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 7, 2009The seventy-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Place Odyssey. 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 less than two weeks, on 21 October. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2009
Most rune stones are written with the late 16-character futhark and date from the 11th century when the Scandies had largely been Christianised. Their inscriptions tend to be formulaic: "Joe erected the stone after Jim his father who was a very good man". But by that time, runic writing was already 900 years old. It's just that inscriptions in the early 24-character futhark are much less common. And when you find them, their messages are usually far less straight-forward.
My buddy Frans Arne Stylegar reports in a series of blog entries [1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] on the discovery, less than two…
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2009
I forgot to mention the variety show on Saturday night. It was headlined by comedian Robin Ince (you may have seen his MAGIC MAN DUNNIT clip) and offered a lot of funny and musical and skeptical and cynical acts of high standard. I was particularly impressed by high-brow rapper Baba Brinkman. Not only is he witty and knowledgeable, he also made me feel that hmm, rapping really can involve a lot of technical mastery. When I told him I like him not rapping about bitches and bling, he replied, "But I do, in other bits of my Darwin rhymes. I say that bling is peacock feathers evolved by sexual…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2009
I'm at The Amazing Meeting London, an Old World instance of the skeptical conferences organised by the James Randi Educational Foundation. (Or more correctly, I am waiting for breakfast at my threadbare Bayswater hotel, where I sleep in a basement closet.) I came to London Friday night and started off with a few social hours with other Swedish skeptics at a pub. Yesterday was the first of two conference days, and I've been making acquaintances left and right. Apart from the locals, I've met a lot of Norwegians and Americans. Among the locals, these days, is Rebecca Watson. She promised me to…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2009
I've been called in to help my friend Arne, retired art historian, whack a manuscript into shape. So the other day I drove down to the manor on Vikbolandet and spent 24 enjoyable hours there, writing and chatting and walking in the park.
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2009
It's always bittersweet to return to sites you've dug. I guess I'm particularly susceptible to this nostalgia since I tend to feel it very shortly after moving on from anything or any place. And since I usually only dig during the sunny season I remember my old excavations as summer country.
Two days ago I checked in with the boat inhumation cemetery at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Ãstergötland. Me & Howard Williams and his students dug there in 2005. The turf and flora have regenerated nicely over our trench and a flock of broad-snouted sheep now grazes on the cemetery hill. They seem to…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2009
My friend Eddie the pagan goldsmith has inadvertently discovered an unusual way to acquire a clean mink skeleton. Here's what you do.
Set some crayfish traps in a lake.
A mink will break into one of the traps to get at the crayfish, get stuck and drown.
When retrieving your traps with their catch, fail to find the one the mink has thrashed around in.
Since you have lost the trap, crayfish and other scavengers will have ample time to clean the mink's bones.
The following year, set the traps again along the same lake shore. When you retrieve them, find the trap you lost last year.
The mink's…
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2009
11-y-o Junior bought his first own album last Saturday: Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much. (My own first was Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward, bought at age 12 in '84 or '85). It's an excellent record once you've gotten used to Mika's queeny (and Queenish) style of singing: catchy studio pop. And Junior has this awesome "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" mishearing of one of the songs. When he told me about it and played me "By the Time" I couldn't hear it any other way either.
"By the time I'm dreaming
and you've crept out on me sleeping
I'm busy in the place for underwear"
What Mika actually…
aardvarchaeology | September 28, 2009
In 1995 a gold hoard was found at Vittene in Norra Björke parish, Västergötland. Its contents had been amassed over two centuries, and it was committed to the earth in the 3rd century AD. A fine book on the find and subsequent settlement excavations has recently been published and is available in full on-line.
Below is a picture of the Vittene hoard. Above is a picture of a replica of the hoard made of marzipan and gold leaf by Sören Elmqvist for the 1995 Christmas market at the county museum.
Thanks to Niklas Ytterberg for the tipoff.
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2009The seventy-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. 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 less than two weeks, on 7 October. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2009
I type this in the hotel lobby while waiting for the train just across the street that will take me to Brussels. The conference closed at 13, I had sandwiches with my colleagues and then set out again for the countryside south of town to grab me a geocache. On the Mergel ridge I saw a motte (an 11th/12th century fortification mound), and I suppose the remains of its bailey might also have been visible if I had entered the pasture it sits in. I've only seen one of those before, in Oxford.
Then I crossed the Jeker stream on a foot bridge by a mill and entered farmland. Apple orchards,…
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2009
Sculpture fragment from the Cathedral of St. Lambert in Liège.
Today's bus excursion took us up the river Maas/Meuse into Wallonia, Belgium's Francophone part, where our first stop was Liège. The city looks pretty crummy, I'm afraid, with a lot of dilapidated and dirty buildings. The ironworks (?) outside town are grotesque in their gargantuan size and run-down brutal ugliness. It's like a nightmare about the Ruhr. A must-see for industrial romantics.
In central Liège is a great big square that used to be the site of the Cathedral of St. Lambert. It got torn down 200 years ago, apparently…
aardvarchaeology | September 21, 2009
Yesterday's paper sessions offered eleven presentations. I almost fell asleep several times. This was not mainly because four of the papers were in German and French which I have a hard time understanding when spoken quickly. The main reason was that few of my colleagues know how to perform an engaging presentation. Yes, you need to perform it. So here are a few suggestions.
Never ever read a prepared text out loud. Speak from brief notes or a slide show. It is better to have five lines of summary text in ball-point pen on the back of your hand than a manuscript.
Do you have reason to…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2009A funny intermezzo caught me Saturday on the train from Brussels to Liège. Across the aisle, two young pretty lesbian couples were seated. And they spent most of the ride necking furiously. I suppose that as a het male I might have been expected to feel some kind of perturbation or arousal at the sight. But in fact I mainly experienced a sort of avuncular tenderness toward the young ladies. Their joy made me smile. Any desire these shapely wenches might have inspired was checked by the evident fact that they weren't interested in my kind. Then they got off (the train, you pervert) and left…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2009
Uppsala, at the roadside by the castle, Friday 18th at noon. Its unblinking eye was very clear.
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2009
Somebody calls you and you answer quite slowly: a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2009I like to travel light. My luggage for a five-day conference stay in the Netherlands barely fills a small back pack. Apart from what I wear and carry in my pockets, I've got:
Netbook computer + charger
Smartphone charger
Camera + charger + transfer cable. The travel camera is pretty small, but its memory card is an old clunky format that won't fit into the netbook's flash reader.
GPS navigator + batteries (gotta get some Maastricht geocaches)
Two paperback sf books + one work-related book, the new Valsgärde volume
Spare undies + socks, wash as needed
Spare t-shirts. This time I decided not…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2009Follow-up: in July last year I wrote about a giant vertebra that had been found in a lake in northern Sweden at 210 meters above sea level. The find spot hasn't been near the sea since the end of the latest ice age. This meant that the bone might be very old.
But already in October there was news in the matter. Zoologists determined that the bone belonged to a sperm whale, and a radiocarbon analysis pegged it at only about 100 years of age. So during the big whaling era someone took the vertebra to the lake and threw it in.
aardvarchaeology | September 18, 2009Musical styles can have really weird names. There's sauce music (salsa), meringue music (merengue), juvenile delinquent music (punk), record collection music (disco), LSD warehouse music (acid house), popular music (pop), you name it. But some of the most intensely loved musical styles have names that mean "copulation music".
"Jazz" was once a verb meaning "to fuck". Jazz music was originally played in the better class of New Orleans brothel, where men would listen to music before, well, getting down to some actual jazzing and jizzing.
Likewise with "swing". A verb meaning "to fuck". (Here…