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 | December 31, 2009Today I did something that, had I been a truly rational consumer, I would have done 20 years ago.
Fisksätra has two grocery stores. One is a big chain store and the other is a typical turkbutik, a mom'n'pop store run by immigrants from the Near East. Whenever possible, I have favoured the little store. I have often gone there first and then gotten only the stuff they don't carry from the chain store.
The little store does not carry superior wares. Its assortment is far smaller than the big store's, and there are very few items there that you can't get at the chain store. I have shopped there…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2009
My brother-in-law Peter Köhler is not only a very nice guy, but also a successful artist. He regularly exhibits his work at Magnus Karlsson's gallery, one of Stockholm's most prestigious venues. Peter's next show there is scheduled for 9 Jan. through 7 Feb. and is titled "Black Magic".
"A study visit to the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall -- where Peter Köhler was given access to the museum's collections, photo archives and library -- and repeated travels in China form points of departure. Peter Köhler works with spontaneous figuration and improvisation, but some of the…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2009The eighty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Primate Diaries. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to the keeper of A Primate of Modern Aspect. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 27 January. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2009After six or seven weeks of Windows, I've finally gotten Ubuntu linux to run again. My installation crashed when I tried to upgrade on-line to the most recent version, Karmic. And then I couldn't boot Karmic from a USB stick. I thought the copy on the stick had gone corrupt. Yesterday Tor lent me a CD burner, and I found that Karmic simply won't boot on my netbook. It crashes midway through bootup in the same way regardless if I try a USB stick or a CD. So I downloaded the previous version, Jaunty, and it installed just fine.
Is the Karmic release Ubuntu's Vista? Is it a dud release, like the…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2009
I suddenly came to think of my first character in a role-playing game. His name was Gildor, he was an elf and a "fighter" -- I suppose he must have been a soldier actually -- and he came to a sad end. I knew him only briefly.
From age twelve to twenty-five I was an avid role-player. Indeed, the person I was then would be really sad to learn that I quit playing eventually. But he would take heart somewhat if he knew that I have lately become a board-game geek instead.
It was about the time I turned twelve, in the spring of 1984, that my buddy Ragnar turned me on to the Swedish version of…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2009
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2009 were announced yesterday.
Professor emeritus of ecological zoology Staffan Ulfstrand receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... for his engrossing and pedagogical books about evolution [such as Savannah Lives: Animal Life and the Human Evolution of Africa] and his many pop-sci talks, particularly during the double Darwin jubilee of 2009. Staffan Ulfstrand frequently appears on nature shows, in Q&A columns and in debates about biology and behaviour. He has also frequently explained evolution in a pedagogical manner when it has…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2009I recently celebrated four years as a blogger. But disregarding what I was doing before I joined Sb, today marks Aard's third anniversary! It's one of the older active blogs on the site: of the 55 that joined at various times in 2006, less than 39 see timely updates today.
I'm still having fun and hope you are too! I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies.
aardvarchaeology | December 28, 2009The blog entry I had been thinking about and repeatedly forgetting about came back to me. Turns out those story beginnings never went far because I had been thinking about situations where I probably wouldn't survive for long. I've had this scary scenario playing in my head, while awake, for quite some time.
First, imagine that you're dropped into a foreign city with only the clothes you wear. No wallet, no hand bag, no money, no cell phone, no identification. Pretty scary, huh? But still, most of us would get out of the situation fairly easily. We would find the embassy of our country of…
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2009The 83rd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the Primate Diaries on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Eric, 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 | December 26, 2009I've had this decent idea for a post popping up in my mind twice and then dropping out of it before I had a chance to write myself a note. It's something about fragments, about beginnings of stories stacked onto each other like a collage. Or so I seem to remember. Maybe it will come back to me.
So, instead, here are some random jottings about my Christmas.
We have a lot of snow and I have been shoveling selected bits away from the yard and the outdoors stairs using a shovel that the previous owner of the house left for us in the garage.
I also had to shovel a track to the compost container.…
aardvarchaeology | December 24, 2009I spent Wednesday evening wrapping presents and reading the latest popular archaeomags that have reached my mailbox. Pleasurable pursuits!
Current World Archaeology's Dec/Jan issue (#38) has a story on new interpretations of the inter-war excavation results at Dura-Europos in Syria. This is an important Roman fortress town that was laid waste after a protracted siege by Sasanid Persians in the AD 250s. Thus it preserves the state of the place just as the siege ended, which is highly unusual, with loads of well-preserved military gear and temporary siege-related structures that would have been…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2009A correspondent of mine who requests anonymity tells a sad tale of what Oligarch Russia does to its cultural heritage these days. Money talks!
... the scandalous case with the monuments of ancient St. Petersburg on the place of which the Government plans to build a big (400 m high) skyscraper of Gazprom. This is in the very centre of the city, some 600 m from Smolny, and from the beautiful Smolny cathedral, the baroque creation of Rastrelli. The cathedral will be reduced to nil [I take it the cathedral will be physically dwarfed by the Gazprom skyscraper, not torn down]. UNESCO has warned…
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2009Last year my wife and I bought a house. Since then we have been tenants of Nacka municipality who owned the land the house sits on. It's a tiny plot, hardly larger than the house itself, and surrounded by communal land. But the interest on a mortgage loan is quite a bit less than the land rent, and over time the real value of the interest payments shrinks through inflation while the rent is adjusted upwards. So today we bought the land plot as well, which means that I now own a piece of Sweden. Or rather, that the bank owns it and lets it to us as long as we pay the interest. The Swedish word…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2009The autumn-term closing ceremony in Swedish schools is traditionally held in a church. The country was solidly (if lukewarmly) Christian until quite recently, and Christmas is of course nominally a Christian holiday. But Muslim immigrants have become more numerous from the 80s on, the Swedish Church separated from the state in 2000, and so it is no longer uncontroversial to bring entire school classes to church.
My son's school, when informing us parents about the ceremony planned for last week, emphasised that though the whole thing would take place in a church, no Christian message would be…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2009
Before lunch yesterday I took a walk and listened to Planetary Radio. And I mused, as so often, that I am very lucky to be living and working on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago. The picture below is the view from my office window. (Sorry about the phone camera.)
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2009
The mines of Gladhammar near Västervik in SE Sweden were worked at least from the 16th century to the 19th century, producing iron, copper and cobalt. Now they pose a big environmental problem because of heavy metals leaching out of the spoil heaps into a nearby lake. A project is afoot to do something about the site, removing all the spoil (!) to a safer location, and so my colleagues from the Kalmar County Museum have been called in to do some early industrial archaeology prior to the cleanup. Here's a fascinating short film they've shot from a basket lowered with a crane into one of the…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2009I've listened to Escape Pod, the science fiction short-story podcast, for four years now. And lately I have become increasingly awed by one of the newer hosts, Norm Sherman. His writing is acerbic, his delivery is deadpan, the guy is just so cool and funny. On the most recent EP episode he played an absolutely sublime H.P. Lovecraft love ballad that he's written and recorded, and it turns out the guy is a veritable Jonathan Coulton! Only one who speaks as well.
Cuz you're my quasi-icthyan angel
You're my half amphibian queen
You're the Overlord of my Universe
You're the Tormentor of my Dreams…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2009The eighty-second 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 Eric at the Primate Diaries. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 13 January. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2009Today is my fourth birthday as a blogger! (Here's my first entry from 2005.) I see myself as the proprietor of and main contributor to a small daily paper on subjects that interest me. And I am enjoying myself! Trafficwise, the mean number of unique readers per day has been as follows.
2006: 157 daily readers
2007: 852 daily readers
2008: 937 daily readers
2009: 714 daily readers (update 3 Jan)
These stats might suggest that the blog is ailing, but actually the mean values for '07 and '08 are skewed by huge spikes on a single entry each for those years (here and here). If we looked at the…
aardvarchaeology | December 15, 2009A new paper in the Norwegian journal Viking offers exciting news about two less-well-known ship burials from the Avaldsnes area in Rogaland on the country's west coast. Being poorly preserved, they have been difficult to date. Bonde & Stylegar now show with dendrochronology that these are the earliest dendro-dated ship burials in Norway!
Storhaug. Ship built c. 770. Burial in 779.
Grønhaug. Ship built c. 780. Burial in c. 790-795.
Another exciting result is that we now know where the famous Oseberg ship was built. Dendro studies have shown that it was built about AD 820, repaired later…