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 | October 29, 2009Ed Yong's excellent post about fruit-bat fellatio received some even better, eye-opening comments from one Russell and Frog:
Russell: "Tan is falling into the fallacy that animals have sex for the purpose of procreation. Or of writing as if. Those bats are having sex because they're horny, and the fellatio is somehow making their sex more satisfying. That might or might not enhance reproduction. But that is not on the little bats' minds when they're busy getting it on."
Frog: "The bats aren't making direct computations of relative reproductive success -- they're 'feeling good', and very often…
aardvarchaeology | October 28, 2009Here's a confusing press release from the University of Gothenburg. Researcher Jonas Warringer is trying to find ways to slow the rate of genetic adaptation in certain microbes down to keep them from evolving resistance to antibiotics. But look at this (and I translate):
Slowed-down evolution can counteract antibiotic resistance
...
The resistance of an infectious agent against antibiotics is particularly serious when it comes to drugs made from fungi, penicillin for instance. Fungal cells are similar to human ones, which makes it hard to develop drugs that hit fungal cells (and are effective…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2009A very prominent German Wikipedian, Meisterkoch ("Master Chef"), doesn't like bloggers much. In a recent opinion piece he manages to insult all the world's blogging scientists in one fell swoop.
"At best, blogs are run by second-rate scientists; typically, however, just by unemployed people. ... In fact, blogs allow the repeated and systematic transfer of half-knowledge and subjectivities which can be 'consumed' and amplified even further by other non-scientific media (other blogs, Twitter, etc.). ... Bloggers usually react with anger and denial if you point out that their blogs are not as…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2009I've been on the instant messaging service ICQ daily since 1997. Last week, though, my entry in some database apparently got screwed up, so my password no longer works and I can't get the retrieval mechanism to send me a new one. Looking through my contact list I then realised that I hardly ever use ICQ anymore, because almost everybody I chat to is on MSN. (I hadn't noticed since I use client software that handles several different messaging protocols transparently.) So I've decided to simply say goodbye to ICQ. Anybody who wants to get in touch should be able to find me anyway, for instance…
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2009
October drizzle can be quite photogenic in my part of the world. Here's a view from the bridge to Fisksätra holme. (I just discovered Pixlr, an excellent free on-line image editor that runs in your browser.)
aardvarchaeology | October 23, 2009Next week, 29-31 October, I'll be in Helsinki for the Nordic Bronze Age symposium. The organisers have been kind enough to ask me to chair one of the sessions, but I'd love to meet up with some Aard readers too. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2009True to the rules of Open Access publishing, the April issue of Fornvännen has come on-line in all its full-text glory less than six months after paper publication.
Katharina Hammarstrand Dehman reports on the kind of hardcore wetland archaeology you can get to do when somebody wants to dig a huge tunnel under a coastal city.
Helena Günther launches a merciless attack on the shamanic model of interpretation that has coloured much Scandy rock-art research in recent years.
Maria Lingström reports on her fieldwork on a 1361 battlefield. Unusually early battlefield archaeology on a site where…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2009
The other day Dr. Isis made comment no 10,000 here on Aard. Lucky it wasn't one of the hate commenters that swarmed the blog around that time! Because the prize I decided on for commenter 10^4 was a song, and it could have become awkward. Now, If you want to hear me do a Queen song, head on over to the good doctor's place.
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2009The seventy-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in two weeks, on 4 November. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2009The Swedish Research Council just released the list of researchers who are getting funding this year. The following archaeological projects are on the list.
Ingela Bergman: Trade, trade routes and Sami settlements -- socio-economic networks in northern Sweden AD 1000-1500.
Gunilla Eriksson: Individual relationships -- cultural diversity and interaction in Neolithic Poland.
Henrik Gerding: Lateres coctiles -- the early use of fired brick in Europe.
Ulf Hansson: "The Linnaeus of Archaeology" -- Adolf Furtwängler and the great systematisation of Classical Antiquity.
Ragnar Hedlund: Propaganda…
aardvarchaeology | October 18, 2009Friday night, I made tacos and chocolate chip cookies with my kids. Saturday, I attended the Imagicon 2 speculative fiction conference, chairing a panel on time travel and forming part of a panel on legal aspects of interstellar empires without faster-than-light travel. I also talked to loads of people and bought a 70s paperback edition of Shea & Wilson's Illuminatus books, which I haven't read before.
Today I finished and submitted a review essay, which is sort of work but fun too, especially since it's the first time I've been commissioned by a major newspaper to write something. And as…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2009
Dr. Isis made the 10,000th comment here on Aard earlier today! Flatteringly, she said that I had made half the women on the Internet lose their shit. I simply know not my own strength.
It took two years and almost ten months to get to 10,000. As her prize, I hereby offer to call the good doctor trans-Atlantic at a time to be agreed on and sing her the Queen song (naturally) of her choice.
*howls* "I was just a skinny lad, never knew no good from bad, but I knew life before I left my nursery..."
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2009The entry about the Fake Advertising Mom provoked a reaction I didn't see coming. I said that pregnancy and nursing changes a woman's body in plainly visible ways and that the fake moms in ads usually show no such signs, in addition to being too young to be realistic mothers of the children they're photographed with. This, to my mind, was a feminist observation.
I picked up feminism from my first wife who had been a women's-lib radical on the extreme left during the 70s. In that mode of thinking, feminists accept and celebrate the female body for what it is. Attempting to look like 20 when…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2009The 78th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Paddy, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. The next open slot is on 4 November. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2009
Autumn is starting to get nasty in Sweden, and immediately the Fake Advertising Mom pops up on billboards and in magazines. Sometimes she's even part of a Fake Advertising Family.
Here's what I mean. I don't claim 100% accuracy, but I believe I can usually tell on sight whether a woman has given birth and nursed a baby or not. It's part of the difference between girls and women. There is also the simple issue of at what age women usually have kids in the West. So when the travel agencies want to illustrate parenthood and show us a cute 7-y-o kid being held by a really pretty, pert, skinny…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2009
Last night somebody googled the phrase "martin rundqvist republikan" and ended up here on my blog. Note the K: this person probably didn't wonder if I'd vote for Sarah Palin. They wondered what I think about the Swedish constitution, which provides the country with a decorative king. Outside the US, "republican" means "anti-monarchist". And yes, I am an anti-monarchist. I think it's a disgrace that the Scandy countries, which are among the world's strongest democracies, are still symbolic monarchies. And I think it's deeply wrong that the hapless royals are born into their golden cage.
But…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2009I lost the battle against the wasp nest: no matter how many workers I vacuumed, it still hung on. And now our house is full of groggy young queen wasps. It seems that the last thing a wasp nest does before shutting down for good is discharge a bunch of queens who will hibernate and then start new nests come spring. But these queens are racing into a trap.
The nest has two main exits. One out into the chilly open air. The other into the comfy warmth of the Rundkvist household. And we haven't been able to locate and stop up the latter opening. So when one of these young ladies is set to leave…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2009I'll be at the ImagiCon 2 speculative fiction convention in the burbs of Stockholm on Saturday the 17th. I'm chairing a panel discussion on time travel and paradoxes at 15:00, and I'm on a panel about interstellar law at 21:00. Any Aard readers there, please make yourselves known!
[More blog entries about imagicon2, sf, sciencefiction, Sweden; imagicon2, sf, sciencefiction, Skarpnäck.]
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2009
I took Friday off from work and drove with my friend Anders to Avesta, an industrial town in Dalecarlia, where our friend Pär and his lovely wife, both teachers, have recently settled. We spent the afternoon and evening walking in the sunshine, admiring their house, eating like kings, listening to some pretty far-out and eclectic music (including Earth, Heino, Om, Demis Roussos and Sunn) and playing the Swedish 70s board game Marinattack. It's notable for coming with an electronic device that replaces dice and outcome tables. They kicked my ass five games in a row. The shame!
Then on…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2009
Small mounds consisting of burnt stone are a signature feature of Bronze Age settlement sites along the coasts of southern Sweden. They were the subject of my first academic publication in 1994, though I'd hardly even seen one, let alone dug one. This I have finally begun remedying today, when I did another day of volunteer digging with my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell.
Mattias and Roger started out as pioneer investigators of the Mesolithic archipelago that is now a bunch of hill tops in the southern part of inland Stockholm county. Their emphasis has shifted though: it's…