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 | July 17, 2009Today I didn't make any effort to entertain the kids until mid-afternoon. I was busy filling in some gaps and writing the last piece of text for my Ãstergötland manuscript, an entry for the gazetter at the end of the book. It's been my main project for almost four years. What remains now is fiddling with details (bibliography, figure numbering and captions, test-reader comments, read-through and final copy edit) and collecting/making illustrations.
Regna and Skedevi parishes
In northernmost Ãstergötland, far from the plains belt, is Lake Regnaren whose surface is 60 meters above current…
aardvarchaeology | July 16, 2009In the West we shake our heads, and very rightly so in my opinion, at sharia, Islamic law rooted in the culture of 7th century AD Arabia. This is the body of thought that leads to judicial stonings and mutilations to this day.
The legislative assemblies of Ireland and Lithuania, each just a short boat ride from Swedish shores, have recently shown that the mindset they cultivate is certainly not that of AD 700. They are aiming for Old Testament times, 700 BC or earlier.
In Ireland, blasphemous speech is now illegal. "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2009The seventy-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Neuroanthropology. 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. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2009
Courtesy of my niece-in-law in Hangzhou, here's a piece of plastic hong shao rou, ç´çè, red braised pork, intended as a cell phone decoration. Yum!
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2009
In early May (I was <this> close to capitalising "Early" because I write about archaeological periods all the time.) metal detectorists on Bornholm, Denmark, rediscovered one of the earliest-documented find spots of guldgubbar. These are tiny embossed gold foils depicting people: usually a single man, sometimes an embracing man and woman, less frequently a single woman. They are a diagnostic artefact type of the Vendel Period's elite manor sites (AD 530-790). A cool thing about the new find is that is contains gold bracteates as well, which suggests that we are dealing with one of the…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2009The 72nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Neuroanthropology tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Greg. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2009
I'm now in that state of summer leisure mixed with the responsibility of providing entertainment for the kids that causes a man to forget what day it is of the week. And so a week's fun is no longer restricted to its last two days. But I have done nothing grandiose lately: mainly pottered about and enjoyed being reunited with my lady wife after her recent visit to the in-laws.
Anyway, Friday and Saturday were largely taken up by housework of the interior decoration kind. My dad likes to suggest grandiose changes to our house and incite my wife into supporting his ideas, but as he also…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2009Lurker:
"In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively."
From this follows that a de-lurk is an opportunity for shy regular readers to make their presence known. Please tell us something about yourself, and about what you'd like to read more of here! Even if you're not shy at all.
Extra kudos to people who de-lurked already at the first Aard de-lurk or even at the Salto Sobrius regulars roundup of March '06.
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2009
KÃ¥reholm manor on the Slätbaken inlet in Ãstergötland, home of my friends the Danielsson family.
In the 1950s there was a company (maybe several?) in Sweden whose business was to fly around rural areas and take aerial photographs of farms, mills, churches and small factories. Employees in pilot uniforms would then ride around in limousines and sell copies to the landowners. For an extra fee you could get yours hand-tinted by a pilot's wife in the suburb next to Bromma airport.
The company didn't sell the negatives, and for most sites they didn't make a sale at all. So the company archives…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2009
Saturday me and the kids went on an unusual package tour. First we took the 1903 steam ship Mariefred from Stockholm to Mariefred, and got to visit the engine room while the machine was working. Mariefred is a small town on Lake Mälaren whose name preserves that of Pax Mariae, one of the last monasteries founded in Sweden before the Reformation. It is home to one of Sweden's liveliest steam railroad societies which runs a narrow-gauge railroad with a plethora of lovely locomotives and wagons. We saw an amateur musical played at the old railway station, with the actors making entrances and…
aardvarchaeology | July 3, 2009Today is my last day as a daycare customer, provided that my views on having a third child don't change radically one day. I've enjoyed the fine service of the Igelboda daycare centre for six or seven years straight, but come autumn, Juniorette will become a 0th grade schoolgirl. She's not yet six years old but already an avid reader. And she's an experienced public speaker after over a year as a daycare representative on the school's environmental board. Spatially speaking, the change will be negligible as her new classroom is in another building on the same school grounds.
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2009The seventieth 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. The next open hosting slot is on 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2009Dear Reader Tom Stinnett alerted me to a really doom-laden article about Sweden in yesterday's Guardian. Says Ruben Andersson (apparently a Swedish expat and anthropologist),
Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats - the equivalent of the BNP - are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more. ... Sweden's homemade financial meltdown of the 1990s ... finally killed off the dream. Poverty was added to the pessimism. Savage cuts…
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2009I really like the spam letters I get with the subject line "Hello Dear". Sometimes the spammer is even named Hello Dear. Here's the latest example.
Hello dear
how are you today i hope that every things is OK with you as is my pleasure to contact you after viewing your profile which really interest me in having communication with you if you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what happened in future. i will be very happy if you can write me back for easiest communication and to know more about each other.i will send you my picture when i receive…
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2009The Rundkvist family's aging computer collection is in a sad state.
Our newest machine is also the only one that's still working flawlessly. A little 2008 LG netbook, it runs Win XP and Ubuntu linux and is mainly used by Junior as a gaming machine. When travelling, my wife and I like to bring it along for its handy dimensions and slight weight, but the dinky screen doesn't lend itself to everyday computing.
My dear 2005 Dell laptop, on which I type these lines, is barely holding together. Its recently renewed Win XP installation is flaky, booting up with an arcane error message and unable to…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009Afarensis left to go solo, but starting today we can instead enjoy the evolutionary anthro goodness of The Primate Diaries right here on Sb! Pop on over and give Eric some of that bonobo group-cohesion-reinforcing lovin'.
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009An idle thought struck me. Let's say you're on the latitude of Northern Europe and you've become a locavore, someone who avoids foodstuffs that must be transported far from their production site. Let's also say that you don't like greenhouses. And finally, let's say you're hooked on coffee or tea. Is there a caffeine source that can be grown outdoors in Northern Europe?
Most psychoactive substances only occur in a small group of closely related plants. But caffeine pops up in widely divergent branches of the floral kingdom. Does anybody know of a caffeine-producing plant that, say, a Dane or…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009Current Archaeology's July issue offers a lot of good reading, of which I particularly like the stories on human origins (see below) and garden archaeology at Kenilworth Castle. But I have two complaints.
First point of criticism. The editors of CA have this weird habit of doing "media tie-ins" without any clear indication of authorship. In the past three issues were excerpts from a forthcoming book by Barry Cunliffe. They weren't billed as written by Cunliffe. Instead you got the impression that a nameless writer had read his book manuscript and paraphrased it for the magazine. "Cunliffe…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2009The 71th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Afarensis on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to the bloggin' australopithecine. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!