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 | February 14, 2010
Had friends over to play some Abalone, Hell Rail and Balderdash. 11-y-o Junior often joins our board-game sessions these days.
Bought ski boots for Junior and went skiing with him and the Rundkvist ladies.
Watched Where the Wild Things Are. Nice visuals, but the movie unexpectedly turned out mainly to explore the complicated personal relationships between a group of monsters. They all behave like a cross between small children and old junkies and are pretty annoying.
Celebrated Chinese New Year's Eve at an unassuming suburban restaurant that made my wife nostalgic through its genuine tacky…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2010I'm studying sacrificial deposits made by people of a lo-tech culture in Sweden 3000 years ago, largely in wetlands. This was long before any word relevant to the area was written. The objects were mainly recovered during the decades to either side of 1900. Yesterday while trawling through back issues of the Journal of Wetland Archaeology I came across a really cool paper on a similar theme. It's about wetland deposits made by lo-tech people and excavated during the 20th century. But in this case the stuff was still being deposited in the 19th century AD, the objects are perfectly preserved,…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2010I've been asked to write an opinion piece about the future of Swedish archaeology for a high-visibility venue. This, as you can imagine, I enjoy doing a lot. Here's an excerpt from the piece as it's looking at the moment.
Swedish academic archaeology should continue its on-going voyage back towards health and sanity, away from the pretentious introverted nadir of a decade ago, and be a robustly empirical science. We should return to a stricter definition of what archaeology is and what we will allow archaeological research funding to be used for. I submit, without any pretence to originality…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2010The eighty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krys at Anthropology in Practice. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 10 March. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And don't miss Ed Yong's piece on the first genome for a prehistoric human, a Bronze Age Greenlander who's spent 4000 years in permafrost!
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2010It's de-lurking time again! If you're a regular Aard reader who never comments, or if you do comment but have an inkling that I may not know who you are, then please comment on this entry and tell us a few words about yourself. Also, questions and suggestions for blog entries are much appreciated.
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2010This morning when I got my bike out of the yard to take Juniorette to school, I heard a loud clattering noise from the box-like outdoor part of our air source heat pump. At first I thought the ball bearing on the rotor had crapped out. But the guy who installed it explained over the phone that the problem was most likely not as severe as that.
A heat pump like ours dribbles condensation water through a spigot on the under side. It's been an unusually cold winter, and so the water has collected as ice on the ground beneath the box, building up layer by layer until it made contact with the…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2010
Lately I've been listening to Canadian 90s/00s orchestral popsters the Heavy Blinkers. Here's a fine song off of their '02 album Better Weather, "I Used to Be a Design". I actually prefer this live version since its production is scaled down and Ruth Minnikin's vocals are heavily processed on the album version. The band performing here has since disintegrated, with the female lead singer going on to head Ruth Minnikin and Her Bandwagon, a folky outfit that will have a new album out any day now.
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2010The 86th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the 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 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 7, 2010
Took a walk and photographed two buildings for Wikipedia.
Went skiing on the golf course.
Had friends over, played a game of Scotland Yard and a game of Power Grid.
Painted three walls in the bedroom. This was sort of a chore, but not in fact boring, and having a nice-looking bedroom is fun. The fourth wall is destined for some faux-Japanese cherry-branch wallpaper on pale grey that looks like something out of a William Gibson novel.
Had family over for a fine Korean dinner cooked by two Chinese sisters.
One piece of fun that I missed out on was Midlake's Stockholm gig. It was sold out.…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2010Danes often have tripartite names, like famous Roman Iron Age scholar Ulla Lund Hansen or NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And I've been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids. So I wrote my erudite buddy, osteologist Helene Agerskov Madsen, and asked her to explain.
I learned that the system is not very old (~100 yrs?) and has already started to fall apart. But in its idealised form here's how it works. The middle name tracks a matrilineage and the last name a patrilineage. When a child is born it…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2010Occasioned by a comment on my recent entry on the movie Avatar and the Gaia hypothesis, here's a re-run of a blog entry from March 2006.
As comments to a recent entry, I've had an interesting discussion about environmentalism with a friend. We both agree that biodiversity and ecological systems should be preserved. But we disagree as to the reason for this.
If I understand my friend correctly, her opinion is that we should preserve biodiversity because it is precious (or even holy?) without reference to the needs and wishes of humans. Let's say she feels biodiversity is an abstract good.
My…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2010Four years ago (when I had only been blogging for a month) I asked my readers what kind of smartphone I should get. Nobody replied, but I got some advice elsewhence and bought a Qtek 9100. Then, two years ago, I asked the same question again and got lots of answers. In the end I bought a Samsung SGH-i780 that has served me well since.
I'd like to get away from Windows Mobile while there's still an aftermarket for the Samsung, so here I go again, asking you, Dear Reader, for advice. Here are the specs I'm aiming for.
Cell phone connectivity
Wifi connectivity that actually allows me to connect…
aardvarchaeology | February 1, 2010It's time for the annual Global Population Speak Out. We all know that in order not to crash the planet we need to consume less energy and raw materials and we need to emit less pollutants. But it doesn't seem to be generally known that nothing an affluent Westerner does can have anywhere near as beneficial an effect on the future environment as not having kids. Riding a bike to work, recycling milk cartons, turning off the outdoor lamp before you go to bed -- all of those green efforts of yours will be swamped and obviated if you have that extra kid.
Think about it. If there were only a few…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2010
Went skiing twice.
Went skating on Lake Källtorpssjön at the Hellas sporting centre under the watchful eye of the Nacka radio masts. There's a snow-ploughed circuit there, but it hadn't been ploughed recently so there was a lot of snow to contend with, plus ice cracks and a stiff cold wind, so it could have been more fun.
Played two games of Pitch Car, two of Drakborgen/Dungeonquest and two of Settlers of Catan. Didn't win even once, but had fun anyway.
Went around a number of neighbours doing the annual reading of their water meters for the housing-area administration. It's part of a…
aardvarchaeology | January 29, 2010
Great flocks of fieldfares (Turdus pilaris, björktrast) are hanging around Boat Hill, feeding off the frozen parkland rowan berries instead of migrating. They're so ruffled up against the cold that they're hardly recognisable as the streamlined summer birds we're used to. Their cousins the blackbirds sit alone like big black apples here and there in the leafless underbrush, waiting for the singing season.
[More blog entries about birds, photography; fåglar, foto.]
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2010As part of the reading course I've set myself on Bronze Age sacrificial finds, wetland archaeology and landscape studies, I'm reading a new book whose title translates as "Swedish bog cultivation. Agriculture, peat use and landscape change from 1750 to 2000". It's about various ways that Swedes have tried to make use of wetland in the past centuries. The sites I'm studying are mostly in wetlands, and mostly they have been identified when finds have surfaced during the kind of projects the book covers. Its main focus is on the Swedish Bog Cultivation Society, that operated from 1886 to 1939.…
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2010The eighty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Magnus at Testimony of the Spade. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 10 March. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2010The Web helps you check if your ideas are original. Recently I've come up with two puns that proved to be unoriginal but still surprisingly uncommon.
Ronald McDonald is the Lord of the Fries.
The famous fantasy role-playing game should always be referred to as Dung & Drag. It amazes me that I haven't thought of this before. Now I have this vision of greying drag queens in printed dresses and rubber boots, cleaning out the manure, shearing sheep and driving tractors.
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2010The 85th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the A Very Remote Period Indeed tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Julien, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is 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 | January 25, 2010
I type these words in a seafood restaurant at the main square of Visby on the island of Gotland. I haven't been here for almost a decade. Today I had the rare pleasure of teaching undergrads. My old grad-school buddy Gunilla Runesson at Visby University College gave me four hours to talk about the Late Iron Age elite, which is what occupied most of my working hours from 1994 until last fall. So I got up at 06:15 this morning, rode a tiny propeller plane across the sea and did three hours on settlements and one hour on graves. Very nice students!
Afterwards I walked through the Medieval city…