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 | May 18, 2009
Here's me and my skeptical homies outside the Vasa museum last Wednesday: Manuel Paz-y-Mino from Peru and Massimo Polidoro from Italy.
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2009The 67th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Get your submissions to Sam before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes! And hey, hey, hey -- have you considered wearing a bone through your nose?
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2009
Moving into a house has conferred a number of unforeseen advantages. The first one I discovered was that I now have a continuing relationship with the sky again, something I really only had before during my scant two years in student housing during my late teens. I see the stars and moon in the evenings, I see the sunset, I perceive the weather much more clearly. I'm looking forward to borrowing a telescope from Jonathan or Pat, come autumn.
The second advantage is a closer relationship with the vegetation. There is now fresh greenery outside the windows where recently I saw only bare…
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2009I just started investigating publishing options for my book manuscript and got my first rejection letter. That is, I apparently hadn't described the book very well, and the publisher rejected a manuscript I'm not in fact writing.
Said I, "The book's about elite settlements in late-1st Millennium Scandinavia and its working title is 'Mead-Halls of the Eastern Geats'".
Said they, "No thanks, we mainly publish prehistoric archaeology, not Medieval history, and not much about Scandinavia".
Replied I, "Err, actually, the 1st Millennium is Prehistory. In Scandinavia, that is. We don't have any…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2009From my Australian friend Ian I got a good book, Inga Clendinnen's 2003 Dancing with Strangers. It's an account of one of world history's most absurd situations.
Imagine a tropical continent inhabited exclusively by fisher-hunter-gatherers at a low population density for tens of thousands of years. They're isolated from the rest of humanity. There is not a single permanent building on the continent. Nobody ever wears clothes. Nobody has ever heard of agriculture or stock breeding. Now watch a fleet of colonisation ships from an early industrial society arrive at the continent's south-east…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2009Italian skeptical star Massimo Polidoro is on a lecture tour of northern Europe. He spoke in the Netherlands last Friday, and here's the remaining schedule:
Mon 11 May. Gothenburg, Sweden.
Tue 12 May. Stockholm, Sweden.
Wed 13 May. Uppsala, Sweden.
Fri 15 May. Tallinn, Estonia.
Sat 16 May. Tartu, Estonia.
Sun 17 May. Helsinki, Finland.
Thu 21 May. Hamburg, Germany.
For details, see Polidoro's web site.
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2009
On 30 April I asked, "Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length of your education significantly different from that of the parent in question?" As of 7 May, I had 20 responses that covered all three parameters I asked for.
Proportion of respondents who have a significantly longer education than their parent: 55%
Median difference of age at first child for the entire population: 5 years
Median difference of age at first child for respondents whose education is significantly longer/…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2009Anglophones find it really funny that one of Sweden's oldest towns is named Sick Tuna -- spelled Sigtuna. However, -tuna has nothing to do with fish, being instead a cognate of Eng. town and Ge. Zaun. It has something to do with enclosed areas. As a reply to a question from my friend Per Vikstrand, here's a snippet about these place names from the Migration Period chapter of my book manuscript about political geography in 1st Millennium Ãstergötland.
Of the place-name categories in Ãstergötland suggested as indicating a status above the ordinary, only one is likely to have been productive…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2009The readers of popular archaeology magazines have a much more international and escapist view of the subject than most professionals. Indeed, in the popular perception, one of archaeology's defining characteristics is that its practitioners travel to exotic locales on a regular basis. In fact, professional archaeologists usually only work in one or two regions each, usually located near their offices. So if an archaeologist does travel abroad to do fieldwork, she is likely to go repeatedly to a single place for years and have little knowledge of other countries, let alone other continents.…
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2009
I've filed the Sättuna excavation report with the State Board of National Antiquities, the County Archaeologist's office and the County Museum. And I've put it on-line at archive.org. Check it out if you're into the Late Mesolithic! We didn't get much data on the 6th century elite settlement.
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2009
It's been more than two years since the last time I hosted the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. Now it's my turn again with number 66!
Our first submission is a piece from Anne of the Spittoon blog about a recently published ginormous study of the population genetics of modern Africans. Africa is the part of the globe where people are most diverse since we started out there and have had time to diversify. Can you imagine those hundreds of thousands of years when all the planet's Homo sapiens lived in Africa and hadn't started to explore the rest of the world?
Razib at Gene Expression offers…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2009
Lately I've been listening a lot to Damn!'s fourth album, Let's Zoom In, that was released last year. Damn! is an unfortunately namned soul/funk octet from Malmö in southern Sweden, mostly known as a backing band for rapper Timbuktu. Excellent stuff, among the best music the country has to offer! Though the album's main single played in the live clip above is a shouting-blues type of thing, most of it is dominated by ultra-smooth Curtis Mayfield style falsetto singing. And there's a lot of kraftwerkesque vocoder on it too.
As I explained to my wife yesterday, a vocoder is a beautiful thing…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2009I intentionally stay away from Twitter. Too many internet-related things already fracture my concentration and keep me from reading books. I go only so far as to update my Facebook status a few times a week.
But for those of you who have made Twitter part of your lives, or would like to try it, check out the new Sb Twitter feed.
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2009
Spent the day metal detecting for Thomas Englund at the battlefield of Baggensstäket, anno 1719 (as blogged about before: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4). This was my third time there, and the first time I've helped on the northern half of the area across the water from where I live. Thomas found musket and pistol balls. I picked up an 18th century coat button and loads of steenkeenggg aluminium bottle tops, and saw an abandoned tree house. I'm particularly interested in the pre-battle finds that are starting to accumulate.
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2009My buddy from the Swedish Skeptics, author Peter Olausson, reports on a recent visit to the Ekehagen prehistoric reenactment centre in Västergötland.
Ekehagen Prehistoric Village
By Peter Olausson
In Ãsarp near Falköping, in a landscape littered with passage tombs, you'll find Ekehagen. Founded in 1983, the centre has a number of houses built to show what Prehistoric life was like in Scandinavia, from huts of the Mesolithic to a farm of the Middle Iron Age (no Vikings).
Note: This is not a museum. Walking around on one's own and studying the buildings etc. might work for people who…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the local Walpurgis Night bonfire, met loads of neighbours old and new.
Played Abalone, Tigris & Euphrates and Qwirkle with Kai and other friends.
Went to a lovely dinner at the home of my friends Mattias & Lina.
Took a morning bike ride and walk in the woods to log a geocache that had appeared…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2009My dad had me (his firstborn) when he was 28. I had my first kid when I was 26. I'm a second-generation university graduate, first generation PhD.
Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length of your education significantly different from that of the parent in question?
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2009I'm trying out a new side-bar widget from PostRank. It's intended to grab browsing readers and send them on from wherever they enter the blog to other posts that have recently proved popular. Whaddayathink?
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2009A recent press release from the University of Lund includes a confusing contradiction. Summarising Dr. Geraldine Thiere's recent doctoral dissertation, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Created Agricultural Wetlands, the release claims that on one hand natural wetlands are not more biodiverse than recently dug ponds, on the other hand that biodiversity in wetlands increases with age. Both statements can't be true.
After I had written to Dr. Thiere she kindly clarified the matter for me. It turns out that arguably neither of the two contradictory statements is true.
To begin with,…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2009Printed newspaper are crap. The news in them is old, you still get entire multipage sections that you don't want, they use up trees and gasoline, they crowd your mailbox and you have to dispose of them after reading them. And they cost money! News should be read on-line, preferably with an RSS reader. (I use Google's).
Now, here's something for my Swedish readers. The country's main newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, currently don't offer a finely sorted selection of thematic RSS feeds. If I want the main international news headings from them, then I have to put up with a load…