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 9, 2010
Christian fundamentalists like to believe that homosexuality is an illness that can -- and should -- be cured. The factual belief is contradicted by a solid scientific consensus, and the value judgement is widely considered to be a repressive holdover from the Bronze Age.
The makers of the French orange-based soft drink Orangina seem to agree with the fundies' unscientific belief that homosexuality can be induced post-natally in a fully formed individual. They, however, are certainly not homophobes. On the contrary, in a recent major ad campaign they invite consumers to use Orangina to "Wake…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2010
Last week was skiing break for my kids. I couldn't find anywhere good to stay in the mountains, so we didn't go off on holiday. Here's what we did for fun instead.
Dinner at the home of a Chinese friend. It was one of those no hablar parties that spouses in multi-ethnic marriages know all about. The food was great and everybody there except me spoke Mandarin - loudly and incessantly. I've never minded much: this time I had brought a book and there was a computer to play with.
Birthday party at the home of an Iranian friend. He used to be a death-metal kid. Now he's a pro-democracy Persian…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2010
Spring has reputedly reached certain areas way south of where I still shovel snow daily, and with it comes Antiquity's spring issue. This is of course an intensely interesting journal, and not solely because the summer issue will feature that opinion piece of mine that I quoted from on the blog recently. In the following are some highlights. All links will give you abstracts and then present you with a pay wall.
Lisa Hodgetts of the University of Western Ontario (!) offers a paper on lithics & bone sites of the period 2400-1800 cal BC, located on the Fjord of Varanger, an area that is…
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2010
Human eyes and brains are still way, way better at image recognition than computers. There are many visual tasks that we do swiftly ourselves but that we can't yet get machines to do reliably at all. In January of '06 I blogged about the Stardust @ Home project where you can help identify particles of interplanetary dust and comet-tail debris in a huge library of digital micrographs. Now I've learned from the BBC's Digital Planet podcast about Solar Stormwatch, where you can help forecast coronal mass ejections and other destructive solar activity that humanity needs early warning about.…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2010Weatherwise, last weekend was thawing and misty and overcast, so I didn't feel like doing much outdoors. I finished reading Daryl Gregory's new novel (didn't do much for me) and started Douglas Adams's fifth Hitch-hiker book. When it appeared in 1992 I didn't bother with it since it seemed too much like flogging an aging franchise, but 11-y-o Junior recently asked me to buy it for him and then he recommended it. So far it seems mildly entertaining.
Had friends over for games: Settlers of Catan and Qwirkle. I was lucky enough to trade my old 80s Junta game for that Settlers box last week. I…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2010
The Vichada river in Colombia is a tributary of the Orinoco. In 2004 part-time geologist Max Rocca discovered that it skirts South America's largest impact crater. It measures 50 km in diameter, nearly a third of the Chicxulub crater caused by the space rock that killed off the non-avian dinos.
This image visualises two important things.
1. Our planet is just another crater-pocked space rock, though here surface erosion acts much faster than on nearby worlds, and we have plate tectonics, all obscuring the impact scars. The Vichada example is a recent one, being less than 30 million years old…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2010
I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ãrsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period", though, is definitely a piece of my technical work…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2010
Being an atheist and a rationalist, I find most religious beliefs quite silly. But religious people vary hugely in their behaviour, and many do excellent deeds. Generally, I find it easier to respect the believer who lives by the core tenets of his faith, as all major religions have pretty reasonable ethical groundwork. Christian charity, for instance, is a fine thing.
On the other hand, I find idolatry and religious egoism particularly risible. And at a Chinese restaurant where I have been a regular for nearly 20 years there is a lovely example of both, as shown above.
Chinese Buddhism is…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2010The eighty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Ciarán at Ad hominin. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 28 April. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2010
The Open Lab 2009 science blogging anthology has been published and is available as a paperback book and a PDF file. There's a piece of Aard in there among many fine contributions. Tell me what you think and what e-reader you're using if you buy the PDF!
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2010
Friday night I unexpectedly found myself looking at dinner all alone. So I quickly arranged for a visit with friends to a Jamaican restaurant (I had jerk chicken), and after our meal Swedepat beat me and Dr Sandy at Race for the Galaxy.
Saturday was mainly chores, but in the evening the Rundkvist family (including 6-y-o Juniorette) played Dungeonquest/Drakborgen and of course got their characters soundly killed.
Sunday morning being extremely snowy and bright with sunshine, I went skiing twice, once with Junior and once with this awesome chick who likes to hang out with me.
Then in the…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2010The 87th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the Anthropology in Practice on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Krystal, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 10 March. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2010Yesterday the parents of a 17-y-o Malmö boy who suffers from autism lost a case in the Swedish court of appeal, Hovrätten. They had sued their insurance company for not recognising their claim for compensation. The parents blame the boy's condition on common vaccines, which would have entitled them to insurance money, while the company holds that autism is almost always congenital and never caused by vaccines. The court found the science presented by the defendant convincing and ruled in the company's favour.
I'm glad that the judicial system values scientific knowledge. But I am saddened…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2010
There was a lot more ice in the heat-pump box than I had thought, a 10 cm cake covering its floor, but getting rid of it proved easy. All I needed was a screwdriver and a small axe. The hot air gun wasn't much use.
I turned off the power feed, took the hood off the thing, removed the rotor and hacked away the ice, taking care not to bash the fine heat-exchange lamelles lining the walls. The ice was laminated from the many defrosting cycles that had built it up, and it fractured into large easily manageable chunks. After reassembling the box I hacked away most of the remaining ice on the…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2010
I got a great letter from Reggae Roger Wikell, which I publish in translation with the permission of Roger and Mattias Pettersson with the awesome metal hair. For context, note that these two scholar friends of mine are the area's foremost authorities on Mesolithic sites that have ended up on mountaintops due to post-glacial shoreline displacement. The lithics there are mainly quartz.
Not all that glitters is quartz.
Yesterday we had a planning meeting with Dr. Risberg [quaternary geologist and the Stockholm area's main shoreline displacement guy]. We're going to core bogs at high elevations…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2010The non-profit Center for Desert Archaeology is located in Tucson, Arizona and publishes a fine magazine, Archaeology Southwest. These generous people contacted me one day out of the blue and offered me a complimentary subscription. On Monday issue 23:3 (summer '09) reached my mail box on snowy Boat Hill, and I was soon enticed to read it from one end to the other thanks to its fine graphic design, its lovely photographs and its exotic theme. I learned a lot!
Archaeology Southwest 23:3 is dedicated to Paleoindian archaeology in Arizona, New Mexico and the Mexican state of Sonora. The…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2010The respected Finnish archaeology annual Fennoscandia Archaeologica has gone on-line! Every single paper from 1984 to 2007 is now available for free on the web site of the Archaeological Society of Finland. It's a great resource for scholars. For instance, the volume for 2007 includes seven largely critical debate pieces on the Susiluola cave that has been interpreted as Scandinavia's first Middle Palaeolithic site. Are there in fact any modified lithics from that cave? Or is it all eoliths and wishful thinking?
Apparently, this does not however mean that Fennoscandia is an Open Access…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2010The somewhat elusive central thesis of M.C. Jenkins's new book Vampire Forensics is that original European vampire folklore was based upon misinterpretation of the slow decay that occurs when you bury a body deep. Particularly so during epidemics, when upon discovery an unusually well-preserved corpse might be made into a scapegoat to explain why people were dying. Disregarding the whole Bela Lugosi cape-and-accent thing, a vampire was originally a restless corpse that drained the health of the living -- not necessarily by actually sucking their blood.
The book is mistitled: its long opening…