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 | April 25, 2016The Swedish Institute is, according to Wikipedia, a Government agency in Sweden with the responsibility to spread information about Sweden outside the country. One way the organisation does this is the Twitter account @sweden, which is handed over to a new Swede every week. This week it's me.
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2016Is there any HBTQ aware research in heterocyclic chemistry?
I don't like goat's cheese. As far as I'm concerned the goats could just stop making it.
Josh Homme always impresses me.
Ticking boxes for the upcoming fieldwork season, feels good. Landowners at two high-profile sites have given their permission. Both permit applications sent to the County Museum for checking prior to their submission to the County Archaeologist. Housing for the team booked at one site, and I have a good lead on housing at the other site too. Archive reports on last year's fieldwork almost done.
This pea soup has…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2016Slussen, "the Lock", an enormous 1930s concrete structure built to organise an 8-way road crossing in central Stockholm, is headed for replacement and the really big demolition bout is drawing near. Exciting! And an opportunity for looooads of really interesting urban contract archaeology!
In Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, the hero goes nuts and an hermit prays for his soul. In the Old Swedish translation, the hermit instead prays that Yvain will never bother him again.
Haha, fucking Swedes. Dude publishes an interesting paper in good English, except he consistently puts "even" when he means "…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2016 Torben Thomsen's tattoo
Torben Thomsen found this relief-decorated and gilded pendant in Hjørring municipality, northernmost Jutland. It was his first really old piece. Knight Ink Tattoo in Frederikshavn did the tattoo work on Torben's lower left leg. Torben's pendant is missing its loop, but his workmate Daniel Bach Morville has found the complete piece below at a nearby site.
The motif is a pair of antithetical sea horses. To date them, let's look at the animal art -- the two objects, not the tattoo. The tattoo artist has classicised the motif and gotten rid of a lot of specifically…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2016 14th century pilgrim's badge of St. Bridget found in the River Fyris at Uppsala.
Fornvännen 2015:3 is now on-line on Open Access.
Lars Larsson on an unusual Late Neolithic burial monument at the record-breaking 1st millennium site of Uppåkra.
Christina Fredengren on deposition of human and animal bodies in the waters of inland Uppland.
Lars Liedgren and Ingela Bergman on a previously unpublished 1921 excavation of a Late Medieval farmstead near Luleå.
Birgit Maixner on the confusing and counterproductive results of Norwegian counties interpreting heritage law regarding metal detector finds…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2016 Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90)
Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of Sir Richard Burton's 1855 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (in the public domain). Here Burton recounts his travels in the summer of 1853, when he disguised himself as a wandering Persian physician and performed the Muslim pilgrimage. At the time, if a non-Muslim was caught doing this, he would be lucky if he only ended up forcefully circumcised.
Burton is an amazing writer, with a keen eye for detail and fine cynical sense of humour. He comes across as a man without any…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2016 Two strap ends from the eponymous Borre ship grave. Image from Oluf Rygh's 1885 Norske Oldsager.
Metal detectorist Steffen Hansen has kindly given me permission to show you his tattoo sleeve. He found the strap-end at Øvre Eiker in Buskerud fylke, Norway, and had it tattooed along with other Norwegian examples of the Borre style. I haven't got a picture of his find, but you can see what they look like in the accompanying picture of a piece from the eponymous find at Borre in nearby Vestfold fylke. The tattoo was done by Mikael "Kula" Jensen of Radich Tattoo in Mjøndalen.
The Borre style is…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2016 Investigated a midden on the commuter train as I went into town for a doom metal gig.
Untouched WW2 resistance arms cache found in a cave near Bergen. Sadly no archaeological involvement. Everything dealt with by police explosives experts.
Greek Western heroine: Kalamata Jane.
So annoying when people write about patently incorrect beliefs held in the past or in far parts of the world as "knowledge".
They're going to drill cores of the limestone that fills the dino killer crater and look at what happened after the impact.
A car is a device that allows you to charge your phone using…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2016 Space Whale
The past two weekends were a lot of fun.
The Royal Technical College's orchestra and several combined student choirs from Sweden and Finland performed Giuseppe Verdi's 1874 Requiem, an intricate and operatic farewell to fellow composer Gioachino Rossini and poet Alessandro Manzoni. Hallwyl House: carving in the doorway between the ladies' drawing room and the Golden Salon.
Gig with King Khan and the Shrines. Imagine a tall, psychedelic, semi-nude, portly, Canadian Wilson Pickett of Indian extraction belting out soul rock with a band consisting of extremely enthusiastic…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2016Yesterday I learned about a cool new tradition among metal detectorists. They're having images of their favourite finds tattooed, often on the arm with which they hold the detector! Note that in Scandinavia these are generally objects that the finders have handed in to museums – they keep them only as tattoos. This is in line with the Danish way of regulating metal detectors: there the submitters of each year's ten best finds are invited to the Finds Oscars in Copenhagen and are publicly honoured by my colleagues.
Hugo Falck found this beautiful brooch in 2014 while collaborating with a…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2016Pretty groovy example of restaurant spelling the other day: "A là cartè".
”From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?”
I know I've said this before, but it is such a remarkable fact that it bears repeating. Dungeons & Dragons was designed by two members of Jehovah's Witnesses.
In library catalogues, books are sometimes categorised as "diss". It means that the librarians don't like them and you probably shouldn't read them.
Had a chat with…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2016Weird argument in the World Wildlife Fund's magazine for why Swedes shouldn't avoid buying palm oil.
"Sweden has such a small population that it doesn't matter to the environment whether we buy environmentally destructive palm oil or not. The big markets are in other parts of the world. But if we buy environmentally certified palm oil, then we get to have a voice in the discussion about palm oil production."
How would a small group of people buying certified oil have any impact on the market for uncertified oil? Makes no sense. I don't want those producers to cultivate any oil palms…
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2016Metal detectorist Dennis Fabricius Holm made a pretty sweet find yesterday: the third known Birka crucifix.
These little wonders of 10th century goldsmith work are named for the first find, made in 1879 when Hjalmar Stolpe excavated in the cemeteries of Birka near Stockholm. In addition to the crucifix grave 660 contained, among other things, two other fine silver filigree pendants and a bronze-capped iron wand that may have served pagan religious purposes.
Crucifix from grave 660 at Birka, Uppland, Sweden.
In 2012 Silke Eisenschmidt identified fragments of a second Birka crucifix among…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2016 Joan Crawford representing America on one of the four main doors to the Grand movie theatre in Stockholm.
If you block the Autobahn with droves of bananas, is that then ein Obstruktion?
Tim Minchin has a huge hit right now in Australia with a song urging a strangely reluctant cardinal to come home from the Vatican and answer some questions about the clergy's crimes against children in the 70s and 80s.
Enormous areas in Scandinavia don't seem to have been completely messed up by the inland ice! If we have any Neanderthal sites, then that's where they are.
Such an amazing night for…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2016One of the best pieces of economic advice I know is ”Don't throw good money after bad”. Or in other words, when you consider whether you should continue to invest in a project, don't let the sum you've already invested figure into your decision. To do so is known as the ”sunk cost fallacy”, and leads to ”escalation of commitment”. A good way to avoid this is to decide beforehand what your exit conditions will be, and then stick to them. A bit like saying “I'm going to play the slot machines until six o'clock or until I've lost $50, whatever comes first”.
Google Maps offers a beautiful real-…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2016 Arthur Machen (1863-1947)
Arthur Machen's 1895 book The Three Impostors, or The Transmutations, is a delightfully strange read. It consists of a short frame narrative interspersed with six standalone stories told inside the frame. Spoilers and musings follow.
First the background to the events, which the reader learns only in the sixth and last story inside the frame. The learned Dr. Lipsius is the leader of a secret Dionysiac cult in 1890s London, focused on sex, drugs and ritual murder. He recruits the young scholar Joseph Walters into the cult. After helping lure a victim to the cult HQ…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2016 My 2006 smartphone, a Qtek 9100
On 2 February 2006 I took delivery of my first smartphone, or handdator as I called it in my diary – “hand computer”. On the following day I got the machine on-line. It was a Qtek 9100, with a slide-out mechanical keyboard that I still really miss, a tiny screen, a stylus and a crappy camera. Since then I've had portable Internet access.
I was already a self-described “net head”, and a particular reason for me to get a smartphone was that I'd started blogging a few weeks previously: I wanted to be able to post no matter where I was. On 8 February, for…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2016 The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940.
I've decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I've been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important. Because wealth equals power.
I don't give a damn about the US primaries.
A brother of Queen Euphemia of Norway was Bishop of Cammin, whose cathedral is famous for a Danish casket from about AD 1000, decorated with Mammen style animal art.
The surname Garfunkel means "carbuncle, garnet" and is thus…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2016As with the bones from the 2014 fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Rudolf Gustavsson of SAU in Uppsala has again analysed the bones we found this year (report in Swedish here). And as expected, there are no human bones: this too is mostly food waste. The body parts represented indicate that trench D just inside the perimeter wall contained meal remains while trench F inside the south tower contained more butchery refuse.
The material is dominated by youngish pigs, a tell-tale marker of aristocratic housekeeping, followed by cattle and finally sheep/goat to a lesser proportion than in the 2014…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2016 "That's lovely sweetie, but can't we just go to bed now and have a good fuck?" (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm)
I wonder what kind of event lead to entire 20-metre dinosaurs becoming fossilised as articulated skeletons.
There's been a lot of psychological research into the mental differences between conservatives and lefties. Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain summarises it well up to 2012. And the refugee situation has really brought this out to me. I follow some conservatives here on Fb, and I happened to read an article in the Daily Torygraph yesterday. Many Conservatives truly…