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 | March 12, 2009
Here's a little archaeological riddle I've been thinking about. From about 1350 to 1700, three-legged brass cooking pots were common in Sweden. When metal detecting in ploughsoil, you often find bits of them. They're easily found as the fragments tend to be large and heavy: they make the detector sing loud & clear. But here's the thing: you almost only find the feet and legs of the pots, hardly ever the wall or rim. Why is that? I think I've come up with an answer.
These pots weren't used out in the fields. The reason that we find the feet there must be that household refuse was thrown…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2009My wife and I watched the 2004 biopic Kinsey last night, about ground-breaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Good movie, good acting, interesting theme. And there's an added perk for fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To the extent that the Kinsey movie has a villain, it's Alfred Kinsey's colleague, Thurman Rice. Professor Rice is an old-school sex-hostile sex educator who shows the class horrific slides of syphilis sufferers and preaches abstinence. And who plays this buffoonish prig of a character? Why, Frank N. Furter himself, the pansexual mad scientist from the planet Transsexual in the…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2009Dear Reader Derek asks,
Perhaps you can help me out here. For years I've been confused as to whether "Goths", "Geats", and "Jutes" are the same people with different spellings, related people with different spellings, or different people with coincidentally-similar names. Also, where "derek" (or "dietrich", or "teodric") comes from. Is it goth, or hun, or something else?
It's really easy to get confused here, because we're dealing both with historical reality and with historical fiction written a long time ago.
Goths: a Germanic-speaking ethnic group that took a major part in Migration…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2009
How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in PhotoShop and Windows Paint. Here's an example of my handiwork, and a snippet of the paper I made it for, submitted last week.
The first decisive step in the formation of the Medieval state of Sweden appears to have been taken about AD 1000 when two ethnic groups, the Svear and the Götar, elected a…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2009
It's time for a blogmeet! On Monday 9 March at 17:30 I want to see you guys at Akkurat on Hornsgatan 18 in Stockholm. This place offers an awe-inspiring selection of rare ales and malt whiskeys, and serves great mussels. Please make your intention to be there known in a comment!
Chances are you'll meet me, Felicia, Henrik, Kai and Ãsa there.
Update 4 May: Check out Henrik's photos!
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2009ARKHAM, MA--Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district's monthly meeting Tuesday.
"Fools!" said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. "We must prepare today's youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods--not fill their heads with such trivia as math and…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2009Eight years ago I sold half an apartment to my former wife and found myself, for the first time, with a sum of money to invest. I did what conventional wisdom recommended at the time: stuck all the money into a mutual fund. I chose an "ethical" one, that doesn't invest in the arms trade etc., but I don't think that's the reason that the whole move proved to be a financial mistake. (The fund in question has a good Morningstar rating.) My share in that fund has never to my knowledge even been worth what I originally paid for it, and the simple reason is that apparently I bought near the top of…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2009When I give talks about Internet subcultures I like to say that I could devote the entire talk to on-line forums for retired Spanish-speaking transvestites. That's how niched groups a global communication network makes possible.
Myself, I'm on a Swedish site for skeptics, a US site for science bloggers and two sites for boardgame geeks (in English and Swedish). And now Dear Reader Tsu Dho Nihm tells me that there's a beer geek site with a huge reviews database: Beer Advocate. Awesome! Beer as culture, beer as baseball stats, beer as philately. Though an abstainer myself, I highly recommend…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2009The 2008 Open Laboratory anthology collecting last year's best science blogging is now available on paper and for download. I'm not featured this year, but I was one of the judges, and I can tell you there's some great stuff in there. Jennifer Rohn of Mind the Gap put it all together. Buy one for your mom!
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2009The sixty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Moore Group Blog. 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 25 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2009Computers are built to preserve information, not to be creative, and certainly not to be random. Therefore it is a problem to get a really random number into a computer when you need one. A common source, looking at the hundredth of seconds in the computer's clock, is not all that good as it leads to predictability if you pull two numbers from the hat with a recurrent time interval between them. You really need to link the computer to something non-digital if you want real randomness.
A legendary 80s science fiction computer game, Elite, used pseudo-randomness to generate its world. The game…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2009
Skiing Break was action packed for the kids. Monday museum, Tuesday playland, Wednesday skiing with grampa, Thursday swimming, Friday museum & puppet theatre and a museum-organised LAN party for the 10-y-o.
Yesterday's museum was the Public Transport Museum which shares an entrance and a ticket with the Toy Museum. Lots of buses and trams, including one bus standing on a service pit where you can descend and check out the under side of the vehicle. Juniorette and I made a pink train carriage in the children's workshop.
One thing that caught my eye was a mothballed experimental hybrid bus…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2009From my buddy Jonas Nordin, retiring head editor of Sweden's main historical journal, a well-argued paper about the problems of applying bibliometric assessments and Open Access practices in the humanities.
Historisk tidskrift, present and future
Reflections on readers' reactions, bibliometrics and Open Access
In this article the author recounts his experiences as editor of Historisk tidskrift. The starting point is a poll of the journal's readers presented at the triannual meeting of the Swedish Historical Association in Lund in April 2008. Readers told that they read Historisk tidskrift…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2009I never thought I'd be writing about Iron Age political geography at a place called Andy's Playland.
It's Skiing Break, and because of preparations for our recent move my wife and I never got round to booking accommodations up north as we often have in recent years. This week, instead we take turns with the old folks at minding the children while they're on break. Yesterday, having been tipped off by Ãsa of Ting & Tankar, my wife took our daughter to the Museum of Nordic Culture where she had a blast in the kids' room. Today, she wanted me to take her to Andy's over at the old Sickla…
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2009
Now and then I blog about abandoned tree houses. But of course, real large houses are even more fascinating in their extended boundary state between dwelling and archaeological site (as I wrote about in January '06).
I recently read a new book (in Swedish) about abandoned houses: Svenska ödehus, finely written by Sven Olov Karlsson and illustrated with exquisite photographs by Philip Pereira dos Reis. Every abandoned house has its story, and the two have sought them out. Highly recommended! Order it here.
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2009
Back in 2006 I gave Silver, the then latest album from Philadelphia folk rockers Maggi, Pierce and E.J., a rave review. Since then the band has put out a collection of covers, a documentary DVD, a side-project duo album, and last fall a new trio album mainly of original songs. I just bought it, and it's great!
Kahchee Moochee is named after Pierce's mom's term for good food. It has ten tracks, and the trio's signature eclecticism is much in evidence. There's folk, folk rock, bluegrass, jazz, power pop, boogie rock and punk rock on this disc, there's three-part harmony and there's some…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2009
The BBC's global tech news show Digital Planet reports from Belém in Brazil on a rootsy version of the new business model that's likely to supersede the traditional music industry. It's musical sneakernet.
Since the invention of sound recording, musicians (and to an even greater extent, record companies) have made their money by putting out recordings and controlling who could copy them. In the analog era, this was fairly easy, as sound quality degraded with each successive copy generation. Whoever had the master tape of a hit song easily made money off it. Also, song lyrics and other…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2009Looking for a good book? Here are my best reads in English of 2008.
Will in the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt 2004. The great man in his historical context.
Casino Royale. Ian Fleming 1953. Finely written about the greatest secret agent of them all.
The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy. Avram Davidson 1975. Riveting supernatural detective stories in alternate-history Balkans.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Michael Chabon 2007. Yiddish noir detective novel in an alternate-history Alaska.
The Spook's Apprentice. Joseph Delaney 2004. Young-adult rural fantasy.…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2009
With thanks to Dear Reader Shelley, here's a 1969 French cover version of the Muppets' famed song: "Mais non, mais non", as written and sung by Henri Salvador.
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2009My favourite stories in Archaeology Magazine's spring issue:
J.T. Milanich on the practicalities, and the unforeseen hassle, of re-burying a collection of Native American skeletons he excavated in the 1980s before his recent retirement.
E.A. Powell on some fake "Atlantean" ruins built into a Dubai luxury hotel that will one day make a very strange meta-ruin.
North European content:
Two half-page pieces on glaciers in Switzerland and Greenland.