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 | April 28, 2009
Here's a fun project. Maja Bäckvall and Jannie Teinler with friends are visiting rune stones mainly in Uppland province, posing for photographs along with the stones and publishing them on a dedicated web site. So far they've done 121 rune stones!
aardvarchaeology | April 27, 2009The May issue of Current Archaeology (#230) has an interesting piece about warfare in the British Neolithic. The UK has a lot of battle-dead inhumations. There's even Neolithic battlefield archaeology of sorts at hillforts that have been besieged by archers and thus are full of flint arrowheads to this day. I heard a paper on this topic by Roger Mercer at an EAA conference back in ~1996, so I knew a little bit about it already.
Much of the issue is about the differentiation of Roman "villa" sites into functional categories such as shrines, tax-collecting depots and rural manors. In Scandyland…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2009Yesterday I inadvertently offended the Sb Overlords in an interesting way. Since I came on board 2½ years ago we've had a series of handlers or "community managers" who have all been competent, charming women. Punning a little, I have fondly called them my Ovarylords. To my knowledge this has not raised any hackles before. But yesterday I used the pun while criticising one of our overlords for a traffic-boosting effort that was in my opinion misguided and a little naive. Wrote I, "my Ovarylord suddenly turns into a cheerleader". This didn't go over well at all. But to my surprise it…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2009As a scholar working in an abstruse subject I live a life largely divorced from what concerns most people. We have no newspaper subscription. I really don't have much of a clue. But I am aware of the poor state of the world economy. Now, how has it affected me so far?
The only effect of the financial crisis on my life that I am aware of is that the mortgage my wife and I took out in December is absurdly cheap. We currently pay less per month to live in a 114 sqm house than we did last year to live in a 80 sqm apartment.
In the long run, it seems the crisis will have both good and bad effects…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2009Skepticality, one of my favourite podcasts, just put its 100th show on-line! Swoopy and Derek have been going strong now for four whole years! Always good for in-depth science-friendly interviews.
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2009The sixty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Primate of Modern Aspect. 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 already on 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a babe. Like me.
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2009As often mentioned here, I am no fan of post-modernist hyper-relativism. This is the idea that scientific truth is impossible and that all our ideas about the world are "socially constructed", that is, that people negotiate agreements about what the world is like and thus determine what is real. Being a realist, I am convinced that there is a single real world out there, and that though not infallible, science is finding out a lot of true information about it. (Just as I am able to find out in a non-socially-constructed way whether there is any milk in the fridge.)
On the other hand, I am a…
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2009Neal Stephenson's 90s science fiction novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are unforgettable, but his 2003-2004 suite of historical novels failed to pull me in. So when I learned that his 2008 effort Anathem is a science fiction story, I was very happy.
This is a 900-page brick of a book, told in the first person by a young man wise beyond his years. The first third of the book is Harry Potter meets Hesse's Glass Bead Game: we are in a co-ed convent where science monks do science-monkish things inside high walls that cut them off from the general public. Then we leave the convent and have…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2009
I really enjoyed my work yesterday. The forenoon saw me in the stores of the Museum of National Antiquities looking through Otto Frödin's uncatalogued finds from the "SverkersgÃ¥rden" site near Alvastra monastery. Not only did I find all the elusive 1st Millennium stuff that's mentioned in the literature but never illustrated, but I was also able to identify for the first time two small pieces of iron military equipment of the same date. These strengthen the case for counting SverkersgÃ¥rden among the province's rare Vendel Period elite settlements. After lunch at the Chinese place where I…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2009Yesterday the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education released an evaluation of the archaeology programs offered at eight of the country's universities and colleges.
The most dramatic finding was that three of the eight offer programs of dubious quality that will be subjected to in-depth evaluation:
All programs in Visby.
All programs in osteology and the PhD program in Mediterranean archaeology in Lund.
All programs in osteology and the PhD program in lab-based archaeology in Stockholm.
This means that all Swedish programs in osteology are possibly sub-standard.
More generally, the…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2009
Högby near Mjölby in Ãstergötland is a magical place because of a serious lack of historical sensitivity. In 1876 (which is really late as these things go in Sweden) the locals demolished their little 12th century church and built a new bigger one a mile to the south. This meant that the parish centre of a millennium or so became a backwater and has not been built over later. It's completely rural, abutting a farm's back yard, very quiet. All that remains of the church is the churchyard wall and one of Ãstergötland's finest rune stones that was taken out of the sacristy wall. Some fine…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2009Today is my tenth anniversary as one of the academic archaeology journal Fornvännen's editors. While I was an undergrad my teacher Bo Petré encouraged me to subscribe from 1991 on, and I started contributing to the journal in 1994. That first contribution became a life-changer for me. It was my third-term paper, and when I called Fornvännen's editor to ask if he wanted to look at it, he asked me what I was going to do next. "I'd like to do Early Iron Age small-finds", I replied. "How convenient", said Jan Peder Lamm, "I'm working on a paper that's leading off into this funny artefact…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2009There is a genre of complaints that I usually find a little silly: the Starbucks breakdown, which occurs when somebody's offered too many options. But now I've run into the problem myself. Yoghurt diversification.
I buy most of our milk & yoghurt to save my wife some carrying. And the damn yoghurt, that was a single product when I was a kid, now presents me with a four-parameter choice! I need to make sure I get:
Non-light
Enviro-friendly
Mild acidity
Unflavoured
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2009
29 October: Sunny autumn morning among the sailing boats hibernating along Pålnäsvägen.
21 December: The dark spot marks where our feet and the wheels of our office chair have damaged the flooring over 7½ years at the home desk on Lakegatan.
9 January: Skating on Lake Lundsjön.
6 April: Fiddling with my smartphone in my new Academy office.
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2009
13 September: Samuel and Ludvig play the piano at Ludvig's aunt's house in Viggbyholm.
12 October: Playing Pandemic at a gaming convention in Gröndal.
21 October: A mechanical excavator is delivered to my dad's property to start work on the new sauna.
21 October: Seminar about Open Access at the Research Council.
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2009The sixty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Quiche Moraine. 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 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2009Björn in Helsingborg wrote me with a few questions regarding archaeology as a career.
Where did you study, for how long, what exactly?
University of Stockholm. Three years crammed into two years at 150% speed, that is, a BA / fil.kand. Four terms of Scandinavian archaeology, one term of history, one term of social anthropology. Later I did a PhD as well, but that's not needed to work as an archaeologist.
What's the labour market like? Is it true that there are no jobs?
The labour market is crap and there are no jobs. All Scandinavian countries produce new archaeologists at a vastly higher…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2009I have previously noted that 10% of the applicants get money for humanities research from the Swedish Research Council, 6% of applicants get general research positions at the University of Linköping, and 4% get jobs at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Today I've learned that less than 6% of applicants get grants from the Swedish National Bank's Centenary Fund, though 13% are invited to submit an expanded proposal.
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2009
I've been working as a consulting editor for the Royal Academy of Letters for almost a decade, most of that time from home. But since 2006 I've had an office at Academy headquarters in a quiet part of Stockholm. This is very good for alleviating the isolation of a non-affiliated scholar. But the actual room I've been in had its upsides and downsides. It's part of a museum on the premises, which meant that while I did have the world's gayest tiled stove, I unfortunately also had to use a little 19th century writing desk designed for a petite lady. Furthermore, I always had to get out before…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2009I'm almost done with the report from my excavations at Sättuna in Kaga last September. Here's an excerpt.
Finds and radiocarbon dates allow us to identify five phases on-site, two of them corresponding to the dates of the metal detector finds that occasioned the excavations.
Late Mesolithic: finds and features with one radiocarbon date.
Middle/Late Neolithic: one hearth with a radiocarbon date, no finds.
Mid-1st Millennium AD: a pit and a hearth with two radiocarbon dates, no finds.
Viking Period: one posthole with a radiocarbon date, no finds.
Modern rubbish pits.
Late Mesolithic
This…