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 14, 2009
These are my obsolete portable music players. A post-1985 cassette player, a 2000 minidisc player and a 2002 iPod whose sole means of communication with the outside world is a firewire socket. In the 90s I didn't listen much to music while on the move. Since 2006 I use a smartphone as my mp3 player.
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2009Tonight the Geminid meteor shower peaks. My wife and I were out last night and saw loads, about one big fat shooting star a minute. Don't miss the year's best meteor shower! It's because the Earth passes through the sandy exhaust trail of a comet. Tomorrow night will be good as well.
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2009
Part of the Swedish Christmas celebrations is that many people turn to traditional cooking. Yesterday my dad's wife & mine made sausages. They were really nice, way better than their limp and grey pre-cooking appearance suggested. But they were hardly traditional, containing mouflon and elk in addition to the pork ("whatever's in the freezer") and being seasoned liberally with garlic.
aardvarchaeology | December 13, 2009A scary but pretty funny accident happened in central Stockholm the other day. A work crew was drilling for a geothermal heat pump when suddenly the drill went into an open subterranean cavity. There wasn't supposed to be one there according to the plans they had been given for the job. When they tried to get the drill out, it stuck.
And then a subway train full of people hit the dangling drill bit head on.
Nobody got hurt.
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2009You know these contrived situations you're supposed to imagine yourself in prior to discussing some problem of ethics? I came across one in a recent Radiolab episode that reminded me of why I don't like thinking inside those boxes.
It's wartime. You're hiding in a cellar with your infant child and a bunch of other people. Soldiers are poking around and killing everybody they find hidden. Everyone in the cellar except the baby understands that you need to be quiet. You know that the baby is going to be noisy and you know that if the soldiers find you they'll kill everybody. The only way to…
aardvarchaeology | December 11, 2009In mid-2008, UK science writer Simon Singh fell afoul of the weird and archaic English libel law. After he wrote in The Guardian that chiropractic lacks scientific support and that such treatments are bogus, the British Chiropractic Association sued him for libel. And in England, a libel case is always a major pain for the defendant regardless of whether he wins or not. He has to prove that he's innocent (!), the damages are 140 times as high as in other European countries, and even if you win it costs you huge sums of money, loads of time and loads of stress. (Also, the law promotes…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2009
Around this time of year, Swedes like to throw little brief daytime parties with mulled wine and ginger bread cookies. Usually they're on weekends, of course. In my mother's family there's been a tradition for decades of organising mulled-wine parties for the descendants of my maternal grandfather's parents.
This year my mom sent out invitations for the family mulled-wine party to take place at two o'clock on a Wednesday. This made little sense to me at first, since it would mean that hardly anyone with a job or kids would come. But then I thought about it and realised that, yes, this is of…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2009
The July issue of Fornvännen has come on-line in all its free full-text glory less than six months after paper publication.
PÃ¥vel Nicklasson publishes his second paper on the forgotten early-19th century antiquarian, J.H. Wallman, and relays information about a Late Roman Period snake-head gold ring found in a highly unusual context.
Ny Björn Gustafsson analyses a poorly understood class of Viking Period ironware and builds a case for a chilling functional interpretation: they were slave collars.
Svetlana Vasilyeva, the most Swedish-speaking colleague we have in Russia, discusses the…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2009
The on-line version of Antiquity's winter issue (#322) was published just the other day. Here are some highlights (links to abstracts, papers then hidden by a pay wall):
A pair of "ornamental trousers" found in an exceptionally well preserved 1st century BC grave in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang. These fancy pants were apparently made out of a pictorial wall hanging looted in the 2nd century from a Bactrian palace.
An Early Neolithic Linear Pottery ceremonial centre on the Middle Rhine in south-west Germany whose voluminous causewayed enclosure ditch is full of cannibalised human bones and…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2009The eighty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Spider Monkey Tales. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krystal 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 in less than a month, on 30 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2009[More blog entries about archaeology, history, uppsala, Sweden; arkeologi, historia, idéhistoria, Uppsala.]
Magnus Alkarp defended his PhD thesis in Uppsala on 21 November. I just read the book, and my opinion is that Alkarp definitely deserves his PhD. In fact, I believe that he probably deserves two such degrees: one in the history of ideas for the present book, and one in archaeology for his as yet unpublished gazetteer of archaeological features and known interventions into the earth at Old Uppsala. But his book was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Department of Archaeology in Uppsala,…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2009
Names are one of the things that separate historical and archaeological thinking from each other. History is full of people of whom little is known beyond their names and perhaps a royal or ecclesiastical title, yet still they are considered to be historical personages. Meanwhile, a dead person found in a nameless prehistoric grave can never attain the same historical stature regardless of the objects preserved with the body and the scientific data extracted from the bones.
This fixation with names was once a characteristic of art historians as well. One of the differences between Medieval…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2009[More blog entries about photography, frost; foto, frost.]
More pix below the fold!
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2009AIDS was discovered in gay men and the virus is more easily transmitted through anal than vaginal intercourse. For this reason, gay men (defined as "men who have sex with men") have long been forbidden to donate blood in Sweden. Likewise, people who go to bed with a new hetero partner must wait three months before donating blood again.
Now the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has decided to change the rules. A bit. Gay men are now allowed to donate blood. If the last time they had sex with a man was more than a year ago. So you're only allowed to donate blood if you're gay in the…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2009The 81st Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Spider Monkey Tales tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to me or Michelle, 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 on 30 December. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2009[More blog entries about Sweden, photography, manor; Närke, Askersund, foto, herrgård.]
I was headed for a lonely November weekend with wife & daughter abroad and son with his mom. So I rounded up three friends (though Paddy K was kept from coming along at the last minute by a big meltdown at work), loaded my best board games and a couple of grocery bags into the family car, and drove to Stjernsund manor in Närke.
Our way there was kind of interesting. I plotted a course that would be as close to a straight line as possible yet largely follow major highways. This meant that we spent…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2009Current Archaeology's December issue offers one of the mag's signature feature write-ups of new books, this time The Complete Ice Age: how climate change shaped the world by Brian Fagan et al. Interesting stuff, where the following passage on the coming of our own species into Ice Age Europe struck me as particularly illuminating:
"In the past, climate change had either forced movement or engendered physical evolution [in the area's hominid population]. Homo sapiens, supremely intelligent, responded to new challenges through cultural evolution. The interaction between nature and humanity now…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2009Today's schedule was 5 hours on trains to Lund, 6 hours in Lund giving a talk, and 5 hours on trains home. In Lund I saw the outline of a very early church foundation picked out in the overlying street pavement near the Cathedral. And I was reminded of other archaeology I've seen thus outlined: the chancel apse of Stockholm Cathedral and the great stone ship at Stångebro near Linköping. It's a pretty cool way to show the many-layeredness of a spot that would otherwise just be asphalt.
Dear Reader, have you seen any interesting archaeology outlined in an overlying street pavement?
[More blog…
aardvarchaeology | November 25, 2009A few months ago I finished a book manuscript on elite settlement and political geography in Ãstergötland, one of Sweden's core provinces, in the period AD 375-1000. In countries that have experienced an infestation of Romans, this era is known as the Early Middle Ages. In Scandyland we call it the Late Iron Age. Researching and writing the book has been my main project for over four years, as reflected in many blog entries here about sites such as Skamby in Kuddby and Sättuna in Kaga.
On Thursday 26 November at 15:00 I will give a talk about these matters at the Dept of Archaeology at the…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2009
In Helsinki a few weeks back I made the acquaintance of my charming colleague Wesa Perttola. Now he has made excellent distribution maps for my forthcoming Ãstergötland book. Above is the scatter of 9th and 10th century elite indicators (big black dots) against a background of 6th-8th century indicators (smaller grey dots) and farms named Tegneby ("thane's farm", stars). Wesa tells me that he is currently available for more GIS and CAD work.
[More blog entries about gis, cad, maps, archaeology; gis, cad, kartor, arkeologi.]