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 1, 2009This past Sunday the Department of Archaeology at the University of Lund organised a public debate about creationism and archaeology. One of the invited speakers was Young Earth creationist Mats Molén, who should not in my opinion have been lent academic credibility in that manner. Universities should teach students about pseudoscience and why it is not science, but they should not let pseudoscientists teach.
Lund is far from my home and I didn't attend the event. But I wrote the non-creationist participants beforehand and suggested that they familiarise themselves with creationist debate…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2009
Logged four geocaches. One helped me discover a huge vestigial highway overpass. Highway 222 was built in the early '70s, and at one spot west of Nacka high school the road engineers thought that they might one day want to build a four-lane highway crossing the new one. They haven't so far. I rode my bike up this little dead-end road, Birkavägen, and onto the unpaved ground under the great airy concrete vault. On the other side there were just woods with a seldom-used path.
Went to the movies, watched Brüno. Found it equally embarassing and almost as funny as Borat. Been thinking about it…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2009
Stacy L. Mason is an Aard regular and a talented artist. Check out his awesome interpretation of the Swedish tardigrades that are going to Phobos!
In other news, I have issues with the lyrics of the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas podcast's theme song, a fine ska tune by 7 Seconds of Love.
I'm gonna flip out like a ninja
'Cause that's what ninjas do
I'm gonna flip out like a ninja
And you should flip out too
The thing that throws me here is the word "because". When deciding on important matters such as whether or not to flip out, Dear Reader, I feel that a person should have a stronger justification…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2009
Phobos-Grunt ("soil") is a planned Russian sample return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. It may launch in less than two months. On board will among other things be the L.I.F.E. experiment, a small canister full of hardy micro organisms, designed by the US Planetary Society. If all goes well, those microdaddies will go to Phobos and back, and then biologists will be able to compare them to their stay-at-home buddies to learn what the environment out there in interplanetary space really does to an Earth creature. Or to a creature from another planet who might once have been thrown into…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2009Quoth Overlord Erin,
In the next three to four weeks, we'll be creating and unveiling a user registration program ... This will allow users to sign in, create a profile, track discussions they're interested in, customize their content, and interact with one another directly. We will also be introducing other benefits for registered users such as entry into prize drawings and possible rewards for commenting. ... registration will be optional at least to start, so no need to worry about readers who don't want to register being unable to comment.
... Some of the features we're looking into…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2009
I'm writing this on the train home from Lidköping on Lake Vänern in Västergötland province. I've spent a pleasant day discussing an interesting fieldwork project with colleagues. Gothenburg PhD student dynamic duo Anneli Nitenberg and Anna Nyqvist Thorsson have been working for years on the island of KÃ¥llandsö, famous mainly for Läckö Castle, and now they're doing something really audacious: they're digging a major barrow on the island's southern shore, diameter ~20 meters. Badgers have threatened to destroy it, and so the ladies got an excavation permit and ample funding from the…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2009The seventy-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Natures/Cultures. 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 23 September. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2009
From Aard regular CCBC, a heritage management conundrum to ponder.
This is a curious situation that I heard about on metafilter.com. I have included some of the links.
Near Kaufdorf, Switzerland there is an auto junkyard that was in use from the 1930s to 1970. It has become overgrown with various forest flora and people have found it an interesting place to take photos. Recently, the Swiss government has decreed the place an environmental hazard and says that it must be cleared and paved to prevent fluids from seeping into the ground. Many people have protested on the grounds that:
This is…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2009The 74th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Natures/Cultures tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Adam. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2009
[More blog entries about Sweden, photography, manor; Närke, Askersund, foto, herrgård.]
My part-time employers, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, sometimes receive rather hefty donations. This is how they came to own Stjernsund manor near Askersund in the province of Närke / Nericia. (Don't confuse it with Christopher Polhem's early industrial centre Stjärnsund in Dalecarlia.)
Stjernsund received its säteri manorial charter in 1637. The original buildings were replaced by the current neo-Classical structures shortly after 1800. Stjernsund then belonged to members of the Bernadotte…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2009The Department of Archaeology at the University of Lund is organising a panel debate about creationism on 30 August under the heading "Archaeology, the Bible and Charles Darwin -- a debate about evolution, creationism and archaeological evidence". On the panel are Neolithic scholar Kristina Jennbert, liberal ex-arch-bishop Karl. G.H. Hammar, author and polyglot philologist Ola Wikander and young-Earth creationist Mats Molén. I am not happy at all with this. The university shouldn't lend credibility to pseudoscientists like Molén by inviting them to public debates. He is in no way…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2009In Nazi Germany and its occupied territories there were many ways to get thrown into an extermination camp. But Friedrich Marby broke some kind of record: he was sent to Dachau for publishing too silly ideas about runes. He survived.
The Nazis themselves were no strangers to occultism, particularly Heinrich Himmler, whose neo-Pagan religious movement I've touched upon before. Movements similar to today's New Age, neo-paganism and occultism flourished in the early 20th century. But Marby was too much even for Himmler: he invented runic aerobics.
Marby's ideas took off from the cosmic and…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2009Daryl Gregory has published a number of very good short stories over the past few years, notably a few science fiction pieces based on neuropsychiatry. So I was very keen to read his first novel, Pandemonium (Ballantine/Del Ray 2008). Genrewise it's modern fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a world much like ours where certain things happen that appear to be magical. As a consequence, the course of post-WW2 US history is different at some points.
The central fantastical idea in the novel is that humanity is haunted by a number of disembodied spirits that can possess people. Each…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2009My dear friend and fellow archaeo-blogger Ãsa M. Larsson of Ting & Tankar has sent her PhD thesis off to the printers! This she has done with her supervisor's blessing, which in Sweden means that she is for all practical purposes a PhD now. The viva is just a ritual and your committee can't influence the thesis since it's already been printed.
Ãsa's will take place at 1300 hours on Friday 18 September, in the Geijer auditorium, building 6, Humanities Centre, Engelska Parken, Uppsala, Sweden. Meet me there. As an Aardvarchaeology exclusive, here's the abstract of Ãsa's as yet not even…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2009Sean B. Carroll's latest book has been sitting on my reading shelf (and been read by my wife) for over four months, but now I've finally read it. Remarkable Creatures is a collection of mini-biographies of people who have made important discoveries in evolutionary biology.
I won't mention names, but we've got both of the scientists who discovered evolution, the guy who discovered mimicry, the man who found the first Homo erectus fossils on Java, the man who discovered the Cambrian Burgess shale with its soft-part fossils, the man who found the first dinosaur nests, the father and son team…
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2009My son just got back from a happy week on Hallands Väderö, a small island nature reserve off the southwestern coast of Sweden. It reminds me of my own visit there at about his age and the bird ring I found.
We were staying in BÃ¥stad on the mainland for a week, and I remember having a lot of fun despite my parents having a number of violent tearful fights. The worst of them got sparked when I complained about how boring my visit to Hallands Väderö had been: my dad was angry with me for complaining, my mom defended me, and soon they were fighting again -- so I thought it was my fault. And…
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2009I love black tea, and by that I mean brews from leaves of Camellia sinensis and C. s. assamica, nothing else, milk and sugar please.
Earl Grey is basically Assam flavoured with oil of bergamot, a citrus fruit. It's OK if there's no plain tea. But many café employees believe that Earl Grey is plain tea.
Sometimes I drink honeybush which is kind of nice, but that's another plant and nothing compared to real tea. I don't like rooibos much.
Here are my favourite teas.
Assam CTC. This is Crushed, Torn and Curled Assamica. Dark, strong, the main ingredient in "English breakfast".
Yunnan (Swedes,…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2009The seventy-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. 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 23 September. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2009Did you notice something funny about the Google logo yesterday? It was full of falling stars. This marked the maximum of this year's Perseid meteor shower. Every year about this time, Earth moves through the exhaust cloud left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. When gravel and sand from the comet enters our atmosphere the grains burn brightly, looking like shooting stars. The meteor shower, that has been known for over 2000 years, looks like it originates in the constellation named for the Greek hero Perseus. But Swift-Tuttle itself wasn't observed until 1862!
Last night before bed time me and…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2009One of my pastimes is writing on Wikipedia. It's almost unavoidable since I use the encyclopedia daily and keep running into stuff to correct -- facts, spelling, stylistic mishaps. In the past, though, I've been really discouraged when trying to improve the articles about Falun Gong (a.k.a. Chinese Scientology). They used to be a battleground between Chinese Communist Party loyalists and Falun Gong devotees, both sides trying to cram as much propaganda into the articles as possible. Then the FGers managed to get the CCP guys banned from editing, which was excellent in itself. Unfortunately it…