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 | September 17, 2009
In a somewhat less subculture-savvy move, an Internet service provider in Gothenburg has chosen to call itself GothNet. Nothing on their web site suggests that they have any inkling what "Goth" means to most English-speaking people today.
The etymology is complicated. First there was a bunch of Germanic-speaking tribal groups in the 1st Millennium AD: Goths, Götar, Geatas, Gutar, all with names meaning "spillers", that is, "ejaculators", that is, "men". Then during the Renaissance the High Medieval building style with the pointy arches got called "Gothic" as a put-down. (Then Gothenburg-Gö…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2009
Here's a piece of fragmentology. In the 19th century a brooch (inset) was found at Vistena in Allhelgona parish, Ãstergötland. It's a copper-alloy piece decorated with embossed silver sheet panels in the Nydam style, approx. AD 375-450. In 2008 a member of my metal detector team found part of a similar brooch at Sättuna in Kaga parish, a few tens of kilometers east of Vistena. Apparently we're dealing with a regional metalworking tradition. The complete brooch measures 57 mm across the head plate, the fragment 42 mm.
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2009
Yesterday I joined my friend Dendro-Ãke, his cousin and their charming wives to check out an example of an old exotic building technique near my home. On Skutudden Point near Baggensstäket (an area I keep writing about, it's just full of history) are a number of little 19th century buildings along the shore, and at least one of them is a cordwood house, Sw. kubbhus. This building method enjoyed some popularity in Sweden (and a much greater one in Norway) in the 19th century and until the end of WW1. It's a bit like brick masonry, only you use cordwood instead of bricks and clay daub instead…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2009Dear Reader, if you are in the Netherlands, in England or in Finland and you either a) want to meet me, or b) want to avoid meeting me, I have some important information for you. I am planning to visit those countries over the coming seven weeks. Beware or drop me a line. You have been warned/encouraged.
19-23 September. Maastricht. Sachsensymposium.
2-5 October. London. The Amazing Meeting.
29-31 October. Helsinki. Nordic Bronze Age symposium.
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2009
My wife and I made a short mushrooming excursion to Lake Lundsjön after lunch. Little more than half an hour in the woods garnered us only four species, but huge amounts of one: velvet bolete. We went home early simply because we didn't need more mushrooms. I'm stewing them with cream. Never had shingled hedgehog before.
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Red russula, Tegelkremla, Russula decolorans
Shingled hedgehog, Fjällig taggsvamp, Sarcodon imbricatus
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2009
On my way to the Library of the Academy of Letters today I spied something unusual. Somebody on the second floor of Storgatan 30 is having pigeon trouble. They've studded the window ledge with nails and stuck a plastic owl to the front of the house.
Those owls are pretty popular. My mom once found one washed up on the seashore near her summer house.
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2009
I never was much of a game console nut. My video game crazes mostly played out on the PC. But I did play the Atari in the 70s, the C64 in the 80s and the NES and SNES in the early 90s, when I wrote for Nintendo mags and borrowed the hardware from my employers. The SNES was the last console I paid any attention to.
11-y-o Junior loves all kinds of video games, particularly on-line multiplayer ones like Roblox and Runescape. But he's also installed emulator software on the PC and played a lot of old games that originally ran on machines he's never actually seen. He's got a Wii which allows him…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2009The seventy-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Ad hominin. 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 on 7 October. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2009
When I left my PhD student office at the Museum of National Antiquities I rescued a couple of angel wing begonias. One has recently been joined in its pot by spontaneously appearing yellow fungus. Today four sizeable mushrooms popped up! And Dear Reader William identified them: they're Yellow Houseplant Mushrooms, Leucocoprinus birnbaumii. That's an eminently sensible name for a mushroom, by the way.
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2009My friend Tor reports, "Complete Heyting algebras are a central object of study in pointless topology".
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2009Back in April of 2008 I mused that strictly chronologically speaking, at 36 I was already a mid-career academic since I started working at 20 and retirement age is currently 65. I'm still years from the age when people get academic jobs in my discipline, 41, but anyway.
Yesterday I had two experiences that opened my eyes to the fact that I am now an archaeological dad. By that I mean that there are at least two fields where work I once did is no longer the Stand der Forschung, but where vigorous new studies refer to and build upon my old stuff. I am a member of the parental generation in…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2009Yesterday I had a clear illustration of how the brain determines the direction of a noise. I was listening to a podcast in ear buds when my wife asked me something. I took one bud out and talked to her for a while as the podcast continued to chatter in my left ear. Then the cordless phone rang. And I kept spinning around, trying to hear what direction the phone was in, but I couldn't! You need two ears to pinpoint direction just as you need two eyes for stereoscopic vision.
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2009The 75th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Ad hominin on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Ciarán. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. The next open slot is on 7 October 23 September. Drop me a line!
aardvarchaeology | September 6, 2009
Played the new German board game Finca that my friend Eddie the heathen goldsmith brought along. It's an abstract system lightly dressed up in a story about harvesting and distributing fruit and greens on Mallorca of all things. Good fun though! Then we played Blokus, always fun too.
Took a sunny six-hour bike trip with my 11-y-o son, had kebab & fries, found three geocaches, failed to find two. It's great when your kid is big enough that he can keep up for hours like that! Quality time.
Went to Circus Brazil Jack with my 6-y-o daughter. As usual a mix of the semi-desperately cheezy and…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2009Visa större karta
Here are two pieces of convoluted Scandy and English etymology that converge in my head.
"Marshmallow" was originally the common name of a plant, Althaea officinalis (Sw. läkemalva), from which a thickening agent was made. This agent was added to meringue foam to produce the toastable sweet pillows we all know and love. And so the sweet took over the name of the marsh-dwelling mallow plant.
On GÃ¥lö, the peninsula where I helped with excavations yesterday, is a place called Kärrmaräng. This means "Marsh Lagoon Meadow", but the Swedish word for meringue is maräng, so "…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2009The Sb Overloards have a poll up to learn what y'all think about the upcoming Sb on-line forum reform.
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2009
So I spent the day on GÃ¥lö, happily digging & sieving a square meter on a Middle Neolithic shore site 25 meters above current sea level that my friend Roger found two years ago. I haven't dug that period since 1993 when I spent almost the entire fieldwork season on the classic Bollbacken site outside VästerÃ¥s. (I did however write a paper about another site of the era in the early 00s.) Today I found knapped quartz and basalt and granite (!) and a lot of small potsherds, one of which has the Pitted Ware culture's signature pits and comb-stamp decoration. Mattias found the best…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2009
The 6th Aardvarchaeology blogmeet was a friendly three-hour affair with good food, good drink and good company. 'Twas me, Kai, MÃ¥rten, Per G, Sigmund, Thinker and Tor, and an excellent time was had at Akkurat.
Here's the historical record of blogmeets past. The archaeological record is, due to modern waste-disposal habits, sadly lost.
Wirström's, March '07.
Wirström's, September '07.
Wirström's, January '08.
Akkurat, September '08.
Akkurat, March '09.
Akkurat, September '09.
In the interest of consistency -- three blogmeets at each tavern -- we must find a new venue for the seventh…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2009
People in the Lake Mälaren area were on to Neolithisation immediately, with agriculture and stock breeding and pottery and sedentary life, when the package became available around 4000 cal BC. But then they said "oh, screw it" and spent most of the the Middle Neolithic as seal hunters and fishers again. My Stone Age bros Roger Wikell and Mattias Pettersson have descended from their Mesolithic heights (post-glacial land uplift and shore displacement, remember) and are now looking at Middle Neolithic sites in locations that were quite extreme at the time -- way, way out in the Baltic. And you…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2009On the commuter train the other day I suddenly realised that I was seeing three rather prim middle-aged middle-class people reading novels, and that all three were genre fiction.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Douglas Adams 1980. (science fiction)
The Man in the High Castle. Philip K. Dick 1962. (alternate history)
Människohamn. John Ajvide Lindqvist 2008. (contemporary fantasy)
It feels like my geek ghetto has been turned inside out and encompasses the entire universe except its own original tiny volume.
About the creationist text ads that show up in the rightmost column. I…