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 | June 10, 2009A seminar in Stockholm tomorrow will treat the question, "What are the most important unanswered questions in the humanities and social sciences?". In my opinion, the most important ones are "How can peace, prosperity and democracy be established in countries where they are lacking?". And historian Arne Jarrick (whom I met last week at Alan Sokal's talk) agrees. In yesterday's Dagens Nyheter he's quoted as saying (and I translate),
To build a bridge you need technological knowledge. To bomb the bridge you need technological knowledge. But to understand why the bridge was bombed and how to…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2009Why are we here? Why do we live? What is the meaning of life? These questions are poorly phrased as neither "why" nor "meaning" has a distinct definition.
To begin with "why", it can refer either to the cause of something happening or the purpose for which something was done by an agent. Causality vs. teleology, to use big words. And in the present context, the question "why" can be dismissed for both senses of the word. Teleology: humans/animals/plants/protists are not given life for any particular purpose and there is no agency involved. Causality: the answer to the question "Why am I here…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2009
Kai and Anneli recently gave us a very welcome present: a cast of a lion mask from the Peerless Palace in Stockholm. North European Baroque is such a weird and lovely style. The wreck of the Vasa is a prime example, and there's a lot of it on the facades of houses in the Old Town too.
The Peerless Palace (Sw. Makalös) was on the spot currently occupied by the Carolus XII Plaza, within easy view of the Royal Castle across the water. It was built in the 1630s by Count Jacob De la Gardie who, among many other honours, was married to King Gustavus II Adolphus's old sweetheart Ebba Brahe. After…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2009The way I like to lead my life is basically Epicurean: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear as well as absence of bodily pain through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires." I live for fun. But I try to emphasise the social side of my modest pleasures: I like to have fun together with people I love, not at the expense of others. Call it the Golden Rule.
Now, my work is largely fun, but still I distinguish between work-fun and non-work-fun, because I am by character…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2009The sixty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. 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 29 July. 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 | June 3, 2009Sweden's secularisation process has been going on for about a century, usually pretty quietly, with the anti-Christian polemics of philosopher Ingemar Hedenius marking a brief period of open conflict in the 1950s.
As is the case in most European countries, Sweden's university system was born in the Middle Ages with the main aim to educate priests. Some of the older ones still have a Faculty of Theology. The other day another one of the National Agency for Higher Education's evaluations was published. They recently checked out the country's archaeology departments. Now they've done religion…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2009
From 1980, a television appearance by the brilliant Tom Lehrer, where he performs a song that never made it onto any of his records back in the day. (I hear it's on the CD re-issue, though.)
Via David Nessle.
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2009Living in a country that hasn't seen war for two centuries, and never having done military service, I'm completely baffled by war rapes and the post-war rapes that have become part of the cultures of certain African countries. Particularly the high incidence of child rape going on e.g. in Liberia and Congo.
The appeal of gambling I sort of understand.
The appeal of drugs and drink I sort of understand.
The appeal of corruption and personal enrichment I sort of understand.
And I sort of understand the strategic military value of demoralising the civilian population by ordering e.g. Japanese…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2009The 68th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Remote Central on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Tim before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2009A friendly Englishman who recently settled in southern Sweden wrote me to ask how a law-abiding metal detectorist should go about getting a permit to pursue their hobby in this country.
The first thing to understand is that the Swedish system makes it effectively impossible to metal detect on a whim while vacationing (unless you're a nighthawk). Paperwork, overburdened county officials and long waits are always part of the process. A sustained metal detector hobby is only really possible if you stick to one or two län counties and establish a good relationship with the County Archaeologist…
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2009Magnus Ljunggren has a lovely little piece about two Russian writers in today's Svenska Dagbladet.
1. In fiction, a man who doesn't exist. Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (1894-1943), a Latvian Jew, wrote the satirical novella Lieutenant Kijé (1927) about a non-existent military officer who gets entered into the rolls through a misunderstanding and rises through the ranks to general.
2. In reality, a body of fiction ascribed to a man who writes nothing. Anatolii Surov (d. 1987) published several successful plays and received the Stalin award twice, all on the strength of work that he stole from…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2009I just got home from Alan Sokal's talk at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the outskirts of Stockholm. He was on the same stage where astronaut Christer Fuglesang spoke a year ago. The headline was "What is Science and Why Should We Care?".
Sokal's reply to his first question was, briefly, that science is to use reason and observation when approaching factual matters pertaining to any aspect of the single real world we live in. It's thinking clearly and respecting the evidence. Not only natural scientists proceed in this manner. Sokal also mentioned historians, plumbers and detectives…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2009[More blog entries about health, ears, cold; hälsa, öron, förkylning.]
When she has a cold, my 5-y-o daughter often suffers temporary hearing loss. Her ears don't get infected, there's no pain or fever -- she just can't hear very well, sometimes for weeks. The reason is that the lining of her eustachian tubes becomes swollen, obstructing them, and then fluid leaks out of the walls of the middle ear, flooding it and putting a damper on her audio. These days Swedish doctors try to avoid putting drainage pipes through kids' ear drums. Instead the excellent Dr. Claes Wibom (who's now treating…
aardvarchaeology | May 25, 2009Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers ("muggles", in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they're looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2009A headline caught my eye: "Archaeology in the Struggle for Jerusalem". As usual when archaeology is used for political ends, it is actually subservient to written history in this case.
In the Bustan neighbourhood of the Silwan precinct in East Jerusalem, the municipality of Jerusalem has ordered 88 buildings torn down. Most are inhabited by Palestinians, most were built without a permit, most can be expected to sit on top of interesting archaeology. But not just any cool anonymous Prehistoric stuff for us nerds: the municipality wants to make an national archaeological park of the area to…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2009Three of my favourite SciBlings -- Afarensis, John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts and John Lynch of Stranger Fruit -- have left the Mothership to set out on their own. All had been with Sb since 2006, none explained quite why they left. Find them at their new sites:
Afarensis
John Lynch: A Simple Prop
John Wilkins: Evolving Thoughts
Update 28 May: Doc Bushwell's Chimp Refuge just left too. Check out their new site!
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2009
A lesson in Swedish from the mall at Sickla.
Last = noun from the verb lasta, "to load".
In = in
Fart = noun from the verb fara, "to travel", cf. "wayfarer" and "fare thee well".
Load-in-travel. Delivery entrance.
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2009The sixty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. 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 15 July. 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 | May 20, 2009On 16 April I wrote about an evaluation of archaeology programs offered at Swedish universities and colleges. Now Aard regular Ãsa reports at the Ting & Tankar blog on the results of in-depth evaluations of certain programs that were judged to be of iffy quality (source1, source2).
Three programs have been issued warnings by the National Agency for Higher Education:
The Mediterranean archaeology PhD program in Gothenburg
The osteology PhD program in Lund
The osteology MA program in Visby
All the warnings are due to inadequate quantity and quality of teaching staff per student. Two PhD…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2009
An issue that has followed me through my career is the fight against pretentious jargon and extreme epistemological relativism in the humanities. The latter is an old idea from the sociology of science which holds that scientific knowledge does not approximate truth about the world, but is instead a kind of agreement among scientists: knowledge is "socially constructed". As a very young and angry grad student, during Scandy archaeology's worst infatuation with this mode of thought, I was heartened to learn about physicist Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax upon the hip post-modernist journal Social Text…