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 | January 24, 2010Had a lot of fun this weekend:
Went skating twice, once with each of my kids.
Went skiing with my wife.
Got beaten at Pitch Car four times by my kids.
Took the kids to a birthday party for a charming friend of mine, populated largely by former physics engineers who are now programmers.
Took my son to a concert with 50s and 60s pop tunes performed by a choir and solists.
Had post-concert dinner with friends & son.
And you, Dear Reader?
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2010
Apparently the Lejre excavators still haven't realised that the lovely silver miniature they found depicts an aristocratic woman who can't be Odin, regardless of who may be the owner of the throne she sits on. A Danish news site contacted me today and asked me about the issue. Here's what I said (and I translate).
In the art of the Vendel and Viking Periods, just as in today's art, there's a set of conventions for how men and women are depicted. Largely it's a question of clothing and jewellery that real people used as well. The main difference is that Iron Age art only depicts aristocrats,…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2010I'm reading the recently published 50-year anniversary volume of "UV", the excavations department within the Swedish National Heritage Board. I worked my first fieldwork season for one of their regional units back in 1992. The book's an interesting read as UV is the single organisation that has done the most archaeological fieldwork in Sweden. Ever. And it's the country's biggest archaeological employer. This arguably means that it is the country's biggest producer of archaeological research. Yet it has no academic affiliation.
In Stefan Larsson's paper about the organisation's current and…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2010
We rarely buy bread. Instead I bake. Tonight's production involved a 5-day sour dough and a bag of roasted sunflower seeds. Pretty good, though I overestimated the amount of salt on the seeds and overcompensated. The sour dough was just for flavour: I can't wait for a proper lactobacillum leavening, so I put yeast in.
[More blog entries about baking, bread; bakning, bröd, surdeg.]
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2010Writes Dear Reader Bruce Paulson of Gillett, Wisconsin:
Your article the other day about rutabagas whet my appetite so on Friday I went to the local grocery store with a friend who was staying for supper. I unloaded three of them at the checkout counter where a teenage clerk started to examine them for an identity sticker. There was none. So she turned to her 65 year old supervisor and said, "What is THIS?" The supervisor said, "That is what they call a Swede turnip. Swedish people eat them, but normal people don't." The clerk then started to check the produce price list for Swede turnip…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2010Here's what I did for fun this past weekend.
Watched Avatar.
Had a dim sum dinner.
Chucked out the Christmas tree, lopped off the branches and kept the trunk to bring to my dad's place for firewood. (This doesn't sound like fun? Well, my life consists of fun, work and chores, and anything related to Christmas trees has to be sorted under "fun".)
Went skiing on the golf course.
Had friends over for dinner and a game of Power Grid.
And you, Dear Reader?
In other news, Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science has resumed blogging after a long hiatus. Chris is a zooarchaeologist (i.e. animal…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2010[More blog entries about movies, avatar, tolkien, gaiahypothesis; film, avatar, tolkien, gaiahypotesen.]
Today my mind was blown by James Cameron's sf film Avatar in full-colour 3D. Some spoilers follow.
Tolkien created the ents, the tree-shepherds, out of his sense that trees are so large yet so defenseless against the man -- or the orc -- with an axe and a torch. The moon Pandora, Avatar's world, is Tolkien's ents on a global scale. It's Lovelock's natty old Gaia "hypothesis" turned concrete reality. Lem's world Solaris is covered by a sentient global ocean. Pandora has a sentient global…
aardvarchaeology | January 14, 2010
Härnevi vicarage, Uppland. Large collection of bronzes, c. 600 BC. Packed into a belt box, wrapped in a leather garment and deposited in wetland. Found in 1902 during drainage digging.
In my work, I really prefer writing over reading, and in order to profit as much as possible from my reading while I remember it, I like to write while I read. Otherwise I just get sleepy and feel like I'm not really getting anywhere. So although I am still just getting acquainted with the research background of my Bronze Age project, I wrote the first couple of paragraphs for my next book today. (Note that I…
aardvarchaeology | January 13, 2010The eighty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the A Primate of Modern Aspect. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed. 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.
aardvarchaeology | January 12, 2010The Open Laboratory is an annual anthology of blog writings on science started by Bora over at A Blog Around the Clock. I was very proud to get pieces selected for the 2006 and 2007 volumes, and then I was miffed to not make the cut for the 2008 one. But now I'm proud again, because my blog entry "Making the Archaeological Record" from February has been selected for Open Lab 2009! This year's volume is being edited by SciCurious over at Neurotopia.
aardvarchaeology | January 11, 2010
I just had to swap two hours of daytime work for two hours of evening free time and get out on Lake Lundsjön with my skis. It's amazing, seeing the cliffs where we sim and sun bathe in the summers, but from an otherwise unreachable vantage point two meters above the water's surface!
aardvarchaeology | January 10, 2010The 84th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the A Primate of Modern Aspect on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Modern Primate, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. It's a great way to get some traffic and visibility in the anthro/archaeo bloggyspheroid. The next open slot is already on 27 January. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2010I support labour unions. Worker solidarity is the only way to keep wages above the barest subsistence level when you're working for an employer who wishes to maximise profit. I haven't been a union member myself for many years, though. The reason is that there is nothing a union can do for me. On an over-saturated labour market there is no way to organise a large enough percentage of the work-force to get any traction in negotiations with the employers. For each archaeologist who makes demands, there are always ten newly graduated young ones eager to work for peanuts. No union can improve our…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2010
Not everyone knows what's inside a golf ball. I do. Or I thought I did.
When I was a kid a friend of mine taught me how to open golf balls. You need a hacksaw (Sw. bÃ¥gfil) and preferably a vise (Sw. skruvstycke). It's impossible to open them with a knife or wire cutters - you're guaranteed to stab yourself if you try. After removing the dimpled hard white shell, we found a layer of soft black rubber, then tens of meters of tightly rolled-up thin brown rubber band, and at the ball's centre a small limp ampoule of soft black rubber that felt like it contained oil. I don't recall opening that…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2010I hardly ever read books in French and I hardly ever read books by Nobel laureates. In the first case, my grasp of the language is shaky and I have no good entry point into French literature: I don't know what to try. I think the last French-language book I tried reading was Les Trois Mousquetaires, and I dropped it halfway through because it's silly and romantic. In the second case, I have no respect whatsoever for the collective taste (or "artistic authority"!) of the Swedish Academy, and it is my firm opinion that the only reason that anybody cares about the Nobel prize for literature is…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2010Everybody knows that English has borrowed the words ombudsman and smorgasbord from Swedish. But did you know that rutabaga is another Swedish loan? And that it was borrowed from a rural Swedish dialect, not standard Swedish?
"Rutabaga" is an American word for the kind of turnip known to Englishmen and Australians as swede. Indeed, the plant hybrid probably once arose in Sweden. In standard Swedish, though, it's called kÃ¥lrot, "cabbage root" -- which is botanically speaking exactly what it is. "Rut-" in "rutabaga" is simply rot, "root". Bagge ("-baga") means "ram", and my speculation is that…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2010
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars six Earth calendar years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both still work fine! Sadly, though, Spirit has been stuck on the edge of a small dust-filled crater since May last year, one set of wheels inside and one outside the crater. Its future looks dim as the Martian winter approaches and it is in a poor position for continued solar power. But Oppy trundles on toward Endeavour crater, taking pictures and analysing rocks. In…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2010
My old Tolkien Society buddy Indûr and his wife rents an extra room in their apartment building. It looks like it used to be the caretaker's office. Now it's a gaming room.
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2010
Frost on rowan trees in Fisksätra at sun-up on New Year's Day. (Note the blackbird.)
[More blog entries about photography, trees; foto, träd, nacka.]
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2010
I found this sign at the Slussen commuter train station the other day.