Because they're actually thinking straight given the data available to them.
If you look at published dendro curves for the transalpine provinces of the Empire, you find that they…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2010Anyone who uses the Library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters more than briefly will soon discover that its staff has a thing for page 17. Every book in that excellent library carries a stamp of ownership on that page.
Last night I was reading Frans G. Bengtsson's 1947 essay collection För nöjes skull. A bit into his piece about Fagertärn, the little lake near Stjernsund whence the red pond liles once came, I found the stamp of the Saltsjöbaden Municipal Library -- on page 17.
Is this secret tradition among librarians restricted to Sweden? To libraries of the 1940s and ones of today…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010Last June a well-preserved mass grave was found near Weymouth in Dorset, southern England. It contained the skeletons of 51 decapitated young men and later-teen boys. At first the burial was dated through the inclusion of Roman-era potsherds. The pit itself had originally been a Roman quarry. But now some of the skeletons have been radiocarbon-dated and ten have been analysed for stable isotopes. As it turns out, the date is most likely 10th century and the men came from Scandinavia. Looks like a Viking raiding party that had bad luck. An interesting and very unusual find! It sort of lets us…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010
Sunday "... five men were indicted, some of them members of the Black Cobra criminal gang. They are suspected of involvement in cake theft from the Godbiten bakery in Ãstorp [pop. 8500] earlier this week. The cake was stolen from a truck on an industrial estate.
120 boxes containing among other things mazarines, brownies and apple pie were taken from the site."
Via Swedish Radio.
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010Here's a question for all of you journal editors and editorial board members out there. Does every single manuscript that your journal receives get the same peer-review treatment? Is there no pre-screening before stuff gets sent to reviewers, where patently kooky or ignorant contributions are killed on arrival?
Is peer review 100%? Should it be? Would that be a wise way to use a journal's resources? Discuss.
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010
Had brunch and a walk in the sunshine with wife and sans kids, a rare pleasure. Strange to think that in just a few years' time they won't need us much anymore. I guess it's one tiny step at a time, setting us down gently. Anyway, it's only 15 years to the first grand-child if Junior repeats my life schedule.
Played Drakar och Demoner, Drakborgen/Dungeonquest and a card game with Jr and his buddy. The latter game has a naughty name that involves bodily discipline of a rambunctious simian who is disrupting the recycling trade.
And you, Dear Reader?
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2010
Scandinavians generally speak pretty good English. But every now and then you come across reminders that they are still very far from being native speakers. Witness this pail of wall-paper glue that I bought earlier today.
Dear Swedish glue-maker, "hernia" means brock and is defined as "the protrusion of an organ or the fascia of an organ through the wall of the cavity that normally contains it". Wikipedia continues, "By far the most common herniae develop in the abdomen, when a weakness in the abdominal wall evolves into a localized hole, or 'defect', through which adipose tissue, or…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2010The 88th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Ad Hominin on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Ciarán, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 12 May. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2010Here's an interesting case. A woman took her baby to Danderyd church (where I once took first communion) and had the child baptised -- against the father's wishes, as it turned out. He isn't happy. And the priest admits that he should have checked with the dad but that he didn't.
Bo Larsson, provost of the see of Stockholm, comments (and I translate):
"When I became a priest in the mid-70s, the nuclear family was the unquestioned standard, but today's relationship patterns are infinitely more varied than they were 20 or 30 years ago and I feel that it has become even more important that the…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2010
I've written before about a recent whale vertebra that someone had dropped into a lake far from the sea in northern Sweden. This past summer, fishermen trawling off the country's southern coast caught two old whale bones, and they've turned out to belong to a grey whale, a species that's been extinct in the Atlantic since the 17th century. An unidentified whale beached itself and died in the area in 1709. Radiocarbon will tell if the newly found bones are likely to belong to that animal.
[More blog entries about whales, balticsea, Sweden; valar, Ãstersjön, Ystad.]
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2010A recurring theme here on Aard is my complaints about how useless certain kinds of higher education are if you want a job. For a change, let's take a look at what kind of degree is most likely to get you a job in Sweden over the coming decade. The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education has just published a study that offers data on this very issue. Here are the degrees where there will be a labour shortage in Sweden for the foreseeable future!
Medical laboratory scientist, Sw. biomedicinsk analytiker
High-school teacher of manual skills for craftspeople such as carpenters and plumbers…